unnoticed
They don't have any regulations and don't need to pay anything??
What a wild, barbaric country.
this post was submitted on 11 May 2026
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Kind of fascinating that they don't do any kind of reconciliation of water delivered against water billed. You'd think that would be an easy thing to do and a good way to discover leaks (or theft). I mean, there would definitely be 'missing' water due to leaks, fire department, etc, but one imagines that would have some kind of normal/tolerable range, and that 30 million missing gallons would trigger some kind of investigation prior to customer complaints.
It sounds like they hooked up their own water connection so the water utility didn't even know they were using the water. They can only measure usage by checking the meter attached to your hookup. I don't think its possible to measure the entire 'input' of water versus total usage like you're suggesting.
They can only measure usage by checking the meter attached to your hookup.
Depends on the age of the system. Newer meters can be read remotely.
When the county utility investigated, officials discovered two industrial-scale water hookups feeding a data center campus located 20 miles south of downtown Atlanta. One water connection had been installed without the utility’s knowledge, and the other was not linked to the company’s account and therefore wasn’t being billed.
I believe the only reasonable reaction to this would be to shut down the data center immediately until this is settled. Sounds like massive fraud. Am I expecting that to happen? Hell no.
fraud? this is plain stealing. The ones who own the data center should go to prison.
At least shut off both water connections and fine the shit out of them for theft
Using tap water for cooling is such an idiotic engineering decision it feels like it was suggested by an LLM chatbot.
Power plants use water too, but they draw it from the nearby river or lake, recycle it through cooling towers, and/or dump it back out into the river or lake. Or course that has its own effects, but at least it's not depriving a nearby town of drinking water by existing.
The pipes were running just nearby the data centre, free real estate