No Field to Land In: How Three States' Water Withdrawal Forms Make Utility-Supplied Data Centers Illegible
A data center that buys treated water from a public utility is, in Virginia and Tennessee by express clause and in Georgia by definition, not a person who withdraws water. Reads the reporting forms each state prescribes, field by field, and asks where on them a delivery to such a facility would be recorded. There is no field built to take it.
A data center that buys treated water from a public utility is, in the three states examined here, not a person who withdraws water. Virginia and Tennessee say so in an express clause. Georgia's surface water statute reaches the same result through the definition of withdrawal, and its groundwater clause is left open. That much is already public, and this paper does not present it as new. What follows from it has not been examined. This paper reads the reporting forms the three states actually prescribe, field by field, and asks where on them a delivery to such a facility would be recorded.
There is no field built to take it. Virginia's OWS-3N defines a transfer as a transaction between two waterworks: Transferred Water is its source type, Release and Delivery its action types, and the form's identifier fields, including the Department of Health public water system number, are the filer's own. No field takes the other party's name or number. Tennessee's CN-1119 requires a system that buys water to name its source, and asks a system that sells water nothing at all about its buyers. Georgia's two monthly forms alone ask a supplier to identify its buyer, and what they ask for is a public water system: by identifier on the surface water form, and by identifier or name on the groundwater form's row label. On the federal glossary definition, a public supplier furnishes water to at least 25 people or holds a minimum of 15 connections. A facility that buys its water is not one and holds no such identifier. Four use taxonomies across the seven instruments read classify the use the filer makes of the water rather than the use made by anyone the filer serves, and none carries a category for a computing facility.
The finding inverts the pattern Kroepsch (2024) documents for the western United States, where regimes made pumpers legible and left pumping unmeasured. Here the volume is measured, at a meter the utility installed and bills against, and it is the recipient the record cannot see. The illegibility is documented on the face of the forms rather than inferred from outcomes, and it is placed against Molle, Lankford and Lave (2024) on the politics of quantification and Hoefsloot and colleagues (2023) on the legibility of water consumers to a utility's own data.
All three legislatures addressed data center water in 2026. Virginia enacted a duty on suppliers to report volumes delivered to data centers holding an air permit, implemented by a regulation adopted without a comment period; the definition that keeps the customer from being a withdrawer was altered only by replacing "it" with "the waterworks". A Tennessee Senate committee deferred a bill proposing the same duty with monthly publication by facility, joined to a facility permit decided under a presumption that residential water access takes precedence over industrial and speculative uses of water. Georgia enacted nothing; of eleven data center bills, the two that reached water did so by barring nondisclosure agreements. The enacted instrument adds a field to the utility's report. It does not add the facility to the class of persons who report.
The paper makes no claim about why any legislature or committee chose as it did. It does not show that any withdrawer, utility or facility acted unlawfully, does not quantify the demand reaching data centers through utilities in any of the three states, and does not claim the pattern extends beyond the three states, the seven instruments, or the 2026 sessions.