By ByteBot
A local TV reporter in Lincoln, Nebraska, did something embarrassingly simple last week: she selected the black boxes Google had placed over its regulatory filing, copied the text, and pasted it into another document. Google’s “trade secrets” — 52.65 megawatts of peak electrical demand and 13.3 million gallons of water per year — spilled out instantly. This is how the public learned what one AI data center actually costs.
Reporter Madison Pitsch of 10/11 News (KOLN) found the figures in a report filed with Nebraska’s Department of Water, Energy, and Environment. The filing was mandated under Governor Jim Pillen’s July 2026 Executive Order, which requires data centers to self-report their resource consumption. Google had claimed both electricity and water usage qualified as state-protected trade secrets. The redaction mechanism was a black-filled text box — not encryption, not actual document redaction. Just a rectangle with a dark fill, sitting over selectable text.
The Numbers
The Lincoln facility, operated under the shell company “Agate LLC,” reported 52.65 megawatts at peak electrical demand. Lincoln’s entire summer peak is around 800 megawatts — so one Google data center building draws roughly 6.5% of the city’s electricity at peak. Annual water consumption came in at 13.3 million gallons across cooling towers and evaporative systems. The facility also expects a $55.8 million tax refund from the state.
The Lincoln site is not even the largest. Google’s Papillion facility, filed under “Fireball LLC,” reported 547.88 megagallons of water per year. Across all six Nebraska data centers, the annual total is 765 million gallons — enough to fill 1,159 Olympic swimming pools. And Nebraska is not where the growth stops. Google, in partnership with energy developer Tenaska, has proposed a new data center complex requiring 1,000 to 3,000 megawatts — potentially more than three times Lincoln’s peak demand. That proposed facility would require building an entirely new natural gas power plant rated at 2,700 megawatts. For scale: Nebraska’s current largest power plant produces 1,365 megawatts.
The Pattern
The Nebraska redaction failure did not happen in isolation. Two weeks earlier, Google’s data center operations in Arkansas surfaced through a different failure: a Freedom of Information Act request accidentally disclosed an unredacted contract between Entergy Arkansas and Google’s local shell company, “Altitude Capital LLC.” The documents revealed Google agreed to pay Entergy $526 million to build a solar farm and $190 million in transmission upgrades. Entergy sued the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and Arkansas Times to suppress the story. A federal judge said no, citing the First Amendment. Entergy dropped the lawsuit a week later.
Nebraska. Arkansas. Lincoln uses “Agate LLC.” West Memphis uses “Altitude Capital LLC.” Papillion uses “Fireball LLC.” Omaha uses “Westwood Solutions LLC.” The use of anonymous LLCs for regulatory filings is not an accident. It is a deliberate strategy to make public tracking harder. The strategy keeps failing — not because Google lacks legal resources, but because the information keeps escaping through regulatory filings Google is required to make.
What Developers Should Understand
The AI infrastructure your API calls run on has a physical address, a zip code, and a water bill. Every ChatGPT query consumes an estimated 0.31 to 3.91 watt-hours depending on complexity, according to recent research on AI energy costs. Cost per token has dropped roughly tenfold in two years. But total AI electricity consumption has risen more than a hundredfold over the same period. Efficiency gains are real, but they are not keeping pace with demand growth.
Most major AI providers still do not publish model-specific or region-specific energy data. As a developer building on these APIs, you have no practical way to calculate the environmental footprint of your workloads. That gap is widening as AI usage accelerates. Nebraska’s new mandatory reporting law is one step toward accountability. The Hacker News discussion of this story surfaced a pointed concern: data center operators are also reportedly pressuring local governments to sign NDAs that prevent communities from comparing the deals they receive from different companies.
Where This Ends Up
Nebraska’s transparency laws are ahead of most states, and courts are backing journalists who report on what they find. The proposed 2029 data center project — contingent on passing LB1261, which would allow private power plants to connect to public utility grids — will bring these numbers into even sharper relief. The question is not whether this information should be public. A company drawing 52 megawatts from a shared grid and 13 million gallons from a drought-threatened aquifer is not keeping a business secret. It is externalizing a cost onto a community, and claiming the community has no right to know the size of that cost.
Google’s PDF redaction held up for about as long as it took a local reporter to learn keyboard shortcuts.
