Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage
1011now.com
1011now.com
The average Nebraska farm is 989 acers[1] as of 2022 and uses roughly ~1,200 acre-feet of water (or roughly 390 million gallons) per year[2]. So a single average Nebraska farm uses roughly 30 times the water the Lincoln data center uses per year. There are 44,479 farms/ranches covering 44 million acres, which accounts for over 90% of the state's total land area.
Until I looked this up, I didn't appreciate the scale of water usage in farming (even in a state like Nebraska that gets a large amount of rainfall compared to Central or Southern California). I hope that the current data center environmental focus continues to shed light on our industrial water and electrical usage.
[1]http://farmflavor.com/nebraska/nebraska-crops-livestock/top-... [2]https://cropwatch.unl.edu/2024/2023-irrigation-and-water-man...
That's to say, farms basically convert water to food and CO2 to O2. I'd say this is the water well spent.
Now that we know that farms use a lot of water, we are clean to waste any lower amount of water.
Thank you!
It's really just a matter of appreciating how much land is involved. Converting to metric, that's 370mm of water per year across the entire land surface. For comparison (per Wikipedia) that's about double the annual rainfall in Phoenix AZ, but considerably less than in San Fransisco (and way less than East Coast cities). Of course, that's in addition to the natural Nebraska rainfall, but you get the idea. It's not an absurd amount.
The current data center craze just feels like the same thing but on a bigger scale.
New AI data centers are obviously compute-oriented instead. That means they consume a lot more power, like hundreds of megawatts. For perspective, on average a U.S. household uses only 1.2KW. Because of this, cooling needs are significantly increased, and while water usage is often overblown, noise volume is a major problem. At (edit) 10m, it often exceeds the 90dB threshold for hearing loss.
Then there's the fact that millions of dollars of GPUs are inside these things, so security means lots of bright lights at all times of day.
These are just problems with the physical presence of a data center, not to mention the electric bill hikes, land value loss, environmental effects, etc. And there's no obvious positives to one going up. No new jobs. No tax money because it's often elided with incentives from bribing local officials.
With all the negatives and seemingly no benefits, ask yourself who wants these data centers, and why? If the only way to improve AI is using more and more compute like this, what is the end-game?
It doesn't have to be really bright lighting but that's the easiest thing to satisfy the underwriter's request, and as a result, the cheapest to implement.
Maybe we should be calling them "compute centers" instead of "data centers".
> At (edit) 10m, it often exceeds the 90dB threshold for hearing loss.
Why would you be anything like that close if you don't work on site?
I would have traded a data center for the dairies I lived near as a kid
Are you serious? Is there any data for this? This would make the whole area unlivable
> At 100m, it often exceeds the 90dB threshold for hearing loss.
This is always kind of funny to me. How's an average US house supposed to provide context for industrial compute?
How much energy does a car factory use? What about a chip fab? A hospital? A battery manufacturer?
What about an apartment of the same physical dimensions as the proposed "data" center?
Any of those measurements would provide meaningful context that would allow the audience to decide what they'd like built in that space if energy consumption is a concern of theirs.
Comparing a multi-million dollar server farm almost deliberately designed to turn electrons into dollars to a US house usually designed to require as little electricity as possible provides...well I can't decide if it's zero or next to zero context. Like, sure, that power powers say thousands of homes, but my own home consumes more energy than is really required to keep me alive. If the concern is efficiency, I'd be just as inclined to abolish new freestanding homes in favor of efficient apartment complexes as I would be to disfavor a data center over a neighborhood. But those up in arms about data center power consumption are not also rallying for fewer lawns, so the argument can't be purely about power consumption.
>With all the negatives and seemingly no benefits, ask yourself who wants these data centers, and why?
What do you mean no benefits? Do you think local governments are signing these contracts and listening to their constituents yelling at them for the fun of it? The company building it profits from compute contracts. The device mfgs profit from purchasing agreements. The city with the land profits via both legitimate and alleged payments from the corp building the center. To suggest that there are seemingly no benefits just because you aren't receiving the benefits is naive. No one's doing all this for free.
>If the only way to improve AI is using more and more compute like this, what is the end-game?
You could have and probably could still say the same about the internet in general. We've been exponentially building out storage, delivery, and compute for decades. If the only way to improve the web is more and more servers, what is the end game?
