# 2026-06 Arkansas Energy & Environment Produces Data-Center Permit Records On **2026-06-08**, the Arkansas **Department of Energy & Environment ("E&E") / Division of Environmental Quality (DEQ)** answered the 2026-06-03 FOIA for data-center air / NPDES / stormwater / cooling-water / source-water / pre-permitting records (Sara White, Legal Support Specialist; Gmail thread `19e8f3501395a49d`). It is the **first of the four long-silent state-agency FOIAs** (AEDC / APSC / DEE-DEQ / DFA) to substantively respond — the others remained silent past the [[2026-06 State Data-Center FOIAs Miss Second-Escalation Deadline|second-escalation deadline]] and the § 25-19-107 final-demand window. ## The response — a self-service pointer For FOIA items 1–5 and 7–10 the agency answered **"See Response to 1"**: retrieve the records yourself from two public databases — the **SEEK** system and the legacy **DEQ Permit Data System (PDS)** — with deep links to the two named facilities ("Groot LLC – Project Pyramid" and "ADP Little Rock Data Hub, LLC – AVAIO Little Rock"), and the caveat that *"DEQ may not have records of all planned data centers."* For **item 6** (DEE/DEQ ↔ AVAIO / Google / Conway / Port developer pre-permitting correspondence), White wrote that any located records *"will be sent to you by close of business Thursday, June 11th."* The only attachment on the reply was a signature logo (not a record). The requester therefore **collected** the SEEK + PDS records on 2026-06-08 and ingested them as the [[deq/seek-pds-data-center-permits-2026-06-08/_overview|DEE-DEQ production]] (58 records; Tier 1). The **item-6 supplemental remains pending (≤ 2026-06-11)** and is not part of this production. ## What it produced - **The headline record:** the **[[Project Pyramid Title V Air Permit (2507-AOP-R0)|Title V air permit 2507-AOP-R0]]** for the confirmed-Google West Memphis site (from PDS) — **238 diesel/HVO emergency engines (232 Tier 2 gensets), 60 cooling towers, roadway emissions**; the first Tier-1 measure of that facility's operational scale. - **Construction-stormwater records** for both AVAIO/Leo (AFIN 60-06409) and Project Pyramid (AFIN 18-01005); **no air permit, NPDES-discharge, or cooling-water-withdrawal record** for AVAIO/Leo. - **The Groot corporate stack:** sole member [[GDH Holdings Inc.]] (officer [[Gabor Turschl]]); signatories [[Michael Montfort]] and [[David Thomas]] confirmed as **[[Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati]]** attorneys. ## Significance The production confirms **wet/evaporative cooling at Project Pyramid (60 cooling towers)** but **names no cooling-water source** for either site — the unnamed-Leo-cooling-source gap is not closed (see [[Identifying the Unnamed Cooling-Water Data Centers]]). It provides the **first Tier-1 Arkansas confirmation** that the recurring shell-officers are Wilson Sonsini lawyers (answering the [[D005 Synthesis|D005]] professional-role question), but **names no hyperscaler as the principal** of the Conway/Port shells — so it does **not** trigger un-bracketing of [[T003 - Shell-LLC Principal Attribution for Forgelight and Willowbend|T003]].