“I can’t drink the water”

When Beverly Morris retired in 2016, she thought she had found her dream home, a quiet stretch of rural Georgia, surrounded by trees and silence.

Today, this is anything else.

Only 400 yards (366 m) from her front porch in Faita County sits a large, without windows a building full of servers, cables and flashing lights.

This is a data center – one of the many pop -ups in America in the small town and around the world to power everything from online banking to artificial intelligence tools like Chatgpt.

“I can’t live in my home with half of the functioning of my home and there is no water,” says Morris. “I can’t drink the water.”

She believes that the construction of the center, which is owned by Meta (the Mother of Facebook), has broken its private well, causing excessive accumulation of sediment. Morris is now kept with water in buckets to flush its toilet.

She says she had to fix the water supply in her kitchen to restore the water pressure. But the water that comes from the crane still has residues in it.

“I’m afraid to drink the water, but I still cook with it, and brush my teeth with it,” Maurice says. “Do I worry about it? Yes.”

Meta, however, says the two are not connected.

In a statement to the BBC Meta, he said “being a good neighbor is a priority.”

The company ordered an independent survey of groundwater to study Morris’s concerns. According to the report, his work at the Data Center “does not adversely affect groundwater conditions in the area”.

While Meta disputes that he has caused the problems with the water of G -Ja Maurice, there is no doubt, according to her assessment that the company has tired its welcome as its neighbor.

“It was my perfect place,” she says. “But it is no longer.”

We tend to think about the cloud as something invisible – floating over us in the digital ether. But the reality is very physical.

The cloud lives in over 10,000 data centers worldwide, most of which are located in the United States, followed by the United Kingdom and Germany.

With AI, which now leads to a jump in online activity, this number is growing rapidly. And with them more complaints than the loved ones.

The US boom is disputed by a rise in local activism – by $ 64 billion (47 billion British pounds) in projects delayed or blocked throughout the country, According to a Watch report by Group Group Group.

And concerns are not just about construction. It is also about the use of water. Maintaining these servers cool a lot of water is needed.

“These are very hot processors,” reports Mark Mills of the National Energy Analyzing Center before Congress in April. “The surface of each chip is hot than the surface of the sun. A lot of water is needed to cool them.”

Many centers use evaporative cooling systems where water absorbs heat and evaporates – similar to how sweat tingles heat from our bodies. On hot days, a facility can use millions of gallons.

One study calculates that data centers managed by AI 1.7 trillion gallon of the water worldwide by 2027

Few places illustrate this tension more clearly than Georgia -one of the fastest growing markets at the US Data Center.

Its humid climate provides a natural and more cost-effective source of water for cooling data centers, which makes it attractive to developers. But this abundance can come at a price.

Gordon Rogers is CEO of Flint Riverkeeper, a non -profit intercession group that monitors the health of the Flint River in Georgia. He takes us to Creek Downhill from a new construction site for a data center built by the US company for quality technology services (QTS).

George Diets, a local volunteer, rises a sample of water in a transparent plastic bag. It’s cloudy and brown.

“It shouldn’t be that color,” he says. For him, this implies the outflow of sediments – and possibly floculators. These are chemicals used in construction to connect the soil and prevent erosion, but if they escape to the water system, they can create a precipitate.

QTS says its data centers meet high environmental standards and bring millions of local tax revenue.

While construction is often carried out by third -country contractors, the locals are the ones who remain to cope with the consequences.

“They don’t have to do it,” says G -n Rogers. “The bigger owner of a higher property has no more property rights than a smaller, less wealth of property owner.”

Technical giants say they are aware of the problems and take action.

“Our goal is that by 2030 we will put more water back into the catchments and communities where we work with data centers than we take out,” says Will Hewes, Global WateWard Stuwardship Lead on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which manages more data centers than any other company in the world.

He says AWS invests in projects such as leak repair, rainwater collection and uses treated wastewater for cooling. In Virginia, the company works with farmers to reduce the pollution of nutrients in Chesapiq Bay, the largest mouth in the United States.

In South Africa and India – where AWS does not use cooling water – the company is still investing in access and water quality initiatives.

In America, says G -n Hues, water is only used for about 10% of the hotter days each year.

However, numbers are added. Single AI request – such as a Chatgpt request – can use around as much water as a small bottle you would buy from the angle store. Multiply this by billions of requests a day and the scale becomes clear.

Prof. Rajiv Garg teaches cloud calculations at Emori University in Atlanta. He says these data centers do not go away – if something else, they become the backbone of modern life.

“There is no going back,” says Prof. Garg.

But there is a way forward. The key, he claims, is long-term thinking: smarter cooling systems, rainwater collection and more efficient infrastructure.

In the short term, the data centers will create a “huge voltage,” he admits. But the industry is beginning to focus on sustainability.

Still, it is a little comfort for homeowners like Beverly Morris – stuck between yesterday’s dream and tomorrow’s infrastructure.

Data centers have become more than just a trend in the industry – now they are part of national policy. Recently, President Donald Trump swore to build the most large AI infrastructure project in history, calling it a “future, powered by US data.”

Back in Georgia, the sun crashes through dense humidity – a reminder why the state is so attractive to the developers of data centers.

For the locals, the future of technology is already here. And it is strong, thirsty and sometimes difficult to live until.

As AI increases, the challenge is clear: how to feed the digital world of tomorrow without draining the most basic resource of all – water.