The first annual water and electricity reports from Nebraska’s data centers landed with the state Department of Water, Energy, and Environment on Sept. 30, and Google’s Lincoln site, Agate LLC, wanted its figures kept private. So the company blacked them out as confidential trade secrets. Then someone dragged a cursor across the boxes, hit Ctrl-C, and pasted the result into a fresh document: 52.65 megawatts of peak electrical demand, 13.299 million gallons of water consumed across cooling towers, evaporative systems and site operations over the prior year.

The redaction was not a lock. It was a suggestion. And it was, functionally, the whole scandal.

A Trade Secret You Can Read With Ctrl-C

Note the shape of the claim. Google did not conceal a formula, a design, a customer list, or a negotiating position. It concealed a utility bill. Water and power arrive at a data center through meters. The city and the co-op already have the numbers. A trade secret that a municipal utility mails out every month is not a trade secret. It’s a press strategy wearing a legal costume.

And it performed about as well as press strategies usually do. Six Nebraska data centers had reported as of Sept. 30 — 765 million gallons of water last year, roughly 1,160 Olympic-size swimming pools. Google’s Fireball Group LLC in Papillion reported about 548 million gallons, the largest of the group. That aggregate went out in the clear. The per-site carve-outs bought the operators nothing except the appearance of having something worth hiding.

As one associate at a Lincoln firm that runs data-center diligence put it when I called the office: “A black box in a PDF is a suggestion, not a lock. Every first-year knows that.”

The Snapshot Is the Loophole

Here is the defense you’ll hear from the industry, and it isn’t frivolous: 13 million gallons is less than half of what the City of Lincoln itself reported using in a single day, Sept. 29. A data center that drinks less than the municipal water system is not the villain of the Nebraska plains.

Fine. Now ask what a disclosure regime built this way can actually show you.

One year. One site. A number with no baseline, no neighbors, no history. The Legislature passed this reporting requirement in its 2026 session, and the trade-secret provisions it wrote leave operators free to remove precisely the figures that would let a reader assemble a trend. The Nebraska Examiner reported in July on Google’s own Nebraska self-disclosures: 46.6 million gallons in 2022, 134.7 million in 2023, about 732.1 million in 2025. Read those three numbers as a series and 13 million gallons stops reading as reassurance. It reads as a young facility’s first year.

The state, in other words, built a disclosure law that generates the single most flattering artifact available — a one-year, one-site snapshot — and then let the regulated party decide which sites produce one. The “nothingburger” argument isn’t evidence. It’s the loophole’s output.

The Industry Is Buying a Liability It Doesn’t Need

There is a genuinely good story in Nebraska that nobody redacted: construction has begun on a $10 million wastewater line to carry cooling water from the Lincoln data center to a recovery site. That is what a serious operator does when it wants to be a good neighbor — spend money, build infrastructure, and let people watch. It is a better advertisement than any campaign, and it sat in the same news cycle as the black boxes.

Instead, the industry spent the fall explaining why its water bill is proprietary. Every operator in the state now gets to be the subject of a records request that reads like a heist. The privilege purchased no secrecy — a determined intern with a mouse undid it — but it purchased a great deal of suspicion, at retail, and it will keep billing long after the numbers themselves are forgotten.

The Legislature should close the door: water and electricity volumes at a publicly permitted facility are not trade secrets, full stop. But the operators shouldn’t wait for a statute to tell them. Laid end to end as a series, their numbers are less alarming than the holes. The holes are what put 395 comments under a Lincoln TV station’s story about a PDF.

That is what the redaction really hid: not how much water Google uses in Nebraska, but how little confidence anyone had that the answer would be flattering. A copy-paste settled it. The company would have been better off typing the figures out itself.

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