You could say the same about just about any growth industry in history. If the only way to reduce the price of bananas is more banana farms, what is the end game?
And the answer is the same in every case. There is not infinite demand for AI and the accompanying infra just as their is not an infinite demand for bananas. If their is not an infinite demand, there is no call for infinite supply increase.
Demand for AI will peak, plateau, and crash, over time just as the tulips, beanie babies, pokemon cards, bitcoin, and everything else does. If you're not in to tulips or pokemon, the craze seems stupid. Because the craze seems stupid, you do not feed it. So long as there are people not feeding it (in order to buy bananas or beanie babies instead of AI subscriptions), its growth and presence will be modulated just as any other thing available for purchase.
I do really dislike that AFAIK almost all of these are being powered via burning fossil fuels. Any way you slice it, it's going to mean that locals end up paying higher energy bills.
They are also building solar farms independent of the data centers. People hate it and are against it.
They just built a Costco which turned some cornfields into a giant warehouse. No signs, no protests, no complaints at the city council meetings.
Does that seems unreasonable? We already grow more than enough food in this country and surely we're not getting 300x more value from the corn.
I understand these companies want to move fast, but this seems to be one of those cases where going slow gets you there faster.
Hasn't it been common knowledge for a while -- as in since well before the ai boom -- that those reviews are in practice mostly tools for obstructionism (I don't want anything built) and extortion (fund this project and we'll drop our complaint), and are a significant chunk of why we suck at megaprojects in recent decades?
Is that's even half true, I don't think the "unforced" there really applies.
Others don't like technological progress to be reduced to the speed of bureaucracies who have no compelling incentive to be particularly efficient. Especially when the technology at hand might end up making quite a few of these bureaucracies much less staffed.
The global impact of AI doesn't change when you force DCs to build in another area.
Most of the shorts I've seen about this use an overlayed sound or synthetic sound of some sort.
I've also seen ben jordans price on "infrasound" but that was inconclusive (and not very scientifically rigorous).
I did see one video that measured 60db from the front yard, which I can admit could be problematic, but that fails to show that it's a pervasive or unsolvable problem
I think there's more to the story than only AI causing higher electricity bills
More generally, societal fatigue with tech culture overtaking everything, subsuming power from every other corner. Surveillance, the Zuck and Elon, COVID-19, immorality, Luigi Mangione and Elizabeth Holmes, a glut of cat videos and jackal-eared Wikipe-tans, delinquency of minors, 5G and everything else that technology can share some blame for, now focused on their visible manifestations.
The trouble is, once a danger becomes visible and ubiquitous, you’ve already lost. Fighting “A.I. Data Centres” is literally quixotic. If you look up “quixotic” in the Spanish Wikipedia, there is a photo of a chivalrous knight jousting with Nvidia’s CEO.
Nobody talks about the local taxes they pay. Its the reason these town councils rush approvals through. My town would chain children to trees to stop a DC, but if they found out it would halve our property taxes, people would volunteer to cut down the trees themselves.
The problem is though that the town council generally wants to do dumb shit pet hobby projects rather than give everyone a tax break.
At the same time, these extractive data centers are being used as the primary input to a technology that its most significant leaders say has a substantial chance of killing all humans in the near/mid term, but oh yeah even if it doesn't do that it will wipe out the majority of white collar jobs.
So yeah, color me shocked that most people don't want to see data centers built in their communities. And labeling it "hysteria" is just a lame attempt to discredit real, important, and proven concerns.
From what we see on the TV is not that people in rural areas in the US are concerned with the environment. It’s just that they fear energy will become more expensive.
As a non American, I find this incomprehensible.
Power and water consumption number revelation goes directly to ceiling on maximum compute and relative compute efficiency. It's handing to every competitor on the planet (including China) "Hey, here's the raw situation on how far along we are on our total capacity to do anything."
... whether this should be a trade secret (since power and water are both shared resources with the surrounding community) is a reasonable question, but in the ecosystem where it is, Google having this data public and their competitors not is a problem.
Companies put signs on buildings so you can find them. Signs are important for retailers or offices where people need to find it. This isn't really the case for a data center. Data centers typically have a sign with simply the address of the building on it, so delivery drivers can find it. Any sort of a sign with branding is a waste of money at best, and a security liability at worst.
