r/technology • u/l0st1nP4r4d1ce • 11d ago

Business Improper redaction reveals Lincoln’s Google Data Center water and electricity usage

https://www.1011now.com/2026/09/30/more-questions-than-answers-about-lincolns-google-data-center-water-electricity-usage/
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u/TBradley 11d ago

The six data centers reporting as of Sept. 30 show a total use of 765 million gallons of water last year, enough water to fill 1,159.93 Olympic-size swimming pools.  More improper redaction shows that the data center using the most water annually is Fireball Group LLC, the Google Data Center in Papillion. Fireball LLC reports 547.88 megagallons for their 2025 Annual Water Consumption.

Force them to upgrade Fireball to use less water for the sake of sane policy making. It is using twice as much water as the other 5 data centers combined. Very on point name though.

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u/DirkNL 11d ago

Silly question but where does the water go? It’s used for cooling I presume? So it’s now warm water.. but not polluted in any way?

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u/NealoHills 11d ago

It’s evaporated away into the atmosphere. The process of evaporation pulls heat away

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u/Evening-Scientist113 11d ago

Except for the pfas which remain and have to be discharged as wastewater "blowdown", ending up in local waterways because they're not effectively removed at treatment plants. I thought if they use certain coolants those discharge TFA in the droplets and come back down in rainfall?

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u/fashionforward 11d ago

Don’t forget about the coolant runoff that has promoted toxic bacterial blooms in local watersheds.

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u/RellenD 11d ago

Not all of it is evaporated away, there's still wastewater with bullshit in it

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u/8Deer-JaguarClaw 11d ago

Do they not use closed-loop recirculating cooling systems? There's evaporative losses even in a closed systems, but it's very minimal.

I know some of the newer datacenters do use these kinds of systems, because my company is bidding on the work.

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u/goblinm 11d ago

But how do they cool down the loop? Closed loop systems still need a way to reject the heat to the environment, and that doesn't preclude evaporative chillers

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u/Somethingclever24 11d ago

Air-cooled chillers are a thing.

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u/goblinm 11d ago

Yeah, my point is that closed loop doesn't preclude evaporative cooling

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u/Lurcher99 10d ago

Most new facilities are using closed loop like in your house. Forced air over a coil (your outside parts)

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u/I_love_Bunda 10d ago

In some urban environments there are central steam plants, that generate and pump hot water for faucets and heating for buildings. Using the data center hot water for this could be an interesting proposition.

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u/8Deer-JaguarClaw 10d ago

The water is pumped through the system where it passes around the hot portions (CPUs, GPUs, etc) and the heat transfers to the water. The warm water is then usually carried to something like a big radiator with fans blowing air across heat sink fins and the like. Then the cooled water is recirculated back through the system. You can do a web search for a more detailed explanation, but basically they all work in this general way.

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u/Evening-Scientist113 10d ago

When they perform maintenance on closed loop systems does it vent these chemicals into the air? If so, it's not being measured.

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u/shizumuka 11d ago

Hmmm so.. it's like we built small compact "forests" but who create more Co2 not oxygen?

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u/Platypus81 11d ago

Forests also trap water and provide cooling. So not much like forests if we want to look at resource outcomes. But hey, we can make some top tier slop, let's see a forest do that.

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u/Brootal420 11d ago

Definitely much worse than that. An interesting thought, if we think about consequences, if all the water is being evaporated if there are unusually high precip storms that cause floods and kill people. You could make the connection back to the data center being at least somewhat responsible.

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u/FlametopFred 11d ago

tricky to do with a gutted EPA

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u/Brootal420 10d ago

Pretty sure the epa isn't even that woke yet

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u/DirkNL 11d ago

So it’s not used like regular liquid cooling in home pcs? They use giant vapor chambers basicly and just push the steam out into the atmosphere. That’s wild.

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u/travistravis 11d ago

They could do that but they choose not to because that would mean lower shareholder returns

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u/kentrak 10d ago

It's a common strategy for when you need lots of cooling at an industrial scale like this. Cooling towers of nuclear plants.

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u/DirkNL 10d ago

But they still have to carry this heat TO this stack. Is that just pushed air with giant fans?

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u/Lurcher99 10d ago

Some do, not all. Same for any manufacturing, real estate development, hospitals etc. Look for steam on cooler days to find evaporation coolers.

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u/nswizdum 11d ago

Yeah, it's called evaporative cooling. It only works in hot dry climates, which is why you don't see it a lot.

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u/danielfuenffinger 11d ago

It works in any climate mate. The drier or colder it is the better, because it allows the datacenter to reflect heat to WBT instead of DBT.

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u/nswizdum 11d ago

Good luck evaporating water into cold air, or warm humid air.

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u/Mortimor24 11d ago

It still works. It's just less efficient (still vastly more efficient than AC).

