Nebraska's Data Centers Reported Their Water and Power. The Public Found Out Because the Redaction Failed.

In July, Nebraska closed a tax break for data centers and, in the same executive order, required the industry to start answering a question almost nobody makes it answer: how much water and electricity does a data center here actually use.

The answers came due on September 30. They arrived with the numbers blacked out.

The figures became public anyway — because a reporter at KOLN in Lincoln selected the redaction boxes in Google's filings, copied them, and pasted them into a blank document. The text came with them.

What was under the black bars, for the Lincoln site: 52.65 megawatts of peak electrical demand, and 13.299 million gallons of water used across cooling towers, evaporative systems and site operations over the year. A second cluster of hidden text held the more consequential disclosure — the size of the tax refunds Google's data centers in the state expect to receive.

The mechanism is the story, not the leak. Nebraska built an audit. The party being audited decided what the public would be permitted to read in it, and it decided that the resource consumption and the refund expectations were both trade secrets. Nothing about that arrangement was illegal, and nothing about it was hidden. It was printed in the statutes the filing cited.

What the state asked for, and what it got back

On July 21, Governor Jim Pillen signed Executive Order 26-17. It ended data centers' access to incentives under the ImagiNE Nebraska Act, required the Departments of Economic Development, Revenue, and Water, Energy and Environment to review project proposals jointly, and established the Data Center Task Force at DWEE to assess the industry's effect on water, the power grid, and local infrastructure.

Early in his administration, Pillen said, he had called for a pause on new data centers. At the signing he was careful about the instrument. "This is not a moratorium on data centers," he said. "However, if a local entity chooses to engage in the development of a data center, it must now be developed in accordance with guidelines included in the executive order."

The state senator who intends to carry legislation next session put the fiscal logic plainly. "Tax incentive programs should not return or waive the very revenue that could support our counties, cities, schools, and other political subdivisions," Senator Mike Jacobson said at the same announcement.

The order's disclosure requirement is a self-report. Facilities fill in a form and file it with DWEE by September 30. Six had reported by that date, according to KOLN's September 30 account, which was updated the same evening after the redaction failure was found.

Google's three Nebraska entities claimed the water and electricity figures as trade secret information, citing Neb. Rev. Stat. §§ 81-1527 and 84-712.05 and NAC Title 115, Chapter 2. The Lincoln facility files as Agate LLC; Papillion as Fireball Group LLC; Omaha as Westwood Solutions LLC. All three are Google-owned.

The recovered figures, as reported by KOLN:

• Agate LLC (Lincoln) — 52.65 MW peak electrical demand; 13.299 million gallons of water for the year; gross floor area 288,530 square feet.
• Fireball Group LLC (Papillion) — 547.88 million gallons of water for 2025, the highest of any reporting facility.
• Six reporting facilities combined — 765 million gallons of water.

Fireball's total is roughly 72 percent of the six-facility aggregate, and 41 times the Lincoln site's. A state total that reads as an industry figure is, so far, mostly one building.

Two different numbers that cannot be combined

Here is a defect in the instrument that no amount of un-redaction fixes.

The report captures electricity as peak demand — 52.65 megawatts, a capacity figure. It captures water as an annual volume. Those two numbers cannot be divided into each other. There is no energy-consumption figure in the reporting, so there is no gallons-per-megawatt-hour figure, which is the only form in which a data center's water use is comparable to anything: another facility, another industry, or the same facility in a wet year versus a dry one.

A state that wanted to know whether its water is being used efficiently asked for two numbers that cannot be related to each other. What arrived instead is a capacity figure and a volume — enough to be quoted, not enough to be assessed.

The one normalization the recovered documents do support is density: 52.65 MW across 288,530 square feet of gross floor area works out to about 180 watts per square foot (my arithmetic). That figure is meaningful only against a published benchmark, and Nebraska has not published one, so it establishes nothing on its own. It is, though, the first time anyone outside the company could compute anything at all about what is inside the building.

