“I can’t drink water”

When Beverly Morris resigned in 2016, she found her finding her dream house – a peaceful section of rural Georgia, surrounded by trees and quiet.

Today it’s all but.

A total of 400 yards (366 m) from its front porch in the Fiet county sits large, without window buildings, filled with servers, cables and flashing lights.

This data center is one of many that jump around America in the town and around the world to provide everything from online banking to artificial intelligence tools such as chatgpt.

“I can’t live in my home with half my house and without water,” says Mrs. Morris. “I can’t drink water.”

She believes that the construction of the center owned by Meta (Facebook Mother’s Company) violated its private well, causing excessive precipitation. Ms. Morris has now sent water to the bucket to rinse her toilet.

She says she had to fix plumbing in her kitchen to restore water pressure. But the water that comes from the tap still has the remains in it.

“I am afraid to drink water, but I am still cooking with it and brush my teeth,” Morris says. “It worries me? Yes.”

Meta, however, says they are not connected.

A statement by the BBC Meta states that “being a good neighbor is a priority.”

The company has ordered an independent groundwater study to investigate Morris problems. According to the report, its operation at the data center “did not affect the conditions of groundwater in the area.”

While meta disputes that it caused Mrs. Morris’s water problems, it assessed that the company had worn its reception as a neighbor.

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

We tend to think about the cloud as something invisible – swim over us on digital air. But the reality is very physical.

The cloud lives in more than 10,000 data centers worldwide, most of which are in the United States and behind them the UK and Germany.

With AI, which now drives a splash on the Internet, this amount is growing rapidly. And with them more complaints from nearby residents.

American boom disputes local activity – with $ 64 billion (47 billion pounds) in projects delay or blocked across the country According to a report at the Group Data Center.

And problems not only in construction. It is also about the use of water. Maintaining these cooler servers requires a lot of water.

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

In many centers, the evaporation systems are used, where the water absorbs heat and evaporates – it looks like from our body. On hot days, one object can use millions of gallons.

One research suggests that AI data centers can consume 1.7 trillion gallons Water worldwide until 2027.

Few places illustrate this tension more clearly than Georgia – one of the fastest growing data centers in the US.

Its wet climate provides a natural and more economical water source for cooling data centers, making it attractive to developers. But this wealth can come at the expense.

Gordon Rogers-Executive Director Flint Riverkeeper, a non-profit propaganda group that monitors the health of the Georgia Flint River. It leads us to the stream down from the new construction site for the data center, which is being built by US technology technology (QTS).

Local volunteer George diet scoopes a water sample into a transparent plastic bag. It is overcast and brown.

“It should not be this color,” he says. For him, this suggests that the nozzle drain is – and perhaps floculants. These are chemicals used in construction to bind soil and prevent erosion, but if they run into the water system, they can create a nozzle.

QTS claims that its data centers meet high environmental standards and bring millions of local tax revenues.

While construction is often carried out by other contractors, locals remain to fight the consequences.

“They don’t have to do it,” says Mr. Rogers. “The owner of the largest wealthy real estate has no more ownership than the smaller, less wealthy real estate owner.”

Technical giants say they know about problems and take action.

“Our goal is that by 2030, we will return more water back to the watershed and community where we work as a data center than we are output,” says Wil Hughes, a global leader of water supply in Amazon Web Services (AWS), which works more data centers than any other company.

He says AWS invests in projects such as leak repair, rain water harvesting and the use of cleaned sewage for cooling. In Virginia, the company is working with farmers to reduce nutrient pollution in the bays of Chepik, the largest mouth in the US.

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

In America, says Mr. Hughes, water is only used in about 10% of the hottest days each year.

However, the numbers are composed. One AI request – for example, a CHTPT request – can use about as much water as a small bottle you would buy at Corner’s store. Multiply this by billions of requests a day, and the scale becomes clear.

Professor Raji Garg teaches cloud calculations at Emora University in Atlanta. He says these data centers do not go away – if anything, they become the basis of modern life.

“There’s no turn back,” says Professor Garg.

But there is a way forward. The main thing, he claims, is long -term thinking: smarter cooling systems, rain water harvesting and more efficient infrastructure.

In the short term, the data center will create a “huge load”, – he admits. But the industry begins to move to stability.

Nevertheless, this is little consolation for housing owners, such as Beverly Morris – stuck between yesterday’s dream and tomorrow’s infrastructure.

Data processing centers have become more than just a branch trend – they are now part of national policy. President Donald Trump recently promised to build the largest in history infrastructure II, calling it “a future that works on American data.”

Returning to Georgia, the sun beats through the thick 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’s loud, thirst, and sometimes it is difficult to live nearby.

As AI grows, the task is clear: how to nourish the digital world tomorrow, without draining the most basic resource of all – water.