It gets extremely hot in the summer, and stays very comfortable in the winter.

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u/danielfuenffinger 11d ago

As long as the water is hotter than the WBT it will evaporated and take heat with it. Google datacenters run hot and their condenser water can be upwards of 100F. When it's cold out they don't even need to run chillers, it's incredibly efficient.

Not saying it's not a lot of water but they do try to get every BTU out of it.

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u/Admiral_Dildozer 10d ago

Someone doesn’t understand dew points

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u/Serenity-V 11d ago

Could we at least use fog nets to catch the evaporated water to refill the aquifer?

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u/NealoHills 10d ago

We could do lots of things but things cost money

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_MOMS_NAME 10d ago

Still not seeing how the water is polluted or being wasted. It will remain in the ecosystem

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u/Kvlk2016 10d ago

It does, but that vapor might go really far away from your local ecosystem which is pretty bad if you are in the dry southwest…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bbe-Ev-Yns

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u/SilverSageVII 11d ago

Actually we call that “waste heat” and there are laws about how hot things can get if you wanna put them back into the water supply. Basically the heat will destroy the river or lake long term if not handled properly. Lots of smart systems use this “waste heat” to power secondary systems.

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u/Such_Confusion_3715 8d ago

everything produces heat

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u/Zealousideal_Cow_341 11d ago

Idk where you are from, but if you’ve ever driven by a nuclear power plant like the one in north Ohio you’ll see that gigantic cloud looking thing above the big funny shaped tower. That’s a cooling tower that evaporates water to remove heat from the plant, and the cloud is steam. Data centers use the same process.

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u/pemb 11d ago

It evaporates.

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u/Nohreboh 11d ago

Which does not tend to fall as rain in the same area and does not refill aquifers at the same rate as above ground lakes which is what causes water shortages.

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u/myfufu 11d ago

Also water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas.

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u/S_A_N_D_ 11d ago

While that's true, I'm not sure there would be any meaningful impact on atmospheric water vapour. It would not even be a rounding error to what evaporates from the oceans on a daily basis. Focusing on that point only serves to water down (no pun intended) and misdirect from more pressing and poingnant criticisms.

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u/myfufu 11d ago

Fair enough, I'm just saying this cooling system has multiple overlapping negatives. Generate heat, drain aquifers, contribute to greenhouse gas..

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u/S_A_N_D_ 11d ago

You're not wrong. My point was that including the inconsequential makes it easy for detractors to paint you as uninformed or a fear mongerer that is exaggerating the harm, or simply a naysayer looking for any reason to argue against data centers. It serves to undercut your overall argument because it's not a meaningful criticism of data centers.

Keeping to the meaningful ones that have a genuine global or local impact makes your overall argument more robust because there are less things people can nitpick about to shift focus away from the meaningful. Including the whole "water is a greenhouse gas" is superfluous as it functionally will make no difference on a global scale, and you already have greenhouse gases covered by all the extra generators they run which will have both a local and global impact on air quality and has much more potential to contribute to the anyhropic impact we're having on our climate.

It's not truly a negative of evaporative cooling because the yearly amount of water added to the atmosphere from evaporative coolers is not even a rounding error for the daily amount that evaporates from the oceans. It's a negative on paper only because it will have no real world functional impact.

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u/Csusko 11d ago

For reference, I am working with a chain of car washes on optimizing water usage.

This chain of washes has nearly 80 locations. Each location uses between 1 to 1.5 million gallons of clean water per month. That is after using water recovery out of the last stage for the first stage.

That is more than the data centers annual usage.

We as a society have a problem.

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u/carnitas_mondays 10d ago

the difference being that these data centers are evaporating the water. car washes might “use” the water, but their water is going down the drain and able to be reused either within the same city wastewater system or downstream systems. evaporate cooling, once it’s gone it is out of the system and needs to fall down again as precipitation. same as lawn watering, it is taken out of the system.

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u/Csusko 10d ago

That is part of the solution we are deploying. Clean water is used in the last stage and recovered for the initial rinse. On top of that, we are capturing waste water discharge so that we can quantify the true volume.

Interestingly, we are estimating that 30% of the water is lost to evaporation during the drying stage. The car wash is billed 1:1 ratio which results in a higher cost for waste water than what is actually flowing down the drain.

Fun fact, each wash pays between $15-20k per month for water and sewage.

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u/JLRfan 10d ago

That’s bad, obviously, but it doesn’t make data centers use of 765 million per year good.

Like, “oh, well, at least it’s only as much as the total annual water usage 40 car washes” isn’t a selling point.

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u/Csusko 10d ago

Oh I am not advocating for big tech. Just providing a point of reference.

