A Wyoming city found a rare bacterium in wastewater tied to a Meta data center

City officials in Cheyenne, Wyoming, said a Meta data center under construction caused the contamination of the city's wastewater treatment facility.

Cheyenne Board of Public Utilities

Officials in the city of Cheyenne, Wyoming, say a massive, under-construction Meta data center campus located just south of the city is responsible for contaminating part of its recycled water system.Cheyenne's Board of Public Utilities said in recent public notices that water discharged by Goat Systems, a Meta contractor at the site, contaminated the city's wastewater treatment facility with a rare bacterium.That facility includes Cheyenne's reuse water system, which is used for irrigation purposes only, a board spokesperson said. The system cleans used water so it can be safely released back into the environment or reused for watering things like parks and golf courses. The bacterium did not enter the city's drinking supply, city officials said."We were able to connect the Meta Data Center campus to this through sampling their site and it was determined to be through their fill-and-flush discharge that the bacteria was introduced to the system," Erin Lamb, a spokesperson for the Board of Public Utilities, told Business Insider on Tuesday.Fill-and-flush operations are a cooling system for data centers in which water is periodically flushed from pipes, discarded, and then replenished with new water. Some data centers now use a "closed-loop" system that recycles the same water within the facility.The board's public notice characterized the infraction as "significant noncompliance" and revoked Goat Systems' "industrial discharge privileges for fill and flush operations." While the board posted the notice on July 2, it said the operations were halted on March 24.Goat Systems, the Meta contractor, "immediately ceased discharge of wastewater from the fill and flush operation" after it was notified of the pollutant, Cheyenne's Board of Public Utilities said. A representative for Goat Systems could not be reached for comment by Business Insider.