# Arup Arup is a global engineering and consulting firm. Its San Francisco water group conducted a confidential water-infrastructure due-diligence inquiry to Arkansas regulators in 2024–2025 for an unnamed industrial / data-center project. ## People - [[Elai Fresco]] — Senior Engineer, Water (San Francisco office); led the Arkansas inquiry. Colleagues Jeff McAllister, Yunus Kovankaya, Grant McInnes, and Andrei Capraru also appear on the thread. ## Roles in this corpus - [[Elai Fresco]] and Arup colleagues corresponded with the Arkansas Department of Agriculture, the Division of Environmental Quality, and the Department of Health from October 2024 through March 2025 — see [[Data-Center Cooling-Water Regulatory Correspondence]]. The inquiry was *"water infrastructure due diligence"* to decide whether *"to go ahead with land purchase"* for *"proposed industrial facilities in Arkansas."* ## Notes Arup withheld the project name and site, citing *"project confidentiality."* The water profile described — millions of gallons per day of evaporative non-contact cooling water, phased multi-building construction — is characteristic of a hyperscale data center. The specific project is not identified in the corpus. ## Web-research context A web-research attempt on 2026-05-22 to identify Arup's confidential Arkansas project did not succeed. No public source places Arup on a named Arkansas data-center project. By the timing of a 2024–2025 pre-land-purchase due-diligence window and by scale, AVAIO Digital's "Leo" campus in Pulaski County is the most prominent candidate — but the public record does not confirm Project Leo as a groundwater-cooled project, and no announced Arkansas data center is publicly matched to the dedicated, multi-million-gallon-per-day groundwater well field Arup described. The project remains unidentified. See [[Identifying the Unnamed Cooling-Water Data Centers]] for the full analysis.