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.

▲

bliteben 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> 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.

▲

bix6 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How does hiding water usage protect the facility exactly?

	▲	dekhn an hour ago \| parent [-]
		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.

▲

bluealienpie 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/08/datacenter-a...