Water Supply in Wasco County: The Dalles' Google Data-Center Story

A trade-secret fight that took roughly a year to resolve

The dispute began with an ordinary public-records request: The Oregonian/OregonLive asked the City of The Dalles for records showing how much water Google's data-center campus was using from the city's municipal supply. Rather than releasing the figures, the city sued the newspaper to prevent disclosure, arguing that Google's water-use numbers were a protected trade secret under Oregon's public-records law. That legal fight dragged on for roughly a year before the city and Google effectively conceded, after a district attorney ruled that the water-use data did not qualify as a trade secret and ordered its release.

The resolution came in the form of a settlement filed with Wasco County Circuit Court, in which the City of The Dalles agreed to provide ten years of historical water-use data for Google's operations and to continue reporting annual usage figures going forward. That settlement is itself a genuinely unusual outcome in the data-center industry, where site-specific water consumption is typically treated as confidential -- and it directly shaped what came next.

What the numbers showed: water use roughly quintupled

Once the data was public, reporting on the disclosed figures described genuinely striking growth: Google's water consumption in The Dalles is reported to have roughly quintupled between 2012 and 2025, reaching approximately 550 million gallons annually, and at points representing a substantial share of the city's overall water supply relative to its size. In the immediate aftermath of the settlement, Google became the first major cloud-computing company to begin voluntarily publishing site-specific water-use figures for its data centers -- a transparency shift widely attributed to the pressure generated by The Dalles dispute itself, rather than an industry-wide standard practice.

For a land buyer, the practical significance isn't the abstract size of the number -- it's what continued growth in industrial water demand implies for a small city's water system and rate base. A municipal water utility serving a city the size of The Dalles that has seen one customer's usage grow roughly fivefold in a little over a decade is a utility under real, documented strain, and that strain has direct implications for future capacity planning, rate structures, and how new residential or agricultural water hookups near the city get prioritized.

A live, unresolved sequel: new water rights from Mount Hood

This story is not over. As of OPB's reporting in January 2026, the City of The Dalles was actively pursuing additional water rights from sources in Mount Hood National Forest, specifically framed as necessary to keep pace with Google's continued, growing water demand at the data-center campus. That effort was described as ongoing rather than finalized at the time of that reporting -- meaning the ultimate outcome (whether new rights are secured, on what terms, and how the cost is allocated between the city, Google, and other ratepayers) was not yet settled.

1. If you're evaluating a parcel that depends on The Dalles' municipal water system, ask the city directly for the current status of the Mount Hood water-rights effort and what it implies for near-term water availability and rates.
2. If you're evaluating a well on the same regional groundwater system, ask whether increased municipal pumping to meet data-center demand has any documented effect on nearby groundwater levels.
3. Don't assume the roughly 550-million-gallon 2025 figure is a ceiling -- the underlying trend has been continuous growth over more than a decade, and Google has continued to pursue further expansion in Wasco County according to industry reporting.