“I can’t drink water”

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

Today, nothing is there.

Just 400 yards (366m) from the front porch in Fayette County, there is a large windowless building filled with servers, cables and flashing lights.

This is a data center – one of many centers that pop up in the U.S. and globally, which can be used for everything from online banking to tools such as Chatgpt (such as Chatgpt).

“I can’t operate half of the house, I can’t live at home without water,” Ms. Morris said. “I can’t drink water.”

She believes the construction of the center owned by Meta, Facebook’s parent company, destroyed her private well, resulting in excessive sediment. Ms. Morris is now rinsing the toilet with water in the bucket.

She said she had to repair the pipes in the kitchen to restore water pressure. But the water from the faucet still has residue.

“I’m afraid of drinking water, but I still cook with it and brush my teeth with it,” Morris said. “Am I worried? Yes.”

However, Meta said the two were not connected.

“Being a good neighbor is a priority”, Meta said in a statement to the BBC.

The company commissioned an independent groundwater study to investigate Morris’ concerns. According to the report, the operation of its data center “has no adverse impact on groundwater conditions in the region.”

Although Meta questioned the issue that caused Ms. Morris’s water, there is no doubt that her estimated that the company has worn her as a welcome neighbor.

“This is my perfect place,” she said. “But no more.”

We tend to think of clouds as something invisible – floating above us in the digital ether. But reality is very material.

Clouds are spread across more than 10,000 data centers around the world, most of which are located in the United States, followed by the United Kingdom and Germany.

The number is growing rapidly as AI is now driving a surge in online activity. Together with them, more complaints from nearby residents.

The prosperity of the United States is challenged by the rise of local activism – $64 billion (£47 billion) of the project Delay or lockdown nationwide, According to the report of the Stress Group Data Center Observation.

And the focus is not just on construction. This is also related to water use. Keeping these servers cool requires a lot of water.

“These are very hot processors,” Mark Mills of the National Center for Energy Analysis testified before Congress in April. “The surface of each chip is hotter than that of the sun. It takes a lot of water to cool them.”

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

One study estimates AI-powered data centers can consume 1.7 trillion gallons Global water by 2027.

This tension is more clearly illustrated than Georgia, one of the fastest growing data center markets in the United States.

Its humid climate provides a natural, more cost-effective water source for cooling data centers, making it attractive to developers. However, this abundance may come at a price.

Gordon Rogers is executive director of Flint Riverkeeper, a nonprofit advocacy organization that monitors the health of the Flint River, Georgia. He took us downhill to the new construction site to build data centers through the US Company Quality Technical Services (QTS).

Local volunteer George Diets spooned the water sample into a transparent plastic bag. Cloudy and brown.

“It shouldn’t be that color,” he said. For him, it hints about sediment runoff – possibly flocculants. These are chemicals used in buildings that combine soil and prevent erosion, but they produce sludge if they escape into the water system.

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

While the construction is usually carried out by a third-party contractor, local residents are the residents who deal with the consequences.

“They shouldn’t do that,” Rogers said. “A larger wealthy property owner is not smaller, and wealthy property owners have more property rights.”

The tech giants say they know these issues and are taking action.

“Our goal is that by 2030, we will put more water back into the watersheds and communities where we operate data centers, which is more than we need to come up with.” Will Hewes, a global water management company for Global Water Level Management Services (AWS), said that the company operates more data centers than any other company in the world.

AWS is investing in projects such as leak repairs, rainwater collection and cooling using treated wastewater, he said. In Virginia, the company is working with farmers to reduce nutrient pollution in the Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the United States.

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

Mr Hughes said that in America, only water is used on the hottest days of each year.

Nevertheless, the numbers total. A single AI query (for example, a request to Chatgpt) can use as much water as the small bottle you purchased from Corner Shop. Multiply it by billions of queries every day, and the scale becomes clear.

Professor Rajiv Garg teaches cloud computing at Emory University in Atlanta. These data centers, he said, will not disappear—if any, they become the backbone of modern life.

“No look back,” Professor Gal said.

But there is a way forward. He believes that the key is long-term thinking: smarter cooling systems, harvesting rainwater and more efficient infrastructure.

He acknowledged that in the near term, data centers will be “tremendous pressure.” But the industry is starting to turn to sustainability.

However, this is rare for homeowners like Beverly Morris, between yesterday’s dream and tomorrow’s infrastructure.

Data centers are not only becoming an industry trend – they are now part of national policy. President Donald Trump recently vowed to build the largest AI infrastructure project in history, calling it a “future powered by U.S. data.”

Back in Georgia, the sun shoots down through thick humidity – a reminder of why the state is so attractive to data center developers.

For locals, the future of technology is already here. And it’s big, thirsty, and sometimes it’s hard to live next to it.

As artificial intelligence develops, the challenge is clear: how to power tomorrow’s digital world without exhausting all its most basic resources.