North -America Business Correspondent
Business reporter
When Beverly Morris retired in 2016, she thought she had found her dream house – a quiet piece of National Georgia, surrounded by trees and quiet.
Today it is anything but.
Only 400 meters (366 m) from her porch in Fayette County is a large, windowless building filled with servers, cables and flashing lights.
It is a data center – one of the many emergence in America and all over the world, to send everything from online banking to artificial intelligence tools such as Chatgpt.
“I can’t live in my house with half of my house and not water,” says Mrs. Morris. “I can’t drink the water.”
She believes that the construction of the center, which is owned by Meta (the parent company of Facebook), has disrupted its private well, which caused an excessive structure of sediment. Mrs. Morris is now dragging water in buckets to rinse her toilet.
She says she had to repair the plumbing in her kitchen to restore the water pressure. But the water that comes from the tap still has residue in it.
“I’m afraid to drink the water, but I still cook with it and brush my teeth with it,” says Morris. “Am I worried about it? Yes.”
However, Meta says that the two are not connected.
In a statement to the BBC, Meta said that “being a good neighbor is a priority”.
The company has commissioned an independent groundwater study to investigate Morris’s concerns. According to the report, the functioning of the data center “had no adverse effect on groundwater conditions in the area”.
Although Meta disputes that it has caused the problems with the water of Mrs. Morris, there is no doubt that the company has welcomed his neighbor.
“This was my perfect place,” she says. “But it’s no longer.”

We regard the cloud as something invisible – floating above us in the digital ether. But the reality is very physical.
The cloud lives in more than 10,000 data centers around the world, most of them in the US, followed by the UK and Germany.
Now that AI now an increase in online activities, that number is growing rapidly. And with them, more complaints from nearby residents.
The US Boom is challenged by an increase in local activism – with $ 64 billion (£ 47 billion) in projects postponed or blocked rural, According to a report from Drukgroep Data Center Watch.
And the worries are not just about construction. It is also about water use. Cooling those servers requires a lot of water.
“These are very hot processors,” Mark Mills testified to the National Center for Energy Analytics for the Congress in April. “The surface of each chip is hotter than the surface of the sun. It takes a lot of water to cool them down.”
Many centers use evaporation cooling systems, in which water absorbs and evaporates – similar to how sweat wins on the heat of our body. A single facility can use millions of gallons on hot days.
One study estimates that AI-driven data centers can consume 1.7 Biljoen Gallons of water worldwide by 2027.
Few places illustrate this tension more clearly than Georgia – one of the fastest growing data center markets in the US.
The humid climate offers a natural and more cost -effective water source for cooling data centers, making it attractive for developers. But that abundance can entail costs.
Gordon Rogers is the executive director of Flint Riverkeeper, a non-profit interest group that monitors the health of Georgia’s Flint River. He takes us to a creek downhill from a new construction site for a data center that is being built by US Firm Quality Technology Services (QTS).
George Dieten, a local volunteer, creates a sample of the water in a transparent plastic bag. It is cloudy and brown.
“It shouldn’t be that color,” he says. For him this suggests the drain of sediment – and possibly flocculances. These are chemicals used in the construction to bind soil and prevent erosion, but if they escape in the water system, they can make sludge.
QTS says his data centers meet high environmental standards and yield millions in local tax revenues.
Although the construction is often carried out by third -party contractors, local residents are those who remain to tackle the consequences.
“They shouldn’t do it,” says Mr. Rogers. “A larger richer owner has no more ownership rights than a smaller, less rich owner.”
Technical giants say they are aware of the problems and take action.
“Our goal is that by 2030 we will reduce more water to the electricity areas and communities where we exploit data centers than we go out,” says Will Hewes, Global Water Stewardship Lead at Amazon Web Services (AWS), which runs more data centers than any other company worldwide.
He says that AWS is investing in projects such as leak repairs, rainwater collection and the use of treated waste water for cooling. In Virginia, the company works with farmers to reduce the pollution of nutrients in Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the US.
In South Africa and India – where AWS does not use water for cooling – the company is still investing in water access and quality initiatives.
In America, Mr Hewes says, water is only used every year on about 10% of the hottest days.
Yet the numbers are correct. A single AI query – for example a request for chatgpt – can use about as much water as a bottle that you buy in the corner store. Multiply that with billions questions per day and the scale becomes clear.

Prof Rajiv Garg gives Cloud Computing at Emory University in Atlanta. He says that these data centers do not disappear – if there is something, they become the backbone of modern life.
“There is no way back,” says Prof Garg.
But there is a path forward. The key, he claims, is long -term thinking: smarter cooling systems, rainwater collection and more efficient infrastructure.
In the short term, data centers will create “a huge tribe”, he admits. But the industry is starting to shift to sustainability.
And yet, that is little comfort for homeowners such as Beverly Morris – stuck between the dream of yesterday and the infrastructure of tomorrow.
Data centers have become more than just a trend in the industry – they are now part of national policy. President Donald Trump recently sworn to build the largest AI infrastructure project in history and to mention “a future driven by American data”.
Back in Georgia, the sun is knocking through thick humidity – a reminder why the state is so attractive for data center developers.
For the locals, the future of Tech is already here. And it’s loud, thirsty and sometimes difficult to live.
As AI grows, the challenge is clear: how the digital world of tomorrow can be switched on without carrying out the most basic source of all – water.
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