While residents of Fayette County, Georgia were being told to conserve water during a state-declared drought emergency, a massive data center next door was gulping down nearly 30 million gallons of the stuff without a working meter, and without paying a dime.

The facility in question belongs to Quality Technology Services, better known as QTS, which is owned by private equity giant Blackstone. The company’s Project Excalibur development consumed an estimated 29 to 30 million gallons of unmetered water over a 15-month construction period. When the county finally caught the issue and ran the numbers, QTS owed a grand total of $147,474 in retroactive charges. That works out to roughly $0.005 per gallon, a rate significantly lower than what local residents pay for their own water.

A metering failure during a drought

The oversight wasn’t malicious hacking or corporate scheming. It was, by all accounts, a procedural error. County officials attributed the failure to problems that arose while migrating to a cloud-based metering system. During that transition, the data center’s water usage simply wasn’t being tracked.

The timing could not have been worse. Georgia was under a declared drought emergency. Residents in the area faced mandatory watering restrictions and some reported noticeable drops in their water pressure. Meanwhile, a facility consuming water at industrial scale was operating completely off the books.

Fayette County decided not to impose any fines on QTS for the unmetered consumption. The company was simply asked to pay the retroactive charges at the discounted rate.

Data centers and the water problem

Georgia currently hosts over 200 data centers, making it one of the more concentrated markets in the US for these facilities. The state has been aggressive in courting data center development with tax incentives and expedited approvals.