A data centre's water stops being a secret
On 15 December 2022 the city of The Dalles in Oregon settled with The Oregonian and released the annual volumes of water Google's data centres had drawn from the municipal supply between 2012 and 2021. For 2021 that was 355 million gallons - 29 per cent of all the water the city used, and three times the 2017 figure. Google said it would no longer treat such numbers as a trade secret.
Why it matters
Until then site-level water use by data centres in the United States was closed: the city litigated against the newspaper for thirteen months to keep it hidden, with the company paying the legal bills. The settlement made the numbers public for one site and removed the grounds for hiding them at the rest - a year before water began to be counted as a quantity in its own right.
355 million gallons is about 1.34 million cubic metres. About 16,000 people live in the city. The request was filed by the reporter Mike Rogoway in September 2021. The district attorney for Wasco County sided with the newspaper and ordered the city to release the records; instead the city sued the newspaper to keep them. Separately Google and the city struck a 28.5 million dollar deal to upgrade the municipal water system, under which the company signed some of its own water rights over to the city. What the record does not claim. The figures of 550 million gallons and 40 per cent by 2025 appear in neither source. The settlement binds the city, not the company: dropping the trade-secret claim was what a Google spokesperson told the Associated Press afterwards, not a term of the agreement.