The only rule forcing a data center to say how much water it drinks is a state law. That is the water leg of the AI receipts ledger — and it means visibility depends on which state you live in.

Virginia signed the clearest version into law. SB 553, sponsored by state Senator Kannan Srinivasan of Loudoun County, directs waterworks operators to break out their monthly sales data and report, in aggregate, how much water goes to data centers holding state air permits. [1] The public reporting website is expected to go live January 1, 2027, though facility-specific figures remain shielded as trade secrets. [2] California's AB 93 would require usage reports without guaranteeing public access. There is no federal rule that does either.

That absence is the story. Operators have long shielded water needs as industry secrets, often behind the same nondisclosure agreements that Illinois is now moving to ban. [1] On X, the framing is a scandal — your town's aquifer training a chatbot while the numbers stay sealed. MSM files it under sustainability, a transparency measure softened by a trade-secret carve-out. [2]

The paper's middle is which instrument forces disclosure, and the answer is a state legislature, not the EPA. Water joins power and tax as the third leg of a state-by-state patchwork filling a federal gap: power decided in the PJM and FERC dockets, tax in Illinois's freeze, water in Virginia's reporting law. A reader in Virginia will soon see an aggregate number. A reader one state over may see nothing. The disclosure map is not a national rule. It is a map.

-- DARA OSEI, London