How Do You Make a Data Center Show Its Real Water and Power Numbers Before the Vote?

Why is the number a secret in the first place?

I assumed the water and power numbers were just buried in some report nobody reads. They're not. In a lot of these deals they don't exist on paper the public can see, because the local government signed a nondisclosure agreement before the project ever hit an agenda.

That's the part that got me. It's not the company hiding from the town — it's the town's own officials agreeing not to tell you. In Virginia, the state with the most data centers, one tally found 25 of 31 localities with a data center had an NDA in place. Sometimes the agreement gets signed by the local chamber of commerce, a private group that isn't even covered by open-records law, which is a tidy little side door around the whole thing.

That's also why you keep seeing cartoon names. "Project Blue" in Tucson. "Project Hyperion" in Louisiana. A shell company with a name that tells you nothing signs the land deal, the county votes on rezoning, and half the elected officials in the room genuinely can't tell you which trillion-dollar company is on the other end. You're being asked to approve a hole in the ground and a straw into the aquifer, with the size of the straw redacted.

'Our water use is a trade secret' — wait, can they actually say that?

When a real number does get requested, the move is almost always the same three words: trade secret. I figured that was a bluff. Turns out it's a bluff that sometimes works and sometimes blows up.

It blew up in The Dalles, Oregon. The city sued its own local newspaper to keep Google's water use secret, arguing the figure was a trade secret. A year of legal fighting later, they folded — a prosecutor ruled water use isn't a trade secret and ordered it released. And the number they'd fought so hard to hide? Google was drinking close to 40% of the entire town's water. After that, Google said it would quit claiming site water use as a secret anywhere in the country.

So the dodge is beatable. But it is not dead. Right around when I was reading all this, Louisiana's utility regulators voted to let Meta keep its data center's projected electricity demand confidential, overruling their own judge who'd ordered the company to show its math. Same claim, opposite outcome. Whether "trade secret" holds up depends almost entirely on who's sitting on the board that day — which is exactly why the pressure has to land on those people, not on the company.

So how do you actually get the number before the vote?

Here's what I pieced together, and none of it is a magic wand. It's leverage applied in the right spot, early.

File public records requests on your own government and the water authority — not the company. Ask for the permit application, the water and wastewater service agreements, the emails, and the NDA itself. Even a heavily blacked-out page tells you how big the thing you can't see is. In one Virginia case, residents were told a project's max water use was around 2 million gallons a day. Then a records request pulled up emails between the developer and the water authority talking about 10 to 11 million gallons a day. Same project, five times the thirst, and the honest number only showed up because somebody asked for the paperwork.

Then there are two pressure points people forget. First, rezoning conditions: some counties now make a written water-and-power report a condition of the permit, so disclosure is baked into the law instead of left to the developer's mood. If your county doesn't require it, that's the ask — no numbers, no rezoning. Second, the utility commission. Whether a giant new customer pays for its own power lines or spreads that cost onto your bill is decided at the public utility commission, and those proceedings are a place ordinary people can formally intervene and demand the load numbers. The zoning meeting and the utility board are usually the only two windows where the public gets to weigh in before the deal is locked. Miss them and you're just watching.

Where to actually go deeper on this

I went down this rabbit hole because the whole thing felt upside down — the people who use the water and pay for the power are the last ones allowed to see the bill. And the more I read, the more it turned into six other questions. Where does the power even come from? Who's firing up gas turbines and floating small nuclear reactors to feed these things? Why is your electric bill creeping up in a town that doesn't have a data center yet?

That's the stuff Byte Bungalow chases on camera — the grid, the cooling, the water, the substations, and the very human question of who ends up paying for all of it. If you want the version you can watch instead of read, come find the channel on YouTube, hit the video, and subscribe so the next piece of this puzzle lands in your feed. This story is nowhere near finished, and neither is the digging.

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