Google Council Bluffs (East) data center, Council Bluffs, Iowa

Google's data center at 10420 Bunge Avenue in Council Bluffs, in Pottawattamie County, Iowa, is registered with the state under a subsidiary name, Questa LLC. The campus used 1.3 billion gallons of water in 2025, more than Google's three Nebraska sites put together took that year.

That is the kind of demand that worries the city's public works director. "So when we get a request, it's not for 100,000 gallons a day. It's for a million gallons a day or two million gallons a day," Matt Cox told the city council in June 2026. "So it only takes one or two big projects and we're at capacity." Mayor Jill Shudak had asked for a year-long moratorium on new data center projects so the city could review regulations first written in 2007 and adopt a comprehensive data center ordinance. At a special meeting the council rejected it unanimously. "They see a red stop sign and say, 'that's what we're going to do' and I'm not sure that's the message as a community that we would want to send right now that we're not open for business," said Councilman Douglas Rew.

Council Bluffs is going the other way from much of Iowa: Linn County adopted an 18 month moratorium in June 2026, and Marshalltown and at least six counties have paused new data centers. The state tax breaks that drew Google here are now an election issue: on August 4, 2026 Rob Sand, the Democratic nominee for governor, proposed ending Iowa's sales and property tax exemptions for data centers and making companies cover the full cost of utility upgrades. "These major corporations should be paying full freight and carrying their own weight," Sand said.