The missing numbers have a pattern.

Water.Large facilities are typically served by municipal systems, so their use folds into city totals and no facility-level figure exists. In Caldwell County, North Carolina, Google’s water, energy, and headcount figures are a contractual trade secret. The one facility-level number this series has — Meta’s Forest City site at roughly 11,500 gallons a day, below the state’s reporting threshold — exists because a reporter asked, and for no other reason.

Money.North Carolina’s 37 unpublished determinations came with no requirement that any company report actual investment or exemption value; the state reads its own buildout off a commercial database. The North Carolina case study carries the full accounting.

Identity.Projects arrive code-named behind shell LLCs, under NDAs that bind the officials reviewing them: most Virginia data center localities, an Indiana county that rezoned 640 acres before Amazon’s name was known, Pima County supervisors who could not say whose project they were approving. The participation guide covers what that does to hearings.

Power and emissions.The Vineland generators ran nine months before any agency knew; the Southaven turbine counts exist because journalists flew thermal drones. And when a Louisiana administrative law judge ruled that Meta had to disclose its project’s basic job and power figures, the commission above killed the ruling. West Virginia went further in the same direction: its 2025 data center law includes a FOIA exemption, so the public-records tool itself is off the table there.

Hardware. No operator publishes what happens to decommissioned equipment; no fab publishes per-wafer figures; corporate lifecycle disclosures stop at the factory gate. The hardware guide treats those six absences as findings, and they belong on this ledger too.

A drone. The turbine and generator counts anchoring two federal matters came from thermal imaging flown by newsrooms. A records request. Arizona journalists identified AWS behind Project Blue with public-records work after officials could not say the name. A community instrument. South Memphis air data exists because residents and university researchers put monitors out. The resulting three-way dispute over that data is covered honestly in the enforcement guide, because a fact that surfaces outside institutions gets contested harder than one that surfaces inside them.

A commissioned study.The only methodical residential noise measurements in the public record were paid for by a homeowners’ coalition. And a question, asked by someone whose job is asking. A legislative audit produced Virginia’s by-right statistics; a town manager’s quote about being shocked at how little water a facility used exists because a public radio reporter called her. The five routes share one property: none is guaranteed. Each depends on somebody deciding a fact was worth the cost of producing.

A gap is not evidence of the worst case. “They won’t say” is compatible with damning numbers, boring numbers, and numbers nobody ever compiled. The Forest City surprise ran opposite to suspicion: the facility used far less water than the town hoped to sell. Treating every blank as a confession produces exactly the overclaiming this series spends its other nine guides correcting.

But a gap is evidence about the system. Which numbers are unavailable, and who arranged the unavailability, are facts with no uncertainty in them. Thirty-seven determinations unpublished is not a rumor. A FOIA exemption written into statute is not an interpretation. The drift problem this series documents — figures mutating upward in retelling — thrives precisely where primary numbers are missing, because nothing anchors the retelling. Bad disclosure and bad statistics are the same story at different stages.

So the discipline this page recommends has two moves, and both matter. Refuse to fill a gap with a guess. Then refuse to let the gap pass as natural: say who is not required to report what, name the statute or the clause, and put the absence itself on the record. The water guide’s lesson was that a claim is not a fact until someone defines the threshold. This guide’s lesson is the sequel: a threshold is not knowable until someone must report against it.