Comment by michaelt
2 hours ago
> 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.
It'd be pretty easy for the company to dispel those outlandish accusations - the PR department could just report the true numbers.
Worth considering in the current climate. My impression a while ago is that the exact water and power usage of any large company's data center is seen as a trade secret of sorts; if a large company invested to become XX% efficient, it might not want competitors to know it hit a certain efficiency target.
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It’s already permitted and operating. Presumably they want the $XX million tax rebates, which haven’t yet been paid out according to this article. Maybe that’s the case in other places too.
Why not get people riled up over water under the bridge and not unpaid rebates? What can anybody do about it? Send the sheriff to lock out the facility?
2 replies →
They do! In great detail:
https://sustainability.google/files/1699a2e19277e478b38a659f...
The data tables start on p. 90.
Sam Altman has stated the water usage in multiple interviews (it's low) and people don't believe him.
Largely because of how many times it could have been stated prior, given it had been a talking point for some time, and the lack of actual evidence (him saying something is not often taken at face value…).
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.
That’s because he’s a known liar. Like he’s famous for his sociopathic lying even amongst sociopathic lying billionaires. Impressive almost.
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Exactly my point
That would not be good PR because a) it would be seen as flippant and b) no one would believe Google.
Both things happened when Sam Altman blogged about how much water the median ChatGPT query used.
Data centers tend to be higher security facilities for a reason. Publicizing any of their technical specs isn’t really beneficial, especially when any numbers that are provided will be dismissed unless even more information is provided to back them up.
Effectively no reward at any risk level, regardless of whether one agrees if there is actually any risk.
Absurd! every company ever would love to hide behind these same excuses.
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.
> every company ever would love to hide behind these same excuses.
Correct. But they can't so easily without Google's (or other big tech companies) big legal departments to make challenging the excuses difficult.
How does hiding water usage protect the facility exactly?
The big hyperscalers always knew that eventually the tide would turn against them (for example when local towns noticed that the DCs didn't actually need very many locals to run the facilities).
They carefully hid things so they could expand for as long as possible, knowing that having the necessary footprint for services, cloud, and AI would be key to winning the race. When I worked at Google, our leaders were always "proud" they had built such a huge fleet (originally for search + ads but rapidly growing to a wide range of products and research) without competitors knowing just how large, because they figured eventually AWS and MSFT would realize they had to build out massively to handle the coming loads.
So they hide these things to stave off complaints for as long as possible.
It’s not high security if everyone is mandated to do it. Power consumption, energy sources, water usage for coolant, waste water treatment plan, etc.
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...
Google has some custom hardware, so directly reporting it could be an issue.
Now that it has been, though…