Google tried to hide its Nebraska resource consumption behind trade secret claims. A local journalist defeated the redaction by highlighting the blacked-out text and pasting it into a new document. The technical failure is almost too perfect a metaphor for the broader governance failure: the state created a reporting requirement, then let the companies reporting decide what the public could see. The numbers underneath are substantial. Agate LLC, Google's Lincoln data center, reports 52.65 megawatts of peak electrical demand and 13.299 megagallons of annual water consumption — enough to fill 20 Olympic swimming pools. But Agate is the smallest of Google's three Nebraska operations. Fireball Group LLC in Papillion consumes 547.88 megagallons annually, roughly 42 times Lincoln's usage. Across all six reporting data centers statewide, total annual water consumption hits 765 million gallons. The tax picture is equally revealing. Google's three Nebraska entities expect combined 2025 tax refunds of $117.55 million under the Nebraska Advantage Act's sales and use tax exemptions. No rebates have been received under the ImagiNE Nebraska Act, but the Advantage Act refunds alone represent a massive fiscal transfer from Nebraska taxpayers to one of the world's most profitable companies. Governor Pillen's July 2025 executive order requiring data center self-reporting was framed as accountability. In practice, it created a system where companies self-report, self-redact, and cite state statutes to justify hiding the very information the reporting was designed to surface. The Department of Water, Energy, and Environment's Data Center Task Force accepted redacted reports without apparent challenge. The redaction failure was caught by a TV station, not by the state. The structural problem is clear: Nebraska wants data center investment and the jobs and tax base it brings. Google wants cheap power, abundant water, and tax incentives. The state has the leverage — it controls permitting, water rights, and tax policy — but uses that leverage to attract rather than regulate. The trade secret exemption under Neb. Rev. State §§ 81-1527 and 84-712.05 was not designed for resource consumption data that directly affects public water and energy infrastructure. Six data centers consuming 765 million gallons of water per year in a state where agriculture already strains the Ogallala Aquifer is not a trade secret question. It is a resource allocation question. The public cannot participate in that allocation if the numbers are hidden. Nebraska built a transparency mechanism, then allowed it to be hollowed out by the very companies it was meant to oversee. The copy-paste revelation is embarrassing for Google and for the state, but the deeper issue is whether Nebraska will close the loophole or simply improve the redaction software. The next reporting cycle will answer that question.
