Google's Lincoln Data Center Peaks at 52.65 MW, a Redaction Error Shows

A redaction that did not redact has put numbers on Google's data center in Lincoln, Nebraska: a peak electricity demand of 52.65 megawatts and 13.299 million gallons of water over the past year. Google had marked both as trade secrets in its annual filing with the state.

The local station 10/11 NOW reported the slip on September 30. Reporter Madison Pitsch selected the blacked-out text boxes in the report to Nebraska's Department of Water, Energy, and Environment, pasted the contents into a separate document, and read the figures. The Lincoln site is filed under Agate LLC. The 10/11 NOW article documents no response from Google.

What the Nebraska filing exposed

Every data center in Nebraska files an annual report with the department, due September 30. The same filing carried the expected 2025 tax refunds for Google's three Nebraska facilities, and the water figure for the Papillion site run by Fireball Group LLC.

Facility	Operator	Water, last year	Expected 2025 tax refund
Lincoln	Agate LLC	13.299 million gal	$55,822,472
Papillion	Fireball Group LLC	547.88 million gal	$39,171,573.39
Omaha	Westwood Solutions LLC	not reported in the coverage	$22,558,881

The three refunds sum to about $117.6 million (our arithmetic). 10/11 NOW reports that the redaction cited Neb. Rev. Stat. sections 81-1527 and 84-712.05 and NAC Title 115, Chapter 2.

The number that matters is not the megawatts

The 52.65 MW figure is peak demand, a power rating at the busiest moment. It is not energy. A site that touched 52.65 MW for one hour and idled the rest of the year would use a sliver of what the same figure implies at full load. The ceiling, if the site ran flat out for all 8,760 hours of a year, is about 461 gigawatt-hours (our arithmetic). The filing as reported does not give actual annual consumption, so the real figure sits somewhere below that and we cannot say where.

The water figure carries its own denominator. Divided by peak demand, Lincoln works out to roughly 252,600 gallons per peak megawatt per year (our arithmetic). Papillion reported 41 times Lincoln's water, a ratio that says more about cooling design and what each site hosts than about size, and the coverage gives no Papillion megawatts to divide by.

1. Lincoln (Agate LLC)13.3 million gal
2. Papillion (Fireball Group LLC)547.88 million gal

Source: 10/11 NOW, Sept. 30, 2026, from Nebraska DWEE filings

What Lincoln's 52.65 MW is next to

The figure is small beside what has been proposed in the same state. Flatwater Free Press reported on March 13, 2026, from documents it reviewed, that a Google data center proposed for southeast Nebraska would need 1,000 to 3,000 MW. Lincoln Electric System's whole service area needs 800 MW at summer peak. Neither Google nor the developer Tenaska responded to Flatwater's requests for comment.

By that reporting, the filed Lincoln site is about 6.6% of LES's summer peak, and the proposal would be somewhere between 1.25 and 3.75 times it (our arithmetic). Flatwater also reported that the project would need LB1261, legislation from Governor Jim Pillen's office allowing privately built power plants, and could come online by 2029. Google's Suncatcher orbital TPU test is covered separately.

The secrecy argument also has a precedent in how the sector reports. Intel published a GPU built around tokens per watt without publishing the tokens per watt; here a reporter recovered figures from a filing in which they had been marked secret.

What would change this read

Annual megawatt-hours from Agate LLC would settle the energy question, and a state decision on whether the trade-secret claim holds would settle the disclosure one. 10/11 NOW lists a public records request dated September 30. Until the department rules, the numbers are public because of a formatting error, not a decision.