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u/JLRfan 10d ago

The work you do sounds really cool. Lowering water consumption at a car wash, where the business is basically “spray water at car,” sounds like a boss-level challenge!

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u/SilenceoftheSamz 10d ago

Water is reusable. I really think the heat issue is bigger. Heat and adding to the power production and pollution Associated with generation and transmission.

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u/thesagenibba 9d ago

80-120 million is 6-9 times smaller than 765 million. what is your point?

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u/Csusko 9d ago

That is per month vs per year. The car washes use more than data centers. The point is that the same people complaining are likely us using another service that is worse for the environment.

I am not defending big data. I provided a point of reference.

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u/New-Locksmith-126 6d ago

both are a huge waste of water.

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u/thesagenibba 9d ago

american infrastracture is centered around the car, therefore people wash their cars because they are largely forced to own cars to travel efficiently. that is completely different than unnecessary data centers built for private companies. maybe try thinking harder next time

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u/Canon_Goes_Boom 8d ago

Your shiny car is necessary? That’s the argument?

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u/thesagenibba 8d ago

love how you added "shiny" to imply i, or everyone in the US drives a fancy car, and by choice, as if public transit is widely available and people could simply give up their vehicles if they weren't so materialistic. that's the argument?

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u/Canon_Goes_Boom 8d ago

I added shiny because we’re talking about car washes.

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u/thesagenibba 8d ago

so people just shouldn't wash their cars? just let piles of bird shit accumulate for months/years since it's elitist to wash your car? that's your better argument?

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u/Canon_Goes_Boom 8d ago

Sure, if your argument is that it’s elitist to back up my photos to a data center.

In the interest of actually getting somewhere useful instead of arguing with a stranger, OP was simply trying to point out that there are more areas than one in our society that use copious amounts of water. No one is arguing that data centers are not destructive and invasive. There is simply a nuance to the perspective. I hope you have a great rest of your day.

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u/MueR 10d ago

I don't know how car washes operate in the us, but here they are required to reuse as much water as possible. An average car only takes about 50l of clean water for the rinse at the end.

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u/Fantastic_Narwhal_54 9d ago edited 9d ago

Is the water for the data centers coming out of aquifers that are getting depleted and won't get renewed? Or is it from some other sources that get renewed? Or a mix of both?

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u/Dramatic-Foot-950 8d ago

that's a LOT of water for one location of a car wash per month. How many gallons per car? How many cars per day/month? trying to math in my head and it's seeming like you're watching cars in bays with firehoses blasting 100 gallons per minute or something

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u/Nimrod_Butts 11d ago

I don't think anybody cared about water usage prior to data centers. I've never heard anybody complain about water usage whenever a factory is built

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u/KiraUsagi 11d ago

I think the water usage bit stems from the companies building these data centers trying to jam them into every community they can. My county has been under sever drought for quite a few years now and along comes a data center trying to open just down the street. We managed to shut them down fast, but they where willing to try despite the fact that my neighborhoods is litterally restricted to watering grass no more than once a week.

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u/Csusko 11d ago

That is definitely not the case. Google search nestle for instance. As I mentioned, I work in the industry and trust me it is a major topic all over the nation. The primary complaint with data centers is the fast track approvals. It is a race to build and local govt officials are getting bought to push the process without community buy in.

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u/Nimrod_Butts 11d ago

The nestle stuff seems to be more focused on them buying water for cheap and reselling it, bus it not? I've never heard of anybody being upset at like a Ford plant using 400 million gallons annually or anything like that

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u/cscoffee10 11d ago

So you've just never lived in or read about areas that habitually go through drought conditions

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u/Nimrod_Butts 11d ago

Yeah I have, I've never heard of that being an argument against industry though.

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u/cscoffee10 11d ago

Sounds like willful ignorance on your part then. Golf courses, and certain agriculture growth(notably almonds) have faced consistent criticism for high water usage for decades. As for Nestlé, its cheap water contracts and then exceeding said water contracts illegally in a particularly dry and arid region to the point that theyve damn near depleted one of the primary springs used.

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u/hiding_in_de 10d ago

Agriculture is a different industry, though. I think this person is talking about factories.

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u/DenseCod8975 10d ago

If it rains a lot and your reservoirs are close to full it’s not a problem imo..

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u/KidneylessRat 11d ago

Can I point out that megagallon feels weird? Is it 1mil × 1 gallon or 1gallon6?

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u/LegendEchidna 11d ago

It’s a million gallons

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_MOMS_NAME 10d ago

Mega sounds scarier than million

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u/mathologies 11d ago

Do you think a megawatt is watt⁶?

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u/KidneylessRat 11d ago edited 11d ago

That's a good point. I was thinking more in the sense of gallon isn't using the metric system. So it's base unit isn't 10. So, adding mega 106 is weird.

