Who’s Thirsty? Say Ah, Here Comes the Data Center!

Last week, I got an email from LinkedIn headed, “Make your resume more ‘human’ by including hobbies. See the strategy.”

Delete.

It’s vexing, but it’s pretty trivial. So I have to, yet again, prove I’m human to a hiring team that will use a robot to evaluate my fit for the role. artificial intelligence is like an ex you can’t seem to avoid no matter how much you’re over them. There’s no longer a way to turn off AI mode in a Google search. And whether I get a callback from a listing is contingent on whether the bot says I’m worth it to the man. When I look up the ridiculously disastrous environmental impacts of AI, to make this fight bigger than myself, to have AI’s inconveniences mean more than just what I feel about the typical hiring process, I get another AI summary.

Residents near Morgan County, Georgia’s data center construction have reported that their water became undrinkable.

In May 2026, U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) raised Morgan County residents’ concerns during a House hearing with Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Assistant Administrator Jessica Kramer. She described clearcutting, construction, and explosive blasting near Meta’s massive data center project. Ocasio-Cortez held up two mason jars reportedly collected from wells near the development, filled with brown water and black floating sediment. Some families now rely on delivered bottled water for cleaning, cooking, and consumption. Residents have connected these changes to the nearby construction, while Meta has disputed that its project caused them. The public record establishes the residents’ allegations and the need for investigation, not a final causal finding.

Inside CERN’s data center. This facility is illustrative and is not one discussed in the article.

Photo: Hugovanmeijeren. Source. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Thirty Million Gallons Later

Morgan County isn’t the only region in Georgia, nor in the country, to raise water concerns during this new era of data center construction, rapidly accelerated by AI usage. Earlier this year, Politico reported that residents of Annelise Park in Fayetteville, Georgia, noticed unusually low water pressure. An investigation found that Quality Technology Services’ (QTS) construction site had used roughly 30 million gallons of county water before officials discovered that its meters were not linked to the county’s new digital billing and usage-tracking system.

According to the EPA, the average American household uses more than 300 gallons of water daily, which would equate to a baseline of 109,500 gallons annually. Thirty million gallons would take one American household around 274 years to consume.

To Politico, QTS stated that they used up 30 million gallons of water in the span of nine to fifteen months, though Vanessa Tigret, the Fayette County water system director, said it was likely to be four months. The company maintains on their website that they did not use water improperly, but rather, “the issue was the meters were not digitally linked for billing or usage tracking in the county’s new smart meter system.” As soon as they found out, QTS affirmed they paid nearly $150,000 in compensation.

Nonetheless, to go a breezy nine months without paying your utility bills is the sort of unawareness I find… shocking. If I think about it in terms of humbly paying my rent, I would’ve been evicted. Maybe I would’ve been jailed. Willard Neal, a resident nearby the QTS facility similarly said to WBRC news that, “If my daughter down here tapped into that big pipeline down the road without putting a meter on it, she’d be in jail. A data center is not going to jail.”

Server racks at the NOIRLab Headquarters Computer Server Room in Tucson, Arizona.

Photo: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/T. Slovinský. Source. CC BY 4.0.

Closed-Loop Cooling and Its Tradeoff

Chief Operations Officer at QTS, Ryan Hunter, released an article on August 27 promoting their new, sustainable use of closed-loop systems to cool down their data center operations. Closed-loop fluid coolers essentially conserve water because they use a liquid coolant to take up the heat from the server room, which then passes through a heat exchanger, cooling it, and returning to the loop.

In an industry applications explainer by Dynamic Rental Solutions, they expand that this differs from an open-loop system, where the coolant exits the system after passing through the server. Although closed-loop systems require less maintenance and water in the initial cooling process, MOST Policy Initiative flags another challenge: heat still has to be removed before the water returns to the servers. Whether through additional evaporative water cooling; air conditioning cooling that consumes energy; or environmental air cooling, which would increase outdoor air temperature, energy and water bills will inevitably spike. That’s the tradeoff.

But Cheyenne, Wyoming, had its own water problem involving a closed-loop process. The Cheyenne Board of Public Utilities issued Goat Systems, a contractor connected to Meta’s data center project, a notice of significant noncompliance after the release of Cupriavidus gilardii into the city’s wastewater system. Goat Systems appealed the notice, so the dispute remained unresolved when the city released its public records.

Why Rural Communities Are Worried

The Data Center Map website reports that there are currently 4,767 data centers nationwide, with Virginia in the lead with 674 centers, followed by Texas with 537, then California’s 296, Georgia’s 276, and Illinois with 242 centers. If one were to look at a map at where these centers are located within states, their constructions typically fall in nearby rural regions, and not coincidentally. A summary of a Capitol News Illinois article explains that rural America is fertile land for data center construction because, besides being plenty of land with electricity and without existing infrastructure to pose as a hurdle, data center projects are expected to generate the most economic development with “property taxes, construction job creation, and community developments.”

You’d think that if the return investment on these data centers was so rejuvenating, residents would feel more confident about living alongside them. Yet the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics from the University of Illinois published a study earlier in June 2026 that reported that in a survey about how worried residents were of the impacts of AI/Data Center Development, rural respondents were the most concerned at 57.9% out of the three groups of rural, suburban, and urban respondents. Rural respondents were the most concerned about

their rising electricity costs, with an average worry level of 5.41 out of 7, which was considered very worried. Rural respondents were the most concerned about the impacts on agricultural land usage and electricity bill costs in comparison to suburban and urban respondents.

The pattern to be noticed is that large, multi-million dollar corporations get the leniency and buffer period to be held accountable months after the damage has been done. As of August 27, the U.S. Drought Monitor has updated Georgia’s map to have abnormally dry and moderately dry regions than not. That means their fire risk is elevated, their agriculture delayed. And the pattern to be questioned is why data centers are being constructed in or near to rural communities that lack the resources and regulations set to combat Big Tech’s Mistakes. Because it’s not just going to be Morgan County or Fayetteville in Georgia, or Cheyenne, Wyoming. It’s going to be Texas. It’s in Tucson, Arizona. It’s going to be Gilroy, California. It’s all up in Virginia. It’s going to be in every state. It’s going to be about everyone’s water, and it should be everyone’s problem.