Microsoft · Nvidia · Meta · Tom's Hardware
Meta data center water discharges paused after contaminating the city's reclamation water supply with bacterium
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The Cheyenne Board of Public Utilities has stopped accepting industrial wastewater from data center fill-and-flush and closed-loop cooling operations after tracing a rare bacterium in the city's reclaimed water to Goat Systems LLC, the entity Meta uses to build its Cheyenne campus.
Key facts
- The Board revoked the contractor's fill-and-flush discharge privileges on March 24, and a wider suspension now covers every data center connected to city services
- Microsoft describes cooling systems that are filled once during construction and then recirculate the same water, while Nvidia's Rubin platform runs a coolant that is 75% water and 25% propylene
- The Cheyenne Board of Public Utilities has stopped accepting industrial wastewater from data center fill-and-flush and closed-loop cooling operations after tracing a rare bacterium in the city's
- Goat Systems routed that flush water, which contained Cupriavidus gilardii, into Cheyenne's sanitary sewer, Frank Strong, the Board's engineering and water resource division manager, told the Wyoming
Summary
Fill-and-flush is a commissioning step in which crews fill a cooling loop's piping with water, flush it to clear debris before the system is run, and then send the used water to drain. Microsoft and Nvidia market sealed liquid loops as a near-zero-water alternative to evaporative cooling, an approach that is spreading quickly as AI data centers expand into more communities. Strong went on to add that the Board's concern extends past the finding of the bacterium, because closed-loop systems can carry glycol and other chemicals that municipal treatment plants aren't built to process.