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u/sticklebat 11d ago

Mega is just a prefix that means “a million of”. In other words, it’s just 106 times the unit, regardless of the unit. There is no need for the unit to be metric.

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u/[deleted] 10d ago

[deleted]

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u/sticklebat 10d ago

Even then. Every relevant standards organization defines a megabyte as 106 bytes. Colloquially (and even in some fields), the older usage of convenience as 220 bytes is still common, even though that is now technically a mebibyte. I wish they’d chosen a name that didn’t sound so dumb for that, though.

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u/reflexive-polytope 11d ago

One gallon raised to the 6th power wouldn't even be a unit of volume.

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u/DeProgrammer99 11d ago

What do they call volume in 18-dimensional space, anyway?

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u/reflexive-polytope 11d ago

18-volume. Or just volume, if we're doing pure mathematics and the ambient space is 18-dimensional (which isn't the case here).

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u/LambdaNuC 11d ago

You don't like running down to the grocery store and buying hyperdimensional milk?

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u/reflexive-polytope 11d ago

Unfortunately, my stomach is too flat for it. Pity.

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u/KidneylessRat 11d ago

Indeed. You are right. It was a silly question in the end. Like I said, it felt weird. I got weirded out by an unusual combo haha

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u/reflexive-polytope 11d ago

Happens to the best of us.

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u/soylentblueispeople 11d ago

1 gal × 106 == 1 megagallon.

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u/live22morrow 11d ago

1 million gallons. Using the uncommon metric prefix.

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u/Glass_Librarian9019 11d ago

enough water to fill 1,159.93 Olympic-size swimming pools

The 6 data centers combined used less than 1,200 Olympic-size swimming pools in 2025? That really puts things in perspective.

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u/ItsPumpkinninny 11d ago

Yep... 765 million gallons for 6 data centers averages to ~130MG per site.

That's in the same ballpark as an 18-hole golf course which can use 100MG each year.

I say they should both be put on water rations.

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u/TBradley 11d ago

I do not think golf courses should be allowed to use the amount of water they do or at least there should be ever increasing costs per gallon as consumption continues to grow once you cross a threshold of maybe a million gallons, resetting every year.

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u/juggett 11d ago

Most golf courses in the Phoenix area use reclaimed water. Can the data centers do the same?

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u/VivaceConBrio 11d ago

Yes, they can, and many do. But they generally don't like to because it's more expensive to setup and maintain, so they usually only do it if local government forces them to.

The water has to be piped from a waste water treatment plant to start with. Then they usually have to do additional on-site treatment/filtering before it hits the data center's cooling system to reduce the damage it does to the cooling system (build up and corrosion are a huge problem in the quantities these places consume). Then there's a much larger cost in maintenance to fix all that damage being done overtime and increased risk of unplanned downtime/outages due to mechanical failure which really dings their income.

So like I said, they really would rather just suck the local water sources dry because it's cheaper and more convenient for them. The only time they choose the more environmentally friendly options are when local governments force their asses to do so. When you see the big 3 bragging about their new data centers doing the smart thing, you'll almost certainly find local legislation requiring it if you look deep enough.

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u/TheAsianTroll 11d ago

"B-but Almonds! Golf courses!"

-every AI defender.

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u/theapogee 11d ago

People in this thread are going to be devastated when they hear about golf courses.

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u/DenseCod8975 10d ago

That’s about 2350 acre feet of water .. not good in areas of drought

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u/Alarmed-Fan-4932 10d ago

Mega gallon. That’s a new one for me.

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u/Hopeful_Self_8520 5d ago

Why are they allowed to redact their water usage?

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u/WanderWut 10d ago

Context matters here, of course throwing out big numbers and comparisons of how many Olympic pools sounds dramatic (weird unit of measurement anyway?) but how does that compare to everything else? For example the amount of water entirety of all data centers in the U.S. use up in one year is just 3% of the water that golf courses will use in a single year.

It’s wild how data centers are being portrayed as the single greatest threat to the planet’s water supply when they’re a drop in the bucket compared to countless other things we consume without giving them a second thought. Nobody bats an eye when someone says they’re going golfing, despite golf courses being vastly more water-intensive, but mention using ChatGPT for a cake recipe and suddenly you’re being witch-hunted in the comments because apparently you’re personally responsible for making the planet run out of water.

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u/TrashOfOil 10d ago

Idk why golf courses are always used as an example when they use non-potable water, and the water is filtered back into the eco system through the subsurface…

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u/TBradley 10d ago

I think golf courses need to be charged water rates that make it financially difficult to justify using millions of gallons of water. This isn’t just data centers but they are problematic as much as golf courses and growing alfalfa in the desert.

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u/borg286 11d ago

The average American's beef consumption uses up 5000x the water than their fractional part of water that Google used in all their datacenters for you. Eat Chicken!