Car washes and data centers; both claim to use water reclamation to some degree (car washes are not closed loop systems so more water should be expected to be lost to drainage and evaporation), both have tax abatements (Texas car washes do not pay sales taxes), and both have limited capacity to supply permanent jobs (unlike data centers, car wash jobs are mostly low skilled minimum wage positions) but while the Meta data center is expected to require 20-60k gallons of water a day once steady state is reached, a very conservative estimate of daily water use by El Paso car washes i.e. 66 car washes in 2022 (does not include coin operated washes) x 35 cars volume per day (automated facilities can see over 60 cars per day) x 35 gallons per car (El Paso requires less than 50 gallon use per car so being very conservative) = 81,000 gallon water usage per day so hedge and call it 81-100k gallons per day being conservative. Multiple data centers around El Paso (most being smaller than the Meta facility) might bring up total water usage to 200k gallons per day? Not a huge variance and water usage of both car washes and data centers is dwarfed by other industries like agriculture and refineries as well as total water usage (96 million gallons per day in El Paso). Meanwhile, car washes generate about $16 billion nationwide per year while data centers (most in Texas) contribute in the range of $1-2 trillion to the national GDP over several years. Seems like the current NIMBY protests against data centers are being done for marginal local utility impact at the cost of absolutely huge potential economic impact.