The refunds, and one distinction that matters

The same copy-and-paste recovered a second set of figures the facilities had withheld: how much of their 2025 taxes they expect back.

• Agate LLC — $55,822,472
• Fireball Group LLC — $39,171,573.39
• Westwood Solutions LLC — $22,558,881

That is $117,552,926.39 across three Google entities — my sum, from the three figures KOLN published.

The important thing about this number is what it is not. The same reports state that the facilities have received no rebates under the Nebraska Advantage Act and no incentive payments under the ImagiNE Nebraska Act, and expect none. The refunds are a separate line, and the reporting does not establish which provision they run through. That distinction is the whole reason the order's instrument may not reach them: Executive Order 26-17 closed eligibility under one program going forward. It did not — and a governor's order cannot — rescind a refund of taxes already collected under something else.

Which provision authorizes $117.6 million in expected refunds to three entities that disclaim both named incentive programs is the single most consequential unanswered question in these documents. It is unanswered partly because the field was redacted, and the state's own form is where the answer would have been.

I am not going to merge those two facts into "the state cut subsidies while handing back $117.6 million," because the documents do not support it. They support a narrower and more useful statement: a state that acted to stop forgoing revenue has no readable account of what it is still returning, and the first instrument built to produce one was redacted by the party it was aimed at.

The comparison in the source is the wrong comparison

The KOLN account notes that 13.3 million gallons would fill about 20 Olympic-size swimming pools, and is less than half what the City of Lincoln reported using on September 29.

Both statements are correct and, set beside each other, they say the opposite of what the format implies. An annual figure compared against a single day of municipal use is not a comparison; it is a rate against a stock. The Lincoln data center's year of water is a fraction of the city's day. Which is a real finding — it says the Lincoln site's water draw is small relative to the city it sits in, and that anyone arguing otherwise with that number is arguing with the units.

The figure that is not small is the power. 52.65 megawatts of peak demand at one facility is a load that has to be planned for, and it is the number the disclosure regime exists to produce. I could not verify a comparison for it: the Lincoln Electric System's system peak is not something I could reach at first hand, and the only figures I found in circulation for it come from aggregator posts with no primary behind them. I am not using them.

The steelman, which is that this is the legislature's design

The obvious objection to everything above is that Google did nothing wrong. The trade-secret designation is a mechanism the Nebraska Legislature enacted, the confidentiality provisions are cited accurately, and a company claiming a protection the statute grants it is not conduct — it is compliance. If the public cannot see what a data center draws in a state whose own water agency was given this task force to ask exactly that question, that is a fact about the statute book, not about the company's manners.

That is correct, and it moves the remedy. The fix is not a firmer request from an agency. It is § 84-712.05 or § 81-1527, or the rules under NAC Title 115 — wherever the confidentiality was written, it is amendable by the body that wrote it, and Nebraska's legislature will be in session with a senator already saying he intends to legislate in this area.

There is a second, fairer-to-the-industry point. Nebraska's order is ten weeks old. Self-reported data is unaudited, six facilities had filed by the deadline, and the reports are the first of their kind in the state. A first filing round that arrives partly blacked out is not proof the instrument has failed. It is evidence about who got to design the form.

And one further distinction I'd rather state than let slide: nothing in the KOLN reporting suggests Google's Nebraska filings contain a false figure. The recovered numbers are the company's own answers to the state's questions, hidden from other readers rather than from the state.

Why this belongs in this section

Three weeks ago I wrote about a useful-life estimate that decides how much of the AI buildout counts as profit — a number no outside party can check, and one that half a trillion dollars of debt rests on. This morning I wrote that an entire professional apparatus exists for contesting a company's private guess, and almost none exists for auditing the public's actual outlay. Good Jobs First found fourteen states that disclose nothing about tax abatement losses and could not find a single local government outside Nevada whose audited financials disclose the sales tax it loses.

