The Cheyenne Board of Public Utilities has suspended all industrial water discharges from data centers connected to city services after a Meta contractor contaminated the municipal reuse water system with a rare metal-resistant bacterium, <em>Cupriavidus gilardii</em>. The disruption pushed two water reclamation plants offline for months.

The contractor, Goat Systems, was performing a "fill-and-flush" — a standard commissioning step where cooling loop piping is filled with water, flushed to clear debris, then drained — and routed the wastewater into Cheyenne's sanitary sewer. Lab staff caught the bacterium in February during routine fecal-bacteria sampling, and the Board revoked the contractor's discharge privileges on March 24. The disclosure, reported this week by the Cowboy State Daily and the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, came as a "very, very unpleasant surprise" to city council members.

Cheyenne sprays its reclaimed water on parks, golf courses, and green spaces, and the Board expressed concern that <em>C. gilardii</em> could become an aerosol hazard during irrigation. While the bacterium isn't a regulated contaminant under federal standards, the discharge was severe enough to trigger "pass-through and interference" findings under the Cheyenne City Code and federal pretreatment rules.

Meta said independent testing found no trace of the substance and that its general contractor Fortis has stopped discharging, now hauling wastewater offsite instead. The Board has not said how the suspension affects other Cheyenne data centers still under construction.

The incident highlights a tension in the AI infrastructure boom: Microsoft and Nvidia both market sealed liquid-loop cooling as a near-zero-water alternative to traditional evaporative systems, but even sealed loops require a one-time fill-and-flush that produces a discharge — and that wastewater leaves the site before the loop is ever sealed.

Sources: Tom's Hardware