Meta's Georgia Data Center Draws Roughly Ten Percent of the County's Daily Water Supply to Cool Servers. A Member of Congress Had to Bring Jars of the Neighbors' Brown Tap Water to a Hearing Before the EPA Agreed to Look.

Beverly and Jeff Morris live about 1,000 feet from Meta's data center campus straddling Newton and Morgan Counties, Georgia, a $750 million-to-$1 billion-plus build in the Stanton Springs industrial park. Their well water ran dry, then came back brown with sediment, and in the months since it has ruined a dishwasher, a washing machine, and a toilet. Meta's servers next door draw roughly 10 percent of the county's entire daily water supply to stay cool.

It took nine months, a lawsuit, two moratoriums, and a sitting member of Congress carrying jars of the neighbors' tap water into a federal hearing room before the Environmental Protection Agency agreed to even look at what happened. The company building the AI infrastructure needed no hearing at all to get tens of billions of dollars in guaranteed electricity spending approved on paper.

The wells run brown

Homeowners on private wells near the Stanton Springs campus started noticing the change not long after construction ramped up: taps that sputtered air, then ran dry, then came back discolored. Reporting from the Press Democrat and the New York Times documented the sequence directly from residents including Beverly and Jeff Morris, whose water now carries enough sediment to have damaged three household appliances.

• The Meta campus draws approximately 10% of Newton County's total daily water use.
• Affected wells sit roughly 1,000 feet from the data center site.
• Newton County water rates are set to rise 33%.
• The county is projected to hit a water deficit by 2030.

The jars in the hearing room

On May 20, 2026, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez held up jars of brown Morgan County tap water at a House Oversight and Investigations subcommittee hearing. EPA Assistant Administrator Jessica Kramer, present to answer questions, pledged the agency would investigate the link between the data center and the contaminated water.

The jars were, functionally, the evidence that moved the process forward. Not a water-quality report. Not a hydrology study. A member of Congress physically transporting discolored tap water into a hearing room.

The lawsuit

Homeowners have since filed suit against Meta, according to reporting by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, alleging that construction and blasting at the data center site disturbed the local aquifer and caused the contamination. In response to the mounting pressure, local governments moved faster than federal regulators did:

• Social Circle, Georgia enacted a 90-day moratorium on new data center applications starting around September 2025, later extended.
• Newton County enacted its own moratorium on new data center applications.

Not just Georgia

The pattern of a data center operator declining to disclose its water use until forced predates the Meta story. In The Dalles, Oregon, Google fought its own host city in court for more than a year to keep its water consumption secret. It disclosed the numbers only after The Oregonian/OregonLive sued and won.

• Google used 383.9 million gallons of water in 2023.
• Google used 434.4 million gallons of water in 2024 — about 1.19 million gallons per day.
• That figure represents roughly one-third of The Dalles' entire municipal water supply.
• Google separately holds rights to pump up to 3.88 million gallons per day from groundwater via a former aluminum smelter site it purchased.

For scale: a large AI data center can use up to 5 million gallons a day, comparable to the water demand of a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people. A "typical" data center uses roughly 300,000 gallons a day, comparable to about 1,000 households.

The other utility bill

Water is the visible half of the story. Electricity is the half that shows up on every ratepayer's bill, whether or not they live near a data center at all. PJM Interconnection, the regional grid operator covering 13 states and Washington, D.C., runs an annual capacity auction that sets what utilities pay to guarantee future power supply. That price has moved as follows:

• 2024-25 auction: $28.92 per megawatt-day.
• 2026-27 auction: $329.17 per megawatt-day — the FERC price cap, hit two auctions running.
• December 2025 auction (2027-28): cleared at $333.44 per megawatt-day.

PJM's own independent market monitor identified data centers as the "