Oregon

~100 facilities6% of facilities tracked here

The headline number

~29%

of The Dalles' total water went to Google at peak, a figure the city fought 13 months in court to keep secret

Water stress

Moderate: Columbia River water is plentiful but municipally mediated; the conflicts here are about transparency and who controls scarce municipal rights.

The local story

Oregon produced the transparency case that defined the beat: when The Oregonian requested Google's water use in The Dalles, the city sued the newspaper to keep it secret, then settled, revealing the campus used about 355 million gallons in 2021, roughly 29% of the city's total, having nearly tripled in five years.

The episode reset the norm: water use figures at publicly supplied data centers are now presumptively public records in Oregon, and several other states cite the precedent. Google subsequently funded city water infrastructure as part of expansion approvals.

East along the Columbia, AWS's Umatilla and Morrow County campuses run on cheap hydro (among the lowest Mid-scenario electricity-water terms anywhere), which is the quieter, structural reason the Pacific Northwest keeps winning AI capacity.

Cite this pagev1.3.1 · 2026-09

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