Even if you aren't worried about intentional security threats to your data center, you don't want the name of your company on it, because people will start showing up at the gate there instead of your primary business location.
I get it, a lot of the older data centers consumed relatively little power. More than nothing but manageable like 1 or 2MW.
The reason for the "craze" is that the AI datacenters being built are monstrosities that consume way more power, an order of magnitude or more. And a lot of them are going up.
I think the largest data centers consume about 1 GW.
https://www.enconnex.com/data-center-energy-consumption-and-...
https://techplustrends.com/1gw-data-center-power-consumption...
The largest AI datacenters. And there are multiple planned that consume beyond 1 GW. In particular, I'm referring to the box elder county data center which I believe is one of the largest planned. [1]
Prior to these AI datacenters, 100MW would have been considered an extremely large amount of power for a single datacenter.
But also, 1GW is a huge amount of power. More than a lot of states use, and not the really small ones like Wyoming. Just for reference, steel mills use 40MW and there's about 8 of them in the US.
1GW is an absurd amount of power to consume.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/kevin-o-learys-9-...
The data center discussed in the article allegedly consumed 53 MW peak and 13 megagallons of water over a year.
It is a monthly consumption of a poorly insulated house with air conditioning running 24/7. Or around 1344 W of constant consumption.
Older DCs relied on much less efficient compute and cooling, and the only reason why their power usage could be less is simply much smaller scale.
With hyperscalers it of course went a bit beyond that due to the sheer number of racks, but 100MW would've been considered huge.
[0]: https://www.northcdatacenters.com/en/northc-datacenters/delf...
[1]: https://www.eurofiber.com/en-nl/data-centers-netherlands/dat...
A single rack in a corporate server room consumes on the order of 10 to 20kW.
1MWh happens when you run a 1MW load for 1 hour. There are 1000 kWh in 1MWh and 1000 Wh in 1 kWh.
A home with 1344W of constant consumption would consume 32kWh per day.
Given the current power consumption of states, I find it hard to believe.
At a large enough scale, it doesn't matter how efficient you are - you're still causing a more damage than the region or the world can take.
There being a grain of truth or a valid angle doesn't wash bullshit from being bullshit.
It'd be pretty easy for the company to dispel those outlandish accusations - the PR department could just report the true numbers.
Noticeably they initially shared this info and then stopped. It seemed to stop around the time researchers started investigating the projects.
https://sustainability.google/files/1699a2e19277e478b38a659f...
The data tables start on p. 90.
Of course, they'd like the water thing to stay an issue as it distracts from others. The water problem has been concentrated on because even some of the most adherent climate change deniers recognise that water access is a significant problem in many areas, so it is an issue that can be usefully raised and won't get tied up in the human-caused-climate-change argument. Unfortunately concentrating on that could be distracting from other matters.
Water use has locally been an issue in places where municipalities were taken advantage of and their local water supply management laws weren't set up to account for a giant consumer to just roll up and start pulling past replenishment rate. But there's nothing about datacenters that demand that be the case; those places were cheap to build in (and why they were cheap to build in should probably be its own graduate political theory thesis / series of fraud and mismanagement investigations and prosecutions).
Effectively no reward at any risk level, regardless of whether one agrees if there is actually any risk.
If they are using over a certain percent of any public utility (and yes ALL utilities are public) the utility should force it to be disclosed.
I think the disinformation is people thinking that data centers directly use vast quantities of water. What happens is the power use stresses water supplies in local areas.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/08/datacenter-a...
Now that it has been, though…
Both things happened when Sam Altman blogged about how much water the median ChatGPT query used.
Why can’t it be discussed?
All this whinging about "is this project using too much power or not" is pointless scarcity that we've chosen to partake in. If we are to create and spend political capital via hyper-focussing on a single issue, perhaps we should use it to fix this instead?
[1]: https://reneweconomy.com.au/just-staggering-china-installs-1...
[1]: https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/6121776-gop-worried-data...
This is overstating things.
Even if you only draw power during these three hours of the day, you still need to pay a daily supply charge, which makes up about 30%(and growing) of the average household electricity bill.
You would need about a 15 kWh battery to cover your household usage outside of these three hours.
