Google The Dalles data center, The Dalles, Oregon

Google's data centers on the Columbia River in The Dalles, in Wasco County, Oregon, are back at the center of a water argument, as residents ask why they are the only ones asked to cut back in a drought. At the city council in September 2026, with Level 1 restrictions asking residents to stop or cut yard watering, Widge Johnson said: "Google doesn't participate in this. This is a Level 1 restriction. So that means that it's just the residents." She told councilors Google's share of city water had risen from 29 percent in 2021 to nearly 40 percent in 2025, figures that were not independently verified at the meeting. She asked whether the contract let the city cut Google's use in a drought; Mayor Rich Mays noted the roughly $28 million Google had put into local water infrastructure, and Johnson replied: "I know, and we can talk money all day." She added: "I would like to know what's in the contract." The mayor said he would get a legal answer.

Google has run data centers here since 2006, now on three sites employing about 200 people, finished another building in 2025 and plans one more in 2026. Its use grew from 104 million gallons in 2012 to 434 million in 2024, a 316 percent rise, while the city's population grew 12 percent. In 2021, when Google announced two new data centers, it offered through a subsidiary, Design LLC, to spend $28.5 million on two groundwater wells, two storage tanks and pump stations, in exchange for deep tax cuts for the data centers' first 15 years and a commitment of water; its property taxes are discounted by 92 percent. To keep up, the city wants to triple its reservoir to about 3,000 acre feet by around 2040, at an estimated $70 million, which needs federal Mount Hood National Forest land. "Google is really not a factor in this at all," Mays said; John DeVoe of WaterWatch said: "Obviously, the great driver of demand for water in The Dalles is Google." The mayor called OPB's reporting inaccurate; OPB reviewed it and corrected one figure, finding that the city's own master plan projects residential water rates rising 99 percent by 2036, not 7 percent.

The figures are public only because of a fight. When The Oregonian asked for Google's water records, the city refused, calling them a trade secret, and after Wasco County's district attorney sided with the newspaper the city sued to keep them sealed, with Google agreeing to pay the city's legal bills until it changed its mind about shielding the information. The city settled with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press on December 15, 2022, releasing a decade of data and paying the committee's fees. Google then said it would stop treating site-level water use as a trade secret anywhere in its fleet.