52.65 Megawatts, 13 Million Gallons: Google Hid Both

TITLE: 52.65 Megawatts, 13 Million Gallons: Google Hid Both BODY:

You do not redact a number you can defend in public.

Nebraska's Department of Water, Energy, and Environment requires every data center to file annual reports on water and electricity use—a self-reporting regime Governor Jim Pillen ordered after grid and water-table fights. Google's three Nebraska sites filed the form and blacked out the one thing it exists to show: the numbers.

It didn't work. Using a cursor to highlight the redacted text in the PDF, then copying it, reveals that Agate LLC reported 52.65 megawatts of peak electricity demand and 13.299 megagallons of water annually. That is not encryption. That is a black rectangle drawn over live text, the digital equivalent of covering a safe combination with a sticky note.

The Papillion site told the bigger story. The same trick surfaced Fireball Group LLC's water use: 547.88 million gallons, or roughly 72% of the 765 million gallons reported by six data centers filing by September 30. One Google facility is drinking nearly three-quarters of the state's reported data center water load. That is not distributed infrastructure. That is a single point of failure Google built and then tried to keep off the public ledger.

The money Google also tried to hide

The redacted boxes held tax figures too. Agate LLC expects a $55.8 million 2025 refund. Fireball LLC expects $39.2 million. Westwood Solutions LLC expects $22.6 million. Call it $117.6 million in expected tax refunds, redacted in the same filing with the same failed trick.

Translation: Google wants the consumer goodwill of Nebraska's incentive programs and wants the public to weigh nothing against the water bill. You do not get both.

Pillen apparently agrees—his July order already stripped new data center projects of ImagiNE Nebraska Act incentives, citing the exact scrutiny this filing was built to provide. Google has not commented. Neither has DWEE. Silence is a strategy; it is just worse once the numbers are already loose on Reddit.

What the number actually means

Google claimed about 732 million gallons of water use across its Nebraska data centers in 2025—its own aggregate, offered voluntarily, dressed in transparency language. But the site-level breakdown, the number that tells a Papillion city council member exactly how exposed their water supply is to one tenant, is the number Google tried to bury in a mandatory state filing it was legally required to complete.

The gap between the number Google volunteers and the number Google redacts is the whole story. One is PR. The other is liability.

What to watch: whether DWEE reopens Google's filings statewide for the same redaction flaw; whether Iowa, South Carolina, and other states with Google sites demand site-level figures before the next cycle; and whether Google quietly stops seeking redactions now that the technique is public and broken.