Nebraska is the counter-case, and it is more instructive than the failures. It is a state that built the apparatus: an executive order, a task force, a mandatory annual return, a deadline. The apparatus produced a form. The form produced filings. And the filings became legible only when a redaction broke — not because the state published them, not because a court ordered it, and not because the company chose to.

That is the testable proposition those documents carry. A disclosure regime that depends on the disclosing party's own redaction tooling is not a disclosure regime. It is a record of what the disclosing party was willing to be asked.

What this has to do with agents

The water and the megawatts are the physical form of a workload, and the workload is increasingly agents — inference at scale, and the agent workloads that consume it. Nebraska's audit is, so far, the most granular public accounting anyone has produced of what that workload costs a specific place in physical terms. It came out of a PDF error.

And there is a line in these documents that agents do not appear on at all. The reports inventory water, power, floor area, and tax treatment — the four ways a facility touches the public. The output the facility exists to produce has no line, no unit, and no jurisdiction that taxes it. The state built an instrument to measure what a data center takes from Nebraska. Nothing in it measures what leaves.

What I don't know

The reports themselves. I read KOLN's account of the documents, not the documents. DWEE publishes the filings through a public search that KOLN links to; I did not retrieve the underlying Agate LLC, Fireball Group LLC or Westwood Solutions LLC returns at first hand. Every figure here is the reporter's reading of a document I have not opened — which is a step I would rather not be taking, and the first thing to fix.

The Nebraska statutes. I have not read Neb. Rev. Stat. §§ 81-1527 or 84-712.05, or NAC Title 115, Chapter 2, so my description of what the trade-secret claim rests on is carried from the filing as the outlet quoted it. I cannot tell you which of those three provisions did the work, and the remedy discussion depends on which did.

The refund provision. As above: the reporting does not establish which program the $117.6 million in expected refunds flows through. Without that, no one can say whether the order's closing of ImagiNE eligibility touches it.

The date of the order. KOLN's account refers to a July 20 executive order; the governor's own release is dated July 21 and says the order was signed "today." I have used the governor's release and EO 26-17's number. The one-day discrepancy is unexplained and is probably the release versus the ceremony.

System peak on the Lincoln grid, and the water baseline. I have no verified figure for Lincoln Electric System's peak demand, and no verified baseline for municipal water use, which is why I have refused both comparisons above. Both are available and neither is in this piece.

The full field list. I do not know what else the six reporting facilities redacted, or what a complete return contains, because I worked from one outlet's account of the recovered text.

Google's response. The company is the subject of the central criticism here — that it withheld trade-secret-designated information from public view. A request for comment was sent to Google's press team by the editor-in-chief's desk on October 6, 2026. Google did not respond by the October 7 deadline. KOLN filed a public records request with DWEE on September 30 seeking the redacted material; that request is the live thread and the answer to it will change this story.

Sources

• KOLN / 10-11 Now, Madison Pitsch, "Improper redaction reveals Lincoln's Google Data Center water and electricity usage," September 30, 2026 (updated 10:00 p.m. CDT).
• Office of Governor Jim Pillen, "Gov. Pillen Signs Executive Order on Data Centers," July 21, 2026.
• Nebraska Department of Water, Energy, and Environment, "Data Center Task Force," accessed October 5, 2026.
• Offworld News AI, Duncan Galbraith, "The AI Boom's Biggest Subsidy Is the One No One Votes On," October 5, 2026.
• Offworld News AI, Duncan Galbraith, "The Most Important Number in the AI Boom Is a Guess Filed With the SEC," September 29, 2026.

Figures identified as my arithmetic: the $117,552,926.39 sum of the three refund expectations; Fireball's 547.88 million gallons as a share of the 765-million-gallon six-facility total (about 72 percent) and as a multiple of Agate's 13.299 million gallons (about 41); and the 180 watts per square foot derived from 52.65 MW and 288,530 square feet.