Last updated: 6 July 2026

Is AI Draining the Ogallala Aquifer? The Data Says No

For seventy years, one industry has drawn down the largest groundwater reserve in the United States: irrigated agriculture. As AI data centers begin appearing on the same land, a new question has followed them into public meetings from Amarillo to Garden City: is the AI industry now doing what farming has done for decades? The numbers, from state water agencies, the U.S. Geological Survey, and county records, say no, not yet, though the story is not finished.

Figures labeled as company claims are stated by the developer and have not been independently audited.

Agriculture built the Ogallala's decline, decades before AI

The Ogallala Aquifer stretches beneath parts of eight states, from South Dakota to Texas, and supports one of the country's most important farming regions. According to the Texas Water Development Board, roughly 95 percent of the groundwater pumped from it goes to irrigated crops: wheat, corn, cotton, and cattle feed. The U.S. Geological Survey's most recent assessment puts the average area-weighted water-level decline at about 16 feet from predevelopment through 2015, with far steeper losses in specific spots, more than 150 feet in parts of Texas and Kansas. That decline tracks directly to the expansion of center-pivot irrigation after 1950. No data center existed anywhere near the aquifer for most of that history.

What's new: AI data centers moving onto the same water table

Since 2025, developers have proposed or begun building large AI campuses on or near the Ogallala, drawn by cheap land, open space, and available power infrastructure. Two projects illustrate the range of what that could mean: Fermi America's Project Matador outside Amarillo, Texas, and a Triple Oak Power data center proposed in Finney County, Kansas. Neither has been operating long enough to show up in USGS water-level data, so today's decline still belongs entirely to agriculture. Whether that stays true is the open question.

Texas: a 20-year water deal, and a company under scrutiny

Amarillo's City Council approved a 20-year water supply agreement with Fermi in October 2025, letting the company draw up to 10 million gallons a day from the municipal system at double the standard rate, with Fermi funding its own infrastructure. Residents protested outside the Potter County courthouse that fall, and by May 2026 city leaders were separately weighing a broader moratorium on large-scale data centers over water concerns. Fermi told the Texas House Natural Resources Committee on 24 June 2026 that Project Matador's cooling design uses about 80 percent less water than conventional systems, a company claim, not an audited figure. That claim is worth reading alongside Fermi's recent track record: CEO and co-founder Toby Neugebauer departed the company on 17 April 2026, and Fermi has separately disputed a report naming its first tenant after previously touting the deal to investors.

Kansas: a data center that says it will use less water than the farm it replaces

In Finney County, Kansas, the calculus runs differently, at least on paper. County records show the 6,000 acres Triple Oak Power wants to develop currently use 3.2 billion gallons of water a year for irrigation, more than the city of Garden City uses annually with a population of nearly 30,000. Triple Oak says its data center, using direct evaporative cooling that runs mostly on outside air, would use about 600 million gallons a year, a claimed 81 percent cut. Local critics say they don't trust either company's numbers, and the Southwest Kansas Groundwater Management District is separately moving to adopt tighter regional water-use limits this summer, regardless of what any single project does.

How big could this get statewide?

A University of Texas at Austin white paper, developed with the Bureau of Economic Geology's COMPASS research consortium, found that data centers account for less than 1 percent of Texas's total water use today. That could rise to 3 to 9 percent by 2040, a figure that includes both the water used directly for cooling and the water used to generate the electricity data centers consume. For comparison, manufacturing currently uses about 7 percent of the state's water. Researchers called for more transparency and better coordination between data center developers and water planners as the industry grows.

What isn't settled yet

Two things remain open. First, whether company-stated water-conservation figures hold up once these facilities actually operate; neither Project Matador nor the Kansas project has run long enough to check. Second, whether the aquifer's decades-long trajectory, driven overwhelmingly by irrigation, changes materially once several large AI campuses are online at once. For now, the record supports a narrower claim than either side's talking points: agriculture, not AI, is what has depleted the Ogallala Aquifer to date.

Water use figures for proposed projects are company estimates and may change before or after construction. Verify current status with the developer or local water authority before relying on this for a specific decision.

Last updated: 6 July 2026