Meta contractor's cooling-water flush contaminates Cheyenne's reuse water system

Cheyenne, Wyoming has stopped accepting industrial wastewater from data center cooling operations after tracing a rare, metal-resistant bacterium in its reclaimed water back to Goat Systems LLC, the entity building Meta’s local campus. The bacterium, Cupriavidus gilardii, disrupted two water reclamation plants badly enough to knock the city’s reuse system offline for months of cleanup. Utility staff only caught it in February during routine fecal-bacteria testing — ‘this isn’t something we normally test for,’ the Board’s water resource manager noted — and the city revoked the contractor’s discharge privileges on March 24 before extending a broader suspension to every connected data center.

The contamination traces to ‘fill-and-flush,’ a one-time commissioning step where crews fill and flush cooling loops to clear debris before sealing them. Ironically, this is the same step that undercuts the ‘near-zero-water’ pitch behind sealed liquid cooling, which Microsoft and Nvidia are marketing hard as AI buildouts push into more communities: the loop recirculates its water once sealed, but that initial flush still leaves the site as wastewater. Goat Systems routed that flush water — origin of the bacterium still unknown — straight into the city’s sanitary sewer.

The city’s concern runs deeper than one organism. Closed-loop systems can carry glycol and other chemicals municipal plants aren’t designed to treat, and Cheyenne sprays reclaimed water on parks and golf courses, raising fears the bacterium could aerosolize during irrigation. Though C. gilardii isn’t a regulated contaminant, the disruption was severe enough to trigger federal pretreatment violations. Meta says it’s backing general contractor Fortis, which has switched to hauling wastewater offsite, and that independent testing at both facilities came back clean in late June, putting the reuse system back online. A city councilman called the whole episode ‘a very, very unpleasant surprise.’