photo #9435089

Robert on October 12, 2026

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Residents of the town of The Dalles, Oregon, use very little water in comparison to their data center neighbor, Google.

Now the company wants to build more data centers, and the town’s leaders are all too eager to provide them with more water, a valuable resource in an area already suffering from the effects of climate change.

- Amal Ahmed

(Picture is of The Dalles Mayor Richard Mays looking at the Columbia River from his hilltop home in The Dalles, Oregon. | Photo courtesy of AP Photo/Andrew Selsky, File)

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From the comments on this: Tom Horton — The Columbia River dumps 150 billion gallons of water into the Pacific every day. Total annual data center consumption in the US is 50 billion gallons… Jeremy Bryan — I’m not trying to get in the mix of this, but sometimes the reality of what’s really happe... View MoreFrom the comments on this: Tom Horton — The Columbia River dumps 150 billion gallons of water into the Pacific every day. Total annual data center consumption in the US is 50 billion gallons… Jeremy Bryan — I’m not trying to get in the mix of this, but sometimes the reality of what’s really happening needs to be voiced. Anyone with any data center experience will tell you the same thing….they don’t use passive cooling or evaporative cooling anymore. The new chips in the servers require way cooler temps than water can provide. So please redirect your energy to the real issues facing the environment. Sewage. All you people on city sewer complaining about global warming while discharging all your pharmaceutical waste into the river are ignorant. Please rise above the narrative and see the real issue killing nature. My two cents. Brooks Heard — All the quantities of water in question are known. An acre foot equals 326,000 gallons. Municipal water rights have Qi (instantaneous withdrawal) and Qa (maximum annual withdrawal). Most states mandate planning for growth and require that those quantities be held in reserve (inchoate rights). Municipalities keep records of industrial use. All this information is available for quantitative and qualitative analysis. Please provide data rather than outrage. Thanks. Zipporah Hill — Brooks Heard, I live in The Dalles, Oregon, home to Google for over 20 years. The Oregonian newspaper asked the City for Googles water usage data. The CITY sued the newspaper to keep the water usage data SECRET because it was “proprietary” information. 550 MILLION GALLONS of domestic water used in 2025. Residents are currently being asked to conserve water. Scott Thompson — The fact that no citizen was allowed access to Google’s “proprietary” information before they built seems very illegal to anyone with a brain. Our leaders are, unfortunately, bereft of brains. Now we get what’s left of the water. Margaret Tibbs — The aluminum plant which formerly sat on this site had rights to 3.88 million gallons per day, or 1.4 billion gallons a year. This came from ground water. As of 2025, Google, which now resides at this site had rights to 1.5 million gallons a day, or 550 million gallons a year. This is coming from the municipal water supply, because Google transferred the ground water rights of 3.88 million gallons a day to The City of The Dalles. While Google uses less water than the aluminum plant did, its usage sparks public debate because it pulls directly from the municipal water supply (representing nearly 40% of the city's total treated water use in 2025). In contrast, the aluminum plant pumped raw groundwater directly via its own private industrial wells. As I understand it, they do this because they need clean, treated water. What is the City of The Dalles doing with the ground water rights it obtained from Google? And is the transfer of the 150 acres on the Dog River feeder to Mill Creek going through to improve the municipal water supply? When I lived in The Dalles there were always watering restrictions in the summer time ( 1970’s) Water restrictions or limitations are not new. Chris Murrell — What is wrong with city leaders around the country. Stop these data centers in their tracks. We already have too many of them. We need data on their effectiveness vs damage No more until they are proven necessary and safe

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October 12, 2026