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.

Two qualifications the record insists on: the county cap covers potable water only — the word “potable” was added to the agreement after the commission vote — and the State Engineer’s ~1M figure is a working estimate its own office traces to an informal conversation with a Project Jupiter attorney, not a metered measurement. The numbers are not directly comparable, and this page does not compare them as if they were.

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 emergency filing itself, read in full: three wells had already failed, not one, and the industrial project’s construction schedule is listed among the reasons. One caution this record insists on: the State Engineer’s action box on that application is blank — not approved, not denied. Under § 72-12-22 the drilling proceeds during review; that is the mechanism, not an approval, and this page does not call it one. Thirty-two 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.

Those are percentages. The absolute tonnages — 37.2 tons of NOx, 75.4 of fine particulates, 161 of carbon monoxide a year — and the basin they land in are on the Air page, along with the thirty-year nonattainment record and the monitors. Air — the airshed and the permit →

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.

That litigation is now over, and it ended in an obligation. On May 26, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court entered the final decree in Texas v. New Mexico — one paragraph closing a thirteen-year case — and under it New Mexico must achieve 18,200 acre-feet a year of depletion reduction in the Lower Rio Grande within ten years, at least half of that within five. The state’s chosen instrument is money: a $150 million program to buy groundwater rights from willing sellers and retire them permanently, plus payments to farmers who fallow their fields. New Mexico is spending public funds to take water out of use in this basin.

The campus draws from the same basin, on a right the state could otherwise have bought. And the decree does not resolve that: it is sector-neutral — a net reduction target with no formula separating farms from factories — and it imposes no moratorium on new appropriations. New Mexico’s own negotiator put it plainly to the Texas Tribune: the settlement “doesn’t dictate what sector the water savings comes from.” Which leaves the question nobody has answered on the record. No document in the Supreme Court’s file, the Special Master’s report, or the State Engineer’s program materials addresses how a new large industrial groundwater user in the Lower Rio Grande squares with an obligation to reduce depletions there. That question is deferred to a state water-management plan due by May 2028 — after the permit is decided.

• 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 still not public when the decision was pushed to a hearing — 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.

Nationally, the numbers cut against alarm — and this page won’t pretend otherwise. U.S. data centers used about 228 billion gallons of water in 2023, most of it embedded in the electricity they buy rather than the cooling they run — and agriculture, lawns, and household plumbing each dwarf that. A single hamburger really does out-drink thousands of AI prompts. If the question is “is AI drying out America,” the honest answer is: not close.

But water is not a national resource. It is a basin resource, and no aquifer is refilled by another state’s rain. The same CBS analysis that supplies the comfort also names New Mexico among the water-stressed states where data centers are concentrating — while the research on where new ones should go points to Texas, Nebraska, South Dakota, Louisiana, Idaho. Not here.

The economist in that same piece says the quiet part: “the straw that breaks the camel’s back is only gonna break the back because all the other straw is on the back first.” In a basin already carrying agriculture, three states, two countries, and a Supreme Court case, the marginal million gallons a day is the straw. The question was never whether AI is thirsty nationally. It is who decided this basin could afford a heavy drinker — and on what numbers: a potable-only cap of 20,000 gallons a day, with the qualifier added after the vote, or the State Engineer’s working estimate of a million a day for everything.