A 13.5kWh Tesla battery system will cost about $15k installed, the taxpayer will cover about 30% of the battery cost(exc installation), which brings it down closer to $11k.
If you live an an owner occupied detached house(about 50% of Australian households), and you can afford a ~$11,000 for a battery, then you can probably pay off the battery within about 10 years.
hint: An individual 18-hole course uses between 300,000 to 1 million gallons per day
You understand, the water isn't used up? It's not even used up in agriculture. Even when you drink a glass of water, the water doesn't actually disappear, soon someone else will be drinking it. The same water that was on the earth when the dinosaurs walked the planet is still on the earth today. No need to panic about someone using water.
The only reason to be concerned is if someone is mixing the water with other chemicals at a rate faster than the natural filtration and then not paying for the treatment to purify the water again. But that is not an issue with data centers. Merely using water is a concern only for people who don't understand how matter is preserved, but a school physics book should dispel those concerns.
Traditional data centers have far smaller power density per rack and thus cooling requirements than AI datacenters; if you can use closed loop system without evaporation, water usage is very small. Difference is around order of magnitude
But if you want to fit maximum amount of compute in the space and need to dissipate it, evaporative based system will be far more effective space wise; especially if also for some reason you built it in hot place, rather than somewhere in the north
While on the surface, the proposals sound very efficient and low impact, as always the devil is in the details.
Standard operation would use closed loop cooling, relying on rooftop rain water to keep the loops topped up. However, the company has acknowledged that when ambient temperatures rise above a certain level (26C), they would need to switch to evaporative cooling.
The contract with the government also has a section where the company requires a connection to the state agricultural water supply as a backup [1].
When rainfall is plentiful and temperatures are low, as they often are in tasmania, everything is rosy.
However the state does experience periods of draught and thats where things get sketchy. Conflicts are likely to arise when a large investor in the states economy wants to start draining the local water supply to keep ai agents running at a time when crops and livestock are competing for the same resources.
Similar issues would arise regarding power. Firmus is proposing to underwrite an expansion of the states already extensive Hydro power network, but for that investment they would very likely expect priority access to the grid when supplies start running low.
[1] https://www.tasmaniancountry.com/newspaper/tasmanian-country...
The concern is real and very much deserves the opprobrium voters are showing.
Most of the consumer water is evaporated but that leaves behind dissolved solids and minerals and so some of the water is used to clean that out. That water also often contains additives like biocides, anti-scale agents, and corrosion inhibitors.
This water is discharged into the sewer system or to municipal wastewater treatment facilities.
Here's an article on the various ways data centers can be cooled and what effect each has on water usage [1].
[1] https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275...
They easily could build near heating system or cooling the water down in another probably big facility close by and send it to the city
Right, isn't that what sharing the information is about to show, that it isn't consumed? Show how much water they're adding to the ecosystem, since I'm guessing they'd have numbers on that, if that's how it works.
but trade secrets
I think all data centers and other industrial concerns above a certain size should have to publish that.
The hysteria always gives datacenter usage numbers in a vacuum, never a comparison, for good reason; we might have to start protesting golf courses and paper mills instead.
I'm sorry, I never worked in a data center nor lived near one, what's the obvious reason you couldn't dispute them? My only guess would be that Google really wanted to keep the amount of usage secret, but that'd only make sense if it was higher than expected not lower.
Also, they didn't want you to be able to guesstimate how many machines / computing power they had, for similar reasons.
People complain about new data center slurping up all local water and then neither Google nor representatives can say "No, actually we're not, here is the numbers", because Google doesn't want their competitors to guess how many machines they have in one of their data center? I'm sorry but that sounds very far-fetched, must be another reason parent wrote it was "obvious" they couldn't divulge how little/much water the place uses.
The water bill alone would be only $100k/yr assuming average US domestic rate of $8 per 1000 gallons.
So ~280 households worth of water? Though the US seems to be on the high end, using 3x more than Japan and 4x more than France (according to a random website)[1]
To state the obvious most people are not running big faucets all the time, and in fact are using way less.
It seems like a bit of a self-own to not just use household or per-capita usage here to prove a point though.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_water_use_in_the_U... [1]: https://www.worldometers.info/water/
If we instead look at almonds, something that is a bit of a luxury nut and not at all a necessity, each almond takes about 1 gallon of water to grow.
