Meta’s data center in Cheyenne, Wyoming, has been forced to suspend all water discharges after a contractor contaminated the city’s reclamation system with bacteria. The facility will be offline for months while they clean it up.
The problem started during a purge of the closed-loop cooling system. That purge spread rare metal-resistant bacteria into the city’s water reuse infrastructure. Not great when your cooling system meets the municipal water supply.
The city immediately suspended all “fill and flush” and closed-loop discharge operations from the facility. Meta’s data center can’t operate its cooling system without those discharges, so the facility is effectively down.
Cleanup is expected to take months. The bacteria involved aren’t your standard pond scum — they’re metal-resistant strains that thrive in industrial cooling environments. That makes remediation more complex than a simple chlorine shock.
This isn’t the first data center water controversy, and it won’t be the last. As facilities grow bigger and consume more power, their cooling systems put increasing pressure on local water infrastructure. Cheyenne is just the latest town caught in the middle.
