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Lincoln, NE

Google's Lincoln Data Center Files for a Third Building's Power and Cooling Plant

Seven permit applications filed since Sept. 9 at 5425 Cloud Ct. in Lincoln, Nebraska, cover the power and cooling buildings for "data center building 3" at Google's northeast Lincoln campus, the largest at $11 million each.

By Morningline Research · November 5, 2026

Google's data center campus in northeast Lincoln is getting ready to grow. On Oct. 30, an application was filed at 5425 Cloud Ct. for three "pre-manufactured electrical buildings" and their foundations on the southeast side of "data center building 3," at a reported value of $11 million.

It's the seventh application at that address since early September. Together they lay out the power and cooling plant for a third data center building on the campus off North 56th Street and Interstate 80, in Nebraska's capital city.

Seven filings in eight weeks

Timeline of Google's Lincoln data center campus, from the 2019 land purchase to the October 2026 Building 3 permit applications
Graphic: Morningline Research, from City of Lincoln permit applications and the reporting linked in this story.

The first came Sept. 9: a $1.05 million control enclosure for a high-voltage substation. On Oct. 7 came two make-up water tanks and their foundations, reported at $8.4 million, to "furnish water to the modular cooling plants."

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Then the pace picked up. Three more were filed Oct. 15:

An Oct. 14 filing, also $4.5 million, covers a prefabricated building to chemically treat the water running inside the cooling plant. The Oct. 30 filing added the second set of E-Houses, for the southeast side.

Much of it gets built somewhere else. Five of the seven filings describe prefabricated or pre-manufactured buildings that get set on site foundations and tied into utilities.

Lincoln's records are dated by filing, so these are applications as filed with the city and are counted by filing date. The values are the ones reported on each filing, not contract amounts. None of them is the data center building itself.

From a mystery buyer to Google

The permits don't name an owner. But they sit on Cloud Court, inside the roughly 600-acre campus that Agate LLC, a Google subsidiary according to 10/11 NOW, bought in 2019. Earlier city permits on the same street list Agate LLC as the owner.

For years nobody would say who Agate was. The company paid more than $18.6 million for about 600 acres northwest of the 56th Street exit on I-80 in late 2019, the Associated Press reported in a story carried by KLKN. Its plans called for a data center with at least two buildings. A traffic study at the time projected up to 960 full-time employees by 2040.

Google confirmed the project in August 2023, calling Lincoln its third Nebraska data center after Papillion and Omaha, 10/11 NOW reported. Mayor Leirion Gaylor Baird said then it would go up "alongside Interstate 80 in northeast Lincoln."

Google's own Nebraska page lists 2026 as the year the Lincoln data center comes online. In August, a Google facility manager told a city roundtable there are "a couple hundred individuals" on site, and that those jobs stay after construction, KLKN reported.

Water and power, three miles of pipe

Interstate 80 traffic approaching Lincoln, Nebraska from the west, with the Nebraska State Capitol tower on the skyline
Interstate 80 approaching Lincoln from the west, with the State Capitol tower on the skyline. Photo: Hanyou23, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).

Cooling is the thread running through these permits, and the city is building for it too. In June, construction started on a $10 million underground line, paid for by Google, that carries cooling water about three miles from the campus to the city's Northeast Water Resource Recovery Facility, 10/11 NOW reported. The line is due in January 2027.

The contract between the city and Agate allows a peak flow of 2,040 gallons a minute, according to the same report. A city utilities spokesperson said the project "makes it so Google does not impact" the city's wastewater treatment capacity.

On power, Google pays for 423 megawatts of wind energy for the Lincoln data center, the Flatwater Free Press reported.

Part of a national run

Lincoln's filings land in the middle of a data center building boom. Spending on data centers rose 8.6% from August to September and has grown at a 217% annualized rate since May, according to an Associated Builders and Contractors analysis reported by Construction Dive.

Starts are piling up too. ConstructConnect counted $135.8 billion in U.S. data center starts across 178 projects through September.

Back on Cloud Court, the electrical and water buildings for Building 3 are on file. No application for the data center building itself is among the filings at this address yet.

How we count

The filings come from the City of Lincoln's building permit applications for 5425 Cloud Ct., filed Sept. 9 through Oct. 30, 2026, and are counted by filing date. Values are the ones reported on each application, not contract amounts. Owner and project details come from the reporting linked here.

See Lincoln's latest permit numbers, updated weekly.

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More numbers: Lincoln, NE building permit activity, updated weekly.