# Sparta Aquifer The Sparta Aquifer is one of Arkansas's principal groundwater sources, underlying much of the southern, central, and eastern parts of the state. It is heavily used for industrial and municipal supply and has long been a focus of Arkansas groundwater-management concern. ## How it appears in the corpus The Sparta Aquifer is the planned cooling-water source for one of the two unnamed data-center projects documented in the [[Data-Center Cooling-Water Regulatory Correspondence]]. In January 2026, [[McClelland Consulting Engineers]] asked the Arkansas Department of Agriculture whether wells "pulling a total 4.32 MGD from the Sparta Aquifer" for "a future data center" would require State Water Compliance review. Department staff noted that the Sparta is a "sustaining aquifer," so wells drawing from it are subject to a metering requirement — but, as a privately owned data-center well, the withdrawal would otherwise face only registration and annual reporting, not Water Plan Compliance review (see [[Water-Use Registration]]). ## Stakeholders Industrial and municipal users across south, central, and east Arkansas draw on the Sparta. The Arkansas Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Division administers the water-use registration regime and the Critical Groundwater Area program that governs aquifer stress. ## Notes The Sparta is analytically load-bearing for the investigation because it geographically constrains the unidentified McClelland project: a planned 4.32 MGD Sparta withdrawal places that data center over the aquifer's footprint — south, central, or eastern Arkansas — and rules out, for instance, the West Memphis site, which sits over the Mississippi River Valley alluvial aquifer. See [[Identifying the Unnamed Cooling-Water Data Centers]].