As Oklahoma and every other state in the nation deals with the boom in AI and data centers, Nebraska took the approach of forcing the developers and operators to reveal more about their operations.
It’s required under a new law which will force data center operators to report their annual water use and power demand. They will have to provide the information to the state, according to Jesse Bradley, director of the Department of Water, Energy, and Environment. He said the state agency will then see what information gaps remain, but that the legislation is a “great start” and will help with future planning.
Grist reported in addition to electricity production, water has emerged as a point of contention as companies look to build more data centers in Nebraska. Local residents, researchers, and regulators worry that new data centers could bring about water shortages in a state where water availability can vary widely and where wide swaths of this agricultural state are suffering through extreme drought. For now, the best available information about how much water data centers use comes directly from the data center companies themselves — if they choose to be transparent.
Like many other states, Nebraska has no official count of how many data centers are in operation. But Google’s Nebraska data centers consumed about 732 million gallons of water in 2025, according to the company. Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet, expects its water consumption from data centers to grow. From 2020 to 2024, Meta’s 4 million-square-foot Sarpy County data center withdrew anywhere from 26.7 million gallons to 37.5 million gallons from the local water supply, depending on the year.
While data centers have typically been built in urban areas, developments have started to move further out to suburbs and rural areas as fiber optic cables and infrastructure has improved, said Dan Diorio, vice president of state policy at the Data Center Coalition. This expansion raises concerns for areas of Nebraska that either don’t have enough water already or whose water supply is already fully allocated. Most of the state’s water is used for irrigation to support the agriculture-based economy.