A single truck shipment of almonds contains somewhere around 40-50 million almonds all packed up ready for their delivery to Costo or wherever.
So to frame this another way, Google's DC uses approximately 1/3 of a single truck load of almonds worth of water a year. Most almonds are grown in drought stricken California as well.
I'm sure we'll be staging the protests and forgoing our emerald nuts 100 cal snack packs any day now.
Other issues than water are far worse, like pollution associated with the manufacturing and running of all the data center gear. Water is not the issue.
I wouldn't be surprised if this 4x difference was purely caused by lawns.
If you had to use heat pumps to move all that out of the water, you'd have to spend about a million dollars on their electricity. If you're somewhere that you can use unassisted radiators all year, great. If you need to force the heat out part of the year, that easily gets worse than boiling off water.
Your only gains would come from whatever increased surface area the system has, radiating energy however it can. But a radiator without any water involved would be as good or better. Air-cooled datacenters do exist, they're just trading other costs and usually can't release as much heat.
Also when it evaporates instead of going to the sewer that drops the price in half.
Edit: Oops I got that mixed up and was treating it like a per-faucet cost. So actually it's one full household income converted into water to handle the entire facility.
Companies might want to avoid this being used as a side channel to infer the amount of their compute.
Companies might want to avoid setting a precedent where activists can demand such information.
Companies might want to avoid the effort of publishing this data, or the risk of publishing incorrect data.
Facts & reason do nothing to a moral panic.
I think at some point someone used the argument of the spoon of water to say about the quantity, but I remember to see explanations that it was unrelated.
Part of why construction of such buildings (starting with pursuing and getting a permit for it) takes as long as it does is because those issues are worked out in advance.
Nobody who is responsible for managing water is surprised by data centers appearing, it's not like they just grow overnight after a rain like people believe mushrooms do.
I think the 13M is referring to “during peak times”, whatever that means.
> However, using a computer cursor to highlight the redacted text box in the report to DWEE, then copying and pasting it into a separate document reveals that *Agate LLC* is reporting 52.65 megawatts of electricity during peak electrical demand and 13.299 megagallons of water between cooling towers, evaporative systems and site operations in the last year. That totals out to 13 million gallons of water.
> For context, 13 million gallons is enough to fill around 20 Olympic-size swimming pools, and is less than half of what the City of Lincoln reports using on Sept. 29.
> The *six* data centers reporting as of Sept. 30 show a total use of 765 million gallons of water last year, enough water to fill 1,159.93 Olympic-size swimming pools.
> More improper redaction shows that the data center using the most water annually is *Fireball Group LLC*, the Google Data Center in Papillion. Fireball LLC reports 547.88 megagallons for their 2025 Annual Water Consumption.
It would be odder if it were directly in Google's business name.
So probably we could grow fewer almonds in California.
At what point does it become significant? I’d think 200 olympic swimming pool worth of water taken out of the local ecology would have some impact. I guess it depends on the region.
The article doesnt say though if all the water ends up evaporated.
The article's data center used 13 mil gal of water, but as they point out another one used up more than 500 mil gallon.
Seemingly much better article (pictures, better comparisons): https://flatwaterfreepress.org/data-centers-can-guzzle-serio...
Apparently Google self-reported the total 700+ million, so the main thing to learn from redacted numbers is how much smaller all the other data centers are compared to the 500 mil gallon one.
Update: in terms of water usage. Not sure whether 500 mil gallon one is larger or just really water-inefficient. That would be a nice thing for some journalist to research...
Update 2: it seems that Google uses water-evaporation cooling in regions that they don't consider water-stressed. Here's a not-so-great reference (scroll down if the text-fragment link doesn't work): https://www.axios.com/2026/06/03/google-pushes-water-standar...
The city finally got permission from the state and the Army Corps to divert water from a nearby river, but only when the river was at a relatively high rate of flow. So functionally what happened was that once the drought broke they were able to refill the lakes faster, and top them up during storms in wet/dry cycles.
Every place is going to have higher and higher odds of becoming water-stressed over the next three decades. Some places more than others. Will the data centers shut down in those situations?
You might think that using 5% of the municipal water supply isn't much but it's a significant fraction of what austerity measures would be able to conserve to retain water through a prolonged drought. In that situation holding water a few extra months until the rains return is the goal.
