The Invisible Trillion · The Legal Weapons

And They’ll Go to Court to Keep It Secret

The secrecy doesn’t always end when the building opens. Sometimes it hardens into something stranger.

In The Dalles, Oregon — a small city on the Columbia River — Google has run one of its largest data centers since 2006. As a long drought wore on and residents watched the water drop in their wells, the local paper, The Oregonian, asked a simple question: how much of the city’s water was Google using? The city refused to say, calling the number a trade secret. The county district attorney reviewed that claim and ordered the records released. And rather than comply, the city sued the newspaper to keep them sealed — a lawsuit that Google, it later emerged, was quietly paying for.

The fight ran thirteen months. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press took the paper’s side at no charge, and in the end the city gave up. When the numbers finally came out, they explained the secrecy: Google’s data centers were drawing about a quarter of all the water in the city, and the figure had nearly tripled in five years.

The part that lingers is the sequence — the town council had already voted, unanimously, to approve two more Google data centers, and the councilors themselves hadn’t seen the water projections until two weeks before that vote. The public never saw them at all. Years later the mayor admitted the episode “is coming back to haunt us,” in a town where trust in the city’s dealings with Google had not recovered.

It’s the NDA logic carried one step further. When a public-records law starts pulling the information toward daylight, the local government can be enlisted to fight the disclosure in court — and the company can quietly fund the fight — on the theory that what a corporation draws from a community’s water supply is the corporation’s secret to keep.

Assembling the Land

A hyperscale campus needs a lot of contiguous land — often hundreds or thousands of acres owned by many different families. In Mason County, the unnamed company surveyed around five thousand acres. Assembling that quietly requires that no single seller realize the whole picture, because a seller who knows a Fortune 100 buyer needs this exact parcel will price accordingly. So the buying is done through intermediaries, one transaction at a time, each looking like an ordinary sale until the pattern becomes undeniable.

Most of the time, the offers are generous enough that this works on its own — the Grossers’ $10 million was real money, and plenty of neighbors took similar deals. But behind the generosity sits an older tool: eminent domain, the government’s power to take private land for “public use.” Since the Supreme Court’s 2005 Kelo decision, “public use” has been read broadly enough to include economic development, and the utility infrastructure a data center needs — the substations, the transmission lines — can often be condemned even when the data center itself cannot. A landowner who knows that refusal can, in the last resort, be overridden bargains from a weaker spot, whether or not anyone ever files the papers.

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