Water & Power

Data centers used about 4.4% of all US electricity in 2023 — federal researchers project 9–13% by 2028. Globally, demand is on track to more than double by 2030, to roughly the annual consumption of Japan. Project Jupiter’s filed application asks for up to 2.45 gigawatts of on-site generation — more electricity than the entire city of El Paso uses.

Every number in this table is real. They describe different water.

The gap is not a measurement dispute — it’s a definition. The agreement’s cap gained the word “potable” after the vote, so the industrial well water bought from a Sunland Park rights holder, the construction draw, and everything non-potable sit outside it. Confronted with the State Engineer’s number, the county attorney first called it misinformation — then conceded: “Quite frankly, we just don’t have enough information.”

The right itself is now identified: OSE file LRG-03150-E — 2,400 acre-feet a year, held by Santa Teresa Capital, LLC, its permitted purposes already covering industrial use. The campus demand would consume roughly half of it. The well was re-drilled under an emergency authorization in October 2025 while a few dozen protests — including the Center for Biological Diversity — await a hearing with no docketed date.

And the timing collides with a court order. On May 26, 2026, the Supreme Court’s final decree in Texas v. New Mexico ordered the state to retire 18,200 acre-feet per year of groundwater pumping in this very basin. The State Engineer’s calculation for Jupiter — about 1,120 acre-feet a year of new industrial demand — arrives inside the zone New Mexico is legally required to relieve. Whether it counts against the decree is now one of the record’s open questions.

The April 2026 switch from gas turbines to Bloom fuel cells is a genuine improvement: roughly 92% less NOx, and no cooling water for power generation. The record should say so plainly. It should also say what didn’t change: the cells still run on natural gas — 271 million cubic feet of it a day at the filed capacity of 2.45 gigawatts. At that scale the manufacturer’s own CO₂ specification works out to roughly 6.6–8.1 million tons per year — even accepting Oracle’s framing of a 21% cut versus the turbine plan, a carbon footprint the size of a city, delivered by a pipeline with a permit fight of its own.

Worth noting: Oracle’s September 2025 congressional fact sheet still described “Siemens and GE gas turbines” — the campus’s power technology changed twice between the county vote and the current permit application.

Water use is set by engineering choices, not company virtue. The same company, two designs:

Jupiter’s closed-loop design sits at the efficient end of that spread — if the filings match the claims. That is a real engineering achievement and a real open question, in the same sentence.

The campus sits in the Chihuahuan Desert over the Mesilla Basin — an aquifer shared by New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico, governed by the Rio Grande Compact and active Supreme Court litigation. Meta’s data center just across the state line holds a 750,000-gallon-per-day permit on the same water table that fills the taps of Chaparral, Sunland Park, and El Paso. Federal researchers already count one-fifth of data-center water as coming from stressed watersheds; this corridor is among the most stressed in the country. No single regulator sees the whole aquifer.

• Operator water metrics exclude the water consumed generating their electricity — 211 billion gallons a year in the US, invisible in every corporate disclosure.
• Construction water is not tracked by the county agreement at all.
• There is no federal or New Mexico law requiring data centers to disclose water use.
• The water-balance sheets filed with the air-permit applications are the only documents that can settle the 20,000-versus-1,000,000 dispute. They were not public before the July 21 decision — and the county has withheld related records under a terrorism exemption.

Project Jupiter’s Bloom fuel cells use no water to make power. That part is true. The natural gas they burn tells the other half of the story — and it starts with the utility next door.

El Paso Electric keeps the lights on for about 407,000 households across the valley. In 2024 it generated 5.79 terawatt-hours of electricity from natural gas — and gas is 81% of everything it owns: 2,168 of its 2,844 megawatts of owned capacity. Jupiter’s filed 2.45 gigawatts is a single private campus with a generating fleet roughly 13% larger than the entire gas fleet of the utility that serves the whole region.

That fuel supply has failed once already, at scale. In February 2021, Winter Storm Uri froze wellheads and gathering lines across the Permian Basin and Texas gas production fell by nearly half. Gas-fired units accounted for 58% of every generator that tripped offline, and 87% of the fuel-related failures were natural gas. More than 4.5 million Texans lost power — some for four days — and at least 246 people died.

El Paso did not go dark. It sits on the Western Interconnection — not the isolated ERCOT grid that serves most of Texas — and it had weatherized its equipment after an earlier freeze in 2011. Its resilience came from what it was not wired to. Project Jupiter’s design runs the risk the other way: a microgrid marketed as “independent” would depend entirely on uninterrupted Permian gas — 271 million cubic feet a day for the East Microgrid alone — carried by a single 24-inch, 17.7-mile lateral, the Green Chile Pipeline, that has no permit yet and is fed by the same wellhead-and-gathering infrastructure that froze in 2021.

And the gas carries a water cost of its own that appears in no operator disclosure. Federal USGS accounting puts hydraulic-fracturing water use in the Permian at roughly 4 to 5.5 million gallons of fresh water per well — up from about 0.6 million a decade earlier. Extraction then brings water back up: the basin produced more than 20 million barrels of “produced water” a day in 2024 — about three barrels of waste brine for every barrel of oil — in a region where more than 70% of wells already sit in extreme water stress.

The 211-billion-gallon figure above counts the cooling water at power plants. It does not count this. The full water footprint of a gas-fired campus begins hundreds of miles upstream, at the wellhead.