ESSAY · JULY 2026

In Palo, Iowa, a town of a few hundred people, a company proposed to draw up to fourteen million gallons of water a day from the Cedar River. That figure is not an activist’s estimate. According to public records reported by Iowa Public Radio, it’s the volume tied to the project — and the original twelve-million-gallon number came from Google’s own representative, describing the buildings to Linn County officials. Fourteen million gallons a day is the water use of a small city. It would go not to homes or fields, but to keeping rows of servers cool enough to run artificial intelligence.

I need to tell you where I’m standing, because it isn’t nowhere. I was born in Webster City. I come from a long line of Iowa farmers — some of the first families to work that ground — and our family farm is still there. So when I read about the Cedar River being measured out in millions of gallons per day, it does not land on me as a policy question. It lands as a question about home. I’ve tried to check my heart against the facts all the way through this, because the last thing I want is to let how much I love that place push me past what I can prove. But I won’t pretend the two are unrelated. The reason I looked closely is that it’s mine.

Here is what I can prove, and it’s worse than any feeling.

Linn County, where Palo sits, did the responsible thing. As data centers began eyeing the area, the county passed an ordinance requiring any large project to complete a water study — a detailed look at how much water it would use, where that water would come from, and how it would affect groundwater and surface water. Developers would also have to sign an agreement covering water use, monitoring, and drought contingencies. Google, while negotiating with the county, had agreed to fund that independent study, committing up to five hundred thousand dollars toward it.

Then Google walked away from the county process and pursued annexation into the city of Palo instead. Palo has no such requirement. Its proposed ordinance does not mandate an independent water study or a water-use agreement; it defers to state permitting. And with the move to Palo, the regional water study — the one document that would have told residents what the project would actually do to their water — was put on hold.

Sit with that sequence, because it’s the whole story. The study that would reveal the cost was cancelled by the maneuver that avoided the study. No conspiracy is required to explain it. It’s the ordinary use of ordinary tools — annexation, the choice of which jurisdiction to build in — to make a fourteen-million-gallon question disappear before anyone was required to answer it.

A resident named Jennifer Leaven, who lives just outside Palo’s limits, put the consequence in a single sentence at a packed public meeting: “How do we prove that all of this water usage is the reason our wells go dry if we don’t do any water surveys ahead of time?” That is the trap, stated plainly by someone living inside it. Without a baseline study, cause can never be established after the fact. If the wells fail, no one will be able to prove why.

What makes this account hard to dismiss is who else is saying it. The sharpest public critic of the Palo project is not an environmentalist. He’s Doug Sevey, a data center owner. Sevey, who has built and run several data centers, went viral after a June city council meeting where he told residents the project would “burn through the water.” His own facility in Hiawatha uses a closed-loop, chilled-water system rather than evaporative cooling — a design that, once filled, uses very little water. His argument is not that data centers are evil. He has said plainly that if the project is developed responsibly, he isn’t necessarily opposed: “If you’re not taking a chance and wrecking the infrastructure, then it’s just growth.” He has said he doesn’t even want to be the face of data center opposition.

That is exactly why his central point carries weight. Sevey’s argument is that towns like Palo are being asked to decide something they haven’t been equipped to evaluate. “You have all these small cities being enticed,” he said, “and they have absolutely no information.” One side of the table brings hydrologists, engineers, and lawyers. The other side is a part-time city council and a very large number representing potential tax revenue. That is not a story about bad people. It’s a story about an information gap — and about who benefits when the gap is never closed.

It’s worth being fair about the disagreement, because the people of Palo are not villains either. Palo’s mayor, Bryan Busch, called the suggestion that Google chose Palo to avoid regulation “insulting and offensive.” He may sincerely believe the town can protect itself through state permitting. But a KCRG investigation found documents showing Palo was negotiating with Google — including discussions about the city’s water and sewer system — during a period when it was publicly presenting itself as simply supporting Linn County’s position. I won’t tell you what was in anyone’s heart. I’ll only set the mayor’s words next to the documents and let you hold both.

A note on the water itself, so I don’t overstate what I know. Data centers cool themselves in different ways. Air-based cooling uses more electricity and very little water. Evaporative cooling, the water-intensive method, passes water through cooling towers where much of it evaporates away — industry syntheses estimate that on the order of eighty percent of the water withdrawn for evaporative cooling is lost to the air rather than returned. Closed-loop systems, like the one Sevey uses, seal the water inside and consume very little. Google has said it uses evaporative cooling at many sites because other methods can use more energy or carry a higher carbon footprint, and that it evaluates local water risks before choosing a system. What cooling design Google intends for Palo is not publicly settled. I’m not going to tell you I know the chemistry of water that hasn’t been withdrawn yet from a system that hasn’t been built. That uncertainty is not a gap in the argument. It is the argument. The people of Palo don’t know either — and the study that would have told them was the thing set aside.

I keep coming back to the shape of it, because it’s a shape I recognize now from other places. In Louisiana, the cost of a data-center deal was never officially calculated, and officials signed nondisclosure agreements. In Virginia, water pledges were made that couldn’t be verified. Here in Iowa, the study was simply cancelled. Different states, different companies, the same move: the number that would let a community decide for itself is the number that never quite gets produced. Not hidden in a vault — just deferred, relocated, or defined out of scope, until the concrete is poured and the question is moot.

And this is bigger than Palo. Iowa already has, by one count, thirty-four data centers. Together the tech companies operating them have invested more than seventeen billion dollars in the state. In 2024, a single Google facility in Council Bluffs used a billion gallons of water — enough to supply every home in Iowa for five days. Meanwhile, after more than a decade of drought across much of the state, some Iowa wells are reported to be running at a fifth of their original capacity, and the aquifers that feed them aren’t recharging the way they once did.

So here is the question I’d ask my fellow Iowans to put to the whole state, not just one town: how much of our water has already been committed to cooling servers, and how much of it is simply gone — evaporated or fouled beyond easy use? I suspect the honest answer is that no one has assembled it. The industry can tell you that in West Des Moines, Microsoft’s data centers average around two percent of the city’s water, less than residents spend on lawns — and that may be true there. But a reassuring number from one city is not a statewide accounting. The figure that would let Iowa actually decide — every facility, every permit, every gallon withdrawn and every gallon lost, measured against aquifers that are already stressed — is the figure nobody seems to have. A state geologist has warned that Iowa’s groundwater isn’t evenly distributed, so a plant that’s harmless in one place may be serious in another. A permit handed out without that study, one resident put it, is a permit “handed out like candy.”

That’s not a reason to panic. It’s a reason to count. Iowa is a place that has always known the difference between a good year and a bad one because it kept records — of rain, of yield, of what the ground could bear. The same discipline applies here. Before the state approves the next thirty-four, it’s fair to ask what the last thirty-four have actually cost, and to insist the answer be public. Seek the truth, wherever it leads. That has never been un-Iowan. It’s about the most Iowa thing there is.

I don’t think the farmers I come from would have called this progress or theft. I think they’d have called it a bad deal made in the dark, and they’d have wanted the survey done first — the way you’d never buy a field without walking it, testing the soil, and knowing where the water sits. That’s not opposition to growth. It’s the oldest rule of working the land: know what you have before you spend it.

So this isn’t a call to stop anything. It’s a call to insist on the study before the decision, not after — a water balance study, an independent one, made public, with a water-use agreement that has teeth. Any community facing one of these proposals can ask for exactly that, and can treat the reluctance to provide it as its own kind of answer. In Palo, the people asked. What they got instead was a change of address.