In the first week of May, two data center developments, one in Arizona and another in Georgia, were caught taking public water without authorization.
In both cases, data center developers consumed water they were expressly prohibited from taking, in communities already experiencing water stress, and in both cases it was the residents who discovered it.
When residents complained of low water pressure in Georgia or dust control efforts in Arizona, they unknowingly tipped off regulators in areas fraught with depleting water supplies, and added to an escalating conflict over data center water use across the country.
Now, more than 50 cities across the country enacted bans or moratoria on new data center construction—including Fayetteville, Ga.
Meta and Google didn’t immediately respond to Fortune‘s request for comment.
One connection had been installed without the utility’s knowledge. The other existed but was not linked to QTS’s billing account, meaning the water flowed unmetered and uncharged. By the time officials identified the problem, QTS had consumed more than 29 million gallons, the equivalence of 44 Olympic-sized swimming pools, a volume that far exceeded the peak usage limit agreed to during the project’s planning process. Those 29 million gallons is equal to roughly the daily water consumption of a small American city of several thousand people, or about 8% of the 355 million gallons Google’s data centers used in The Dalles over the course of an entire year, though still is a small fraction of the 6.1 billion gallons Google reported using across all its data centers globally in 2024.
Construction, however, is expected to continue for another three to five years.
This all came forward with a resident running for a seat on the Fayette County Board of Commissioners. Local attorney James Clifton obtained the utility’s 2025 letter to QTS through a public records request and posted it on Facebook, and told Politico the county had been pressuring individual residents to cut water use while QTS—the single largest consumer in the county—was draining the supply without paying.
Drought conditions in Georgia have worsened since the project was announced, and today, the whole state is experiencing severe to exceptional drought, with destructive wildfires burning in the southern part of Georgia. Gov. Brian Kemp declared a state of emergency last month as a result.
In less than a year, Amazon withdrew from the project, but the developer, Beale Infrastructure, purchased the land from Pima County and continued construction while seeking new partners.
Amazon didn’t immediately respond to Fortune‘s request for comment.
Recently, a resident asked a city staffer whether the dust control water at the Project Blue site was coming from the city, and as a result, triggered an investigation into the site’s water usage.
Thomure demanded that Beale replace the two acre-feet of water used, which approximately 650,000 gallons, or roughly equal to the annual water usagee of six to seven American households. Compared to operational data centers, it’s a fraction of the water consumed, but still, it’s a developer taking water from a city that had explicitly refused to provide it.
Beale said the city had issued a permit for temporary water through normal channels. City spokesman Andy Squire said the document was not a permit but an application for a construction meter intended for use within Tucson Water’s service area, and the contractor didn’t disclose that the water would be transported outside city limits.
The city limits are an important context here: Developers increasingly site large projects just beyond municipal boundaries to avoid the state’s Assured and Adequate Water Supply law, which requires a demonstration that a development can meet its water needs for 100 years. Building outside city limits allows developers to sidestep that requirement while still relying on nearby water infrastructure.
On average, a medium-sized data center consumes roughly 110 million gallons of water per year for cooling, which is enough to power the annual water use of about 1,000 households. Larger facilities can consume up to 5 million gallons a day.
