A new academic study from UC Riverside, Caltech, and RIT documents that local water supply is a non-negotiable bottleneck for AI infrastructure siting, with OpenAI's scrapped Stargate expansion in Abilene, Texas cited as Exhibit A.
Companies are shifting to closed-loop, water-free cooling, but UC Riverside researcher Shaolei Ren found the energy penalty is brutal: water-free systems roughly **double energy intensity**.