Its like arguing about climate change by zeroing in on carbon emissions. The issue people should be raising is wasted energy, over consumption, not knowing "enough", etc. Once the issue is pinned to a single externalized factor the argument lives or dies by that factor.
Don't get me wrong, I think carbon emissions matter but primarily because we should simply do better if we can. But I've never found a study that proves causation, at best its correlation shown primarily through modeling.
That doesn't mean we should stop trying to reduce carbon emissions, but it does mean that reducing carbon specifically isn't guaranteed to reduce or reverse climate change.
Surely you must agree thst such a complex system as the global climate can't be driven by a single factor, or a single element on the periodic table.
Legislation gets easier once public opinion has turned against an idea or a company. But it takes a while to build that up.
Tonto, dunno who "we" is but around my metro area, public drinking is rather tightly controlled.
I am not really aware of the laws around walking down a public sidewalk with a beer in hand. It is certainly gauche but a done-thing to sit at a bus stop and have a Fireball or two.
However, any drinking establishment that serves alcohol will stop you at the door and won't permit anyone to carry drinks outside of their premises. That's a strict thing. My apartment community bans drinking in walkways and stairwells, which was probably done more by non-residents than my neighbors. So there are a lot of bans on public drinking, even if it is not blanket-outlawed.
A couple of major developments at the shopping mall, though: traditionally all American movie theaters were dry, but that rule has been relaxed, and even the major chains are serving alcohol now. At the mall there has been instituted a "sip & stroll" policy, where designated bars can serve you a plastic cup, and you can roam around the mall with drink-in-hand, as long as you observe the borders of it, where you can't walk into the parking lot or off-premises with your booze.
In general, I have seen many liquor-related laws be relaxed and lightened across my county and state. It seems that there's a general lack of will to crack down on the demand-side, when there is lots and lots of profit to be had on the healthcare-side, where you will get a diagnosis and medication and treatment, whether that is IOP or in-patient, so why not encourage more drinkers to overindulge? Broken window fallacy FTW!
I had no idea what 13 million gallons of water was until they pointed out it was like when I filled up my olympic swimming pool 20 times. That was a slow summer.
Given the pressure construed on resources, why not use personal or household usage averages?
Maybe ~450 people-years doesn't have the same impact as Olympic pools.
Wow!
Id find it difficult to believe that these companies are giving that much money in free loans to the government the way a retail worker estimating their taxes and getting a refund of a few hundred to thousand a year does.
Is this just tax breaks given to these corps at the end of very year?
Nebraska had a unexpected 86 million dollar gap in tax revenues collected last year[1] and these tax 3 tax breaks on their own account for 130% of that
[1]https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2025/07/15/nebraska-ends-fiscal...
Given the numbers I've seen for tax breaks for other big construction projects (malls, factories, etc), I wouldn't be surprised if the state ends up in the red on datacentres. It's not all that uncommon for the state to offset project cost 100% on the promise of job creation.
> Many articles about current or future AI data centers report the number in the water permit they apply for as the amount of water they actually use day to day. But this almost never happens. [1]
This is from the problematic and often wrong but in this case correct Andy Masley. It's not completely clear to me whether this number is observed usage or a theoretical permitted maximum, in which case the actual usage could be even lower. It could be either.
[1] https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake?ope...
Do you have a link for this? I'm interested in learning more about why Masley is wrong on heat islands.
> Data centers impact local utilities unevenly: while their water consumption is roughly equivalent to adding a small town of 25,000 people, their electrical footprint across the state exceeds the residential power needs of the entire population of Nebraska.
> Together, Google’s three Nebraska data center sites draw enough electricity to power up to 290,000 homes—equivalent to supplying the entire residential power grid for roughly one-third of Nebraska’s total population.
The greener solution is to use water.
It's going to come back down as rain, yes, but there is no guarantee it will come down in the place you need it. Fairly minor variations in surface temperatures and evaporation can have a large effect on local rainfall.
Anything but metric.
If those numbers are yearly, they are significant (about what the city of Lincoln uses in a month) but perhaps not troubling. Depends on your perspective.
As long as they don’t pollute, I don’t see much a problem with this amount of water usage. And the water doesn’t need to be disinfected either, only cleaned and filtered. So any natural renewable source would do.
