Used to be the sparkling city by the sea, ya no. It likes to keep its name in the news now for a lot of bad reasons. The latest;
The drought-stricken City of Corpus Christi is withholding how much water a controversial cryptocurrency mine is siphoning away from surrounding residents.
The Texas Observer reported on the facility’s water burden last year in a series examining the cryptomine and artificial intelligence data center boom unfolding across the state. From May to August last year, the Bitcoin mine consumed 11,563,000 gallons, according to water utility records that the Observer previously obtained via a local resident’s public information request.
Together, the records pointed to an average of about 127,500 gallons a day, well over the 100,000-gallons daily rate that the city uses to label a “high-volume user.” Moreover, records obtained last year showed the city already added a new 4-inch water pipe to the site to help the mine cool its computing hardware with a technique known as liquid immersion.
City Council member Roland Barrera, in whose district the mine is located, said city staff told him the mine is still guzzling about 100,000 gallons a day, or about 3 million gallons a month. Other industrial users, like the city’s petrochemical refineries, use as much as 90 million gallons monthly.
But now, as Corpus Christi faces an ever-deepening water crisis, in response to the Observer’s public information request, the city is refusing to release the latest 2026 records of the mine’s water usage. The city is appealing the Observer’s request for those records to the Texas Office of the Attorney General, citing a section of the Texas Utilities Code that allows nondisclosure of an individual customer’s account. That’s a change from just last year, when the city provided water-usage records.
City Council member Sylvia Campos was outraged to learn the city was withholding water usage records. “Oh my God, that pisses me off,” she told the Observer. “This is public information. This is water.”
The city’s crisis has made state and national headlines amid predictions that its water demand could exceed supply as early as next summer without additional rainfall or some other water source. With drilled wells already dry and a hot-button desalination plant tabled for now, the city is readying itself for a more serious potential Level 1 Water Emergency, which would impose even more restrictions and penalties for exceeding limits.
Residents already have been living under water restrictions since December 2024, curtailing activities like lawn watering and car washes. The next phase, which might come as early as December, would enforce a mandatory 25-percent reduction for residents, businesses, and large industrial users like petrochemical refineries.
The mine, located on 75 acres just outside the city’s northwest limits, would come under those restrictions, according to Council member Barrera, who helped broker an Industrial District Agreement (IDA) with the project’s original developers beginning in 2022. Barrera told the Observer he now thinks that agreement should be reviewed.
As the Observer previously reported, the city was promised millions of dollars in tax revenue for what was originally a pair of 300-megawatt-capacity Bitcoin mines developed by the Dallas-based Bootstrap Energy. A 2022 presentation by then-Assistant City Secretary Andrea Gardner predicted revenues of $32 to $50 million over a 10-year period in exchange for the city’s de-annexation of the property, a decision that would enable Bootstrap to escape more than $70.5 million in franchise fees and sales tax on its electricity use.
Source for the above information
