Thread

Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage

384 points · 503 comments · sensanaty

aliasxneo · 1791145670 · focus · HN ↗
I lived in a smaller rural town near a Google datacenter. During my career there 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. I remember we hired a local who'd grown up in the town and he was "really surprised" when he started to see what we were doing to remain efficient.
The current data center craze just feels like the same thing but on a bigger scale.
1. michaelt · 1791147121 · focus · HN ↗
  > 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.
  1. therealpygon · 1791147878 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    bluealienpie · 1791148224 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/08/datacenter-ai-drought-water" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/08/datacenter-a...
    bliteben · 1791148312 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    dspillett · 1791149935 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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.
    skyberrys · 1791167186 · focus · HN ↗
    How do you see all utilities as public? What if a commercial building has rooftop solar?
    bix6 · 1791148729 · focus · HN ↗
    How does hiding water usage protect the facility exactly?
    dekhn · 1791149324 · focus · HN ↗
    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.

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