Once the outside air crosses a certain temperature, air-to-air AC becomes less efficient and evaporative cooling can be used to get rid of heat instead.
Of course, this has the side effect of using more water during warm periods, when people and agriculture also need more water. That can be rather problematic in drought situations, especially in the decades to come.
How does that benefit Nebraska?
Water that had some heat transferred to it sounds like perfectly well usable water, right...?
Dealing with waste hot-water sounds like a PITA. Piping it straight back to the reservoir would need a dedicated pipeline, probably with insulation so you don't bake everything around it. Harnessing the excess heat on-site would be awesome, although I'm sure datacenters would already doing this as best they can to recoup electricity costs.
[1] https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/cooling/evaporative-cool...
If it was irrigation water, instead of drinking water, that would be about 26 acres worth of irrigated crops - in drought conditions.
If they were bypassing the municipal water supply or using post-wastewater treated water for their water usage, I'd be more blase about the situation. But farms are much thirstier than people.
I mean, come on, let's drive some competition on something other than profit. If someone wants to buy the greenest compute they can, and they can afford a slightly higher price, let's empower them to do that!
The one exception is if they're using fossil water pumped from aquifers, which doesn't renew (back into the aquifer that is), but nobody seems to bother to make the distinction.
Yes water goes eventually back into circulation but that does not help in the place where the system is already at it's limit
The contaminants consist of dissolved solids and minerals that were in the incoming water, plus additives such as anti-scalers, corrosion inhibiters, and antibacterials.
The excess minerals don't worry me much.
If you pump water out of one watershed into another, perhaps via evaporation and wind transport, then you better expect the downstream users, deprived of their water, to complain.
For example, the upstream users of water from the Colorado use so much that Colorado River Delta is nearly always dry. Or read about the California water wars.
Further, increased competition for surface water raises prices, which encourages additional aquifer extraction.
Different data centers have order of magnitude differences in water usage depending on how whether they use the water for cooling or not.
If it really matters, block it out, print it, scan it, then send that.
If it really really really matters, block it out with random extra amounts of width, print it, scan it, edit the page images in paint to move the text to the right of a redaction forward or back a bit so people can't guess the words based on width.
There will be protests and cases related to water usage of AI, but none of them would hold any ground. And winning the water case would just make the argument in their favour.
https://archive.dni.gov/index.php/gt2040-home/gt2040-deeper-... | https://water.usgs.gov/vizlab/water-availability/03-vulnerab... | https://www.epa.gov/watersense/statistics-and-facts | https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-cent... | https://natureforward.org/data-centers-and-water-use/ | https://www.newsweek.com/data-centers-environmental-concerns... | https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275... | https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co... | https://fieldreport.caes.uga.edu/publications/TP121/how-data... | https://www.wri.org/insights/us-data-center-growth-impacts | https://www.nixonpeabody.com/insights/articles/2025/09/05/wa... | https://cnr.ncsu.edu/news/2026/09/data-center-boom-water-res... | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2026/01/11/ameri... | https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/land-lines-magazine... | https://www.worldwildlife.org/our-work/freshwater/water-scar... | https://swefc.unm.edu/home/living-without-water-is-draining-... | https://www.cdcfoundation.org/blog/addressing-growing-water-... | https://www.brookings.edu/articles/millions-of-americans-lac... | https://lifestraw.com/blogs/news/america-has-a-drinking-wate... | https://www.digdeep.org/close-the-water-gap
Over the course of a year, that doesn't sound terrible.
That's 1,200 olympic sized swimming pools of treated drinking water lost in leakages per year.
On the substance: 13M gallons sounds huge until you see the context in the article - less than half of what the City of Lincoln uses in a single day, and about 20 Olympic pools for a year of operation. The Papillion site at 548 megagallons is the much larger water user. And the tax refund numbers ($55.8M for Agate alone) explain why Nebraska's reporting law and the governor's executive order exist - locals want to know what they're getting vs giving.
Claiming electricity/water usage as trade secret under 81-1527 feels like a stretch when the state explicitly requires annual self-reporting to DWEE. If everything material is redacted as trade secret, the reporting requirement is meaningless. Would be interesting to see if DWEE fixes their submission portal to reject non-flattened redactions.