Did a Meta data center introduce a rare, dangerous bacteria into the sewers system of Wyoming’s capitol city? It’s an environmental pollution mystery with an answer that could decide the future of American AI infrastructure development.
Our drama begins in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where the city’s board of public utilities just wrapped up a lengthy investigation into the presence of Cupriavidus gilardii, a potentially lethal bacteria resistant to heavy metals, in the city’s wastewater treatment systems. Apparently, in February, board staff detected the contamination and shut off public access to the city’s water reuse system, a supply of treated non-potable water fed with treated wastewater and used for lawns, athletic fields, and other green spaces. Officials were worried that spraying this water could release into the environment a bacteria found to cause fatal health outcomes in immunocompromised or elderly people who are infected by it.
The board then identified a culprit – Goat Systems LLC, a Delaware-registered firm without a website Meta tasked with overseeing its large $800 million hyperscale project in Cheyenne dubbed Project Cosmo. Goat Systems lost its wastewater disposal permit. The board plans to also fine Goat Systems for violating city code “along with additional fees for our remediation efforts,” board public affairs coordinator Erin Lamb told me in an email. (The only person publicly affiliated with Goat Systems is Pamela Gregorski, an employee for a company that specializes in creating LLCs. Gregorski, who is linked to other LLCs handling Meta projects across the country, did not reply to requests for comment.)
In public comments and statements to me, the board linked the bacteria to water used to flush the Meta data center’s closed-loop cooling system so debris could be removed before the facility was operational. “We were able to connect the Meta data center campus to this through sampling their site,” Lamb said.
This finding led Cheyenne to also indefinitely ban data center projects in the city from ever disposing of “fill-and-flush water” in the sewer system again.
Meta has not denied contamination was found by the city, but says repeated sampling at its project site failed to come up with any evidence confirming they were the source. One can imagine a scenario where the data center and its design played no role in this bacteria showing up, or that city officials erroneously tagged the tech company with responsibility at a time when they’re dealing with political troubles already.
But what is happening in Cheyenne, first reported last week by Wyoming local press, will have consequences for the future of AI infrastructure whether or not Meta was actually even responsible. Right now, all over the country, tech companies are failing to get permits for their data centers because people are worried about water use. These closed-loop data center designs are supposed to address those concerns, letting large hyperscalers contain, cycle, and reuse the water they use for months or even years. A story like this gaining traction in public discourse around data centers will inevitably damage the sector’s public image unless rectified – and fast.
Cheyenne’s claims about the Meta data center being responsible for the bacteria have already metastasized on social media, disseminated through channels often cited by data center opponents on the ground elsewhere in the country. “REPORT: ‘RARE’ BACTERIA DISCHARGED INTO WYOMING WATERSHED LINKED TO DATA CENTER,” reads one post by a Facebook user Izzy Bella that has been shared more than 2,600 times. “Think of this the next time you hear blatant greenwashed lies like ‘closed loop cooling.” This post has been shared by major anti-data center groups on Facebook, including Pennsylvania Data Center Resistance, a social media page for organizing against projects in the Keystone State.
Going solely off what happened in Wyoming, some in the state are concerned the process of cleaning these loops before opening a data center can produce some nasty byproducts. Dr. Jonathan Brand, a civil engineering professor at University of Wyoming, has been studying the data center buildout in Wyoming for years, watching what’s happened in Cheyenne closely, and like me has way more questions than answers.
Usually, Brand said, a company using water in metal-intensive industrial applications – think a metal plating facility – has to test that fluid before it’s dumped into a municipal sewer system. The chain of events spelled out by the board left him “guessing that didn’t happen here,” and he’s worried the bacteria formed within whatever petri dish-like environment was created inside the network of looping pipes before it was flushed.
“The bacterium was the canary they saw, but you could have a lot of residual metals, which is not something we normally test for at a wastewater plant,” he said. “What else was in that discharge? Nobody else has let us know that and they’re probably not going to.”
City officials claim the water was tested before it entered the sewer and was missed, but there’s a trust deficit between locals and the government on what happened. Little of this information was public until a few weeks ago. Cheyenne residents first learned trouble was afoot on June 26, when the board posted a press release “reminding all residential, commercial, and industrial customers that the discharge of hazardous substances into the sanitary sewer system is strictly prohibited.” Nothing was included about data centers at all; all the board said was that the bacteria was dumped by “an industrial user within the system.”
Then Exie Brown, a Cheyenne resident and GOP candidate for state house, blasted a press release out on social media declaring “a credible source with knowledge of the [board] investigation and sampling” told him the “industrial user” was a data center.
I reached out to Brown asking how he learned about this. His answers were cryptic. “I was given a piece of paper with that name of a bacteria on it,” he told me over the phone, declining to name the “very credible source” who told him about the contamination. “That it was released into our waste water system, that it came from a data center, that it was Meta, that they found out in February, and I needed to check into this.” When I asked why the piece of paper, he replied: “Because they [the source] wanted to keep this quiet. Off the phones and stuff.”
City officials deny any malintentions behind the delay and claim they’re learning about all of this at the same pace as the average resident. “We learned here a week or so ago,” Cheyenne mayor Patrick Collins told me in an interview. He added this wouldn’t have stirred as much interest “had it been something else,” referencing the fact it was from a data center.
“As I understand it, the contractor that was building the site was flushing out a closed-loop cooling system, and when they tested the water everything seemed to be fine, but when it was released into our system, bacteria had grown and was released into our wastewater treatment,” Collins said. “It just happened to be a data center. It’s an unfortunate and highly regrettable situation.”
The mayor acknowledged this contamination will make it “a little tougher” to argue for more data centers in the city. There are currently 10 operational data centers in Cheyenne and surrounding Laramie County, according to estimates from pro-business group Cheyenne LEADS, which has said five projects are under construction – including the Meta facility – and at least nine others are “in various stages of planning or due diligence.”
On Monday, the Cheyenne city council will vote on whether to annex land owned by various nearby property owners for more data center deals, including parcels owned by the family of U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis. Before this event, Cheyenne was incredibly resistant to the anti-data center backlash, handily rejecting proposals to pause development.
Collins thinks Cheyenne will still be open to the tech sector. But the bacteria changed things. “I recognize there’s going to be challenges as we move forward. It’s something we’re going to have to look into. This was a regrettable situation that happened.”
We will see more transparency soon from the Cheyenne city government about the contamination. The board tells me it’s planning a press conference next week where Lamb told me “more information will be made available.”
Francis Brennan, a public affairs manager in the company’s strategic response division, provided me with a statement from an unnamed “Meta spokesperson” claiming that Fortis – the construction company hired by Meta and Goat Systems LLC – was directly handling water disposal on site. After the board “shared that it found a substance in the city’s wastewater” the construction company “began hauling it offsite.” Meta claimed Fortis has not been able to corroborate the presence of this bacteria in comparable water samples.
“Meta is committed to being a good neighbor in Cheyenne, including through the protection of local water resources, and will continue encouraging collaboration between Fortis and the board until this situation is revoked,” the statement read. Meta declined to answer follow-up questions..
Fortis confirmed they were responsible for dumping water on site when the contamination was discovered. They stated they’ve been unable to confirm the presence of the bacteria. In a statement provided to me, the company said: “Immediately upon learning of the issue, we stopped discharging water into the city’s wastewater system. We have since engaged in a thorough investigation that has included ongoing repeat testing by independent environmental specialists and have found no trace of the substance.”
