The state on Monday announced it awarded the money to the semiconductor company as part of the more than $2 billion in state and local incentives that Intel was promised for picking Ohio for the project.

The company plans to use the funding to modernize the manufacturing lines at the company's two Central Texas locations.

Lower Colorado River Authority options to increase water availability include water supply storage in the mid-basin, groundwater, return flows from Williamson County, direct potable reuse, pipelines, aquifer storage and aquifer recovery.

State officials are requesting public input about the request.

Gordon Dolven, director of Americas Data Center Research at CBRE said “Data center operators are prioritizing power availability, rather than selecting markets based on traditional factors such as location, connectivity, water and land pricing.”

Amazon is not the only tech giant to identify New Albany as an up-and-coming data center hub. Google also announced in August a $1.7 billion investment into its three Ohio data center campuses, one of which is in New Albany. The tech company selected the site due to its ample land, water supply, low natural disaster risk and aggressive tax incentives.

Amazon filed presubmittal documents with Mesa’s planning office for two separate data centers about four miles apart in southeast Mesa.

The U.S. is pushing to secure new domestic mining supplies for metals such as copper, lithium and manganese that are critical for building things like electric vehicle batteries, solar panels and other components of the energy transition away from fossil fuels. But much of the exploration and planned production of these minerals is taking place in the arid American West, where water is increasingly scarce.

The preliminary results of the long-anticipated study indicate what IEDC officials had been asserting for nearly a year: transporting as much as 100 million gallons of water a day through a 35-mile pipeline to support a planned 9,000 acre or more technology and manufacturing hub is feasible without hurting existing homeowners and businesses that rely on the water supply.

Caroline County wants to build a water-intake facility that could withdraw up to 13.9 million gallons of water a day from the river.