Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage

I lived in a smaller rural town near a Google datacenter. During my career there I had routinely come across some outlandish accusations made about our water/power usage from the locals. But for obvious reasons I could never dispute them. I remember we hired a local who'd grown up in the town and he was "really surprised" when he started to see what we were doing to remain efficient.

The current data center craze just feels like the same thing but on a bigger scale.

Nearly exactly 40 acre feet of water, which is probably the underlying unit. An acre of corn uses maybe a couple of acre feet a season. Corn irrigation alone uses tens of millions of acre feet of water per season in the USA.

So, basically, not a meaningful amount of water at all. Credit to the story authors for taking the time to frame what 13MM gallons actually works out to.

The concern around data centers looks a lot like a moral panic. They've been around for decades and nobody cared before the backlash against AI. They're like any other industrial building, subject to the same resource constraints and zoning laws. I suspect if the owners of that land built a steel mill, a semiconductor fab, or anything other than a data center with similar power and water requirements, nobody would care.

There is sometimes incorrect conflation between what the datacenter is permitted for and what the datacenter actually draws.

> 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...

You can get better cooling performance at the cost of slight water usage or you can use more energy without using water at all.

The greener solution is to use water.

I dont like the olympic swimming pool comparisons so I converted to immigrant population comparisons. How many people's worth of electricity and water are the data centers consuming , of course all the analysis was done on gemini since we are talking about google data centers :) here's the output

> 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.

kind of confusing numbers here. the 13 million gallon figure refers to one specific datacenter, but you add on five more datacenters and the number grows to... 765 million gallons? The datacenter in Papillion accounts for 548 million of those. Is it bigger? Is it less efficient? not a lot of info apparent in this report.

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.

> Agate LLC reports expecting a refund of $55,822,472 from 2025 taxes. Fireball LLC is expecting a refund of $39,171,573.39 from 2025 taxes. Westwood Solutions LLC, the Google-owned data center in Omaha, is expecting a refund of $22,558,881 from 2025 taxes.

Wow!

I don't really understand the hand-wringing about data centers and water. Unlike fossil fuels, when you "use" water, it doesn't go away, it goes back out into the environment. And since DCs use it for cooling, not some industrial process, it doesn't even contaminate the water in any meaningful way.

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.

This is also likely insignificant compared to how much water is constantly evaporated by a large lake.

> 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.

Over the course of a year, that doesn't sound terrible.

From a redaction point of view: I can't believe this is still happening. Surely by now all government and local government offices have a data/records person and policies about information handling. I guess it's not really sensitive info like the name of a government informant. Maybe they intentionally leaked it with a 'whoops, we tried' excuse.

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.

Seems like a lot of water to me. And what does society get back from google in return?

It… doesn’t look that bad. Electricity use is sizable. Water which usually gets all this screaming is, well, look up how much a golf course or a large hotel uses.

So what? Water used for cooling doesn't disappear.

[flagged]

This document was created after the Epstein redaction debacle and yet they still leaked redacted data. People will never learn. <facepalm>

If everything was on the up and up they wouldn’t be hiding things behind shell companies and ndas. The water and electric usage is the least of our worries. These things will make cancer alley look like a Sunday picnic. There is a reason executives won’t live anywhere near the hot zone.