QTS Data Center Drew 29M Gallons Undetected for 15 Months

A Blackstone-owned AI data center campus 20 miles south of Atlanta drew 29 million gallons of municipal water through two unregistered connections over as many as 15 months — undetected until residents in a nearby subdivision complained about low water pressure, Politico reported May 10.

The facility is Quality Technology Services' (QTS) "Project Excalibur" campus in Fayetteville, Georgia: 615 acres, 13 buildings totaling 6.2 million square feet, with plans for up to 16 buildings and $1 billion in total investment. QTS attributes the unauthorized draw to temporary construction activities — concrete work, dust suppression, and site preparation — and says its operational cooling design is a closed-loop recirculating system that pulls no water from the municipal supply once running. Fayette County's water system director, Vanessa Tigert, traced the oversight to a procedural error during the county's migration to a cloud-based metering system.

How long the connections ran unmetered is disputed. Tigert estimates roughly four months; QTS says nine to fifteen. Either way, the county's monitoring infrastructure failed to catch 29 million gallons of consumption on what is now its single largest customer — a gap Tigert attributed directly to under-resourcing: "We don't have enough staff. We can't keep staff," she told Politico. One employee handles both inspections and plan reviews for the entire department.

Fayette County billed QTS $147,474 in retroactive charges and declined to issue a fine. Tigert's explanation: "They're our largest customer, and we have to be partners. It's called customer service." The campus is projected to generate $150 million to $200 million annually in Fayette County property tax revenue — a fiscal dependency that pressures enforcement.

Data centers evaluating site selection should note the operational risk: municipalities courting large AI campuses with tax incentives may lack regulatory staff or political will to enforce utility agreements. QTS's closed-loop cooling is standard for modern hyperscale builds. But the gap between construction-phase and operational-phase water use is wide, and counties with thin water authority headcount may not audit either phase independently.

The incident occurs amid materially unfavorable conditions for Georgia water supplies. Governor Brian Kemp declared a state of emergency last month over wildfires, and the state is currently rated as experiencing moderate to severe drought. Georgia's Public Service Commission froze Georgia Power's base electricity rates through 2028 to prevent data center load from shifting costs to residential ratepayers — signaling state awareness of resource pressure even as county-level oversight remains fragmented. Georgia hosts more than 200 data center facilities.

Fayetteville enacted Ordinance 26-0-12 earlier this year, banning new data centers from every zoning district. Fayetteville is one of at least 50 U.S. cities with active bans on new data center construction; four have adopted permanent prohibitions, per the U.S. Data Center Moratorium Tracker. A separate Crow Holdings proposal was denied by the city's planning commission in January; the developer withdrew its appeal in March.

The incident became public only after a Fayette County resident used a public records request to obtain the county's May 2025 letter to QTS. That discovery pathway — citizen FOIA, not regulatory audit — is precisely the oversight gap enterprise buyers and policymakers must now close before the next 6-million-square-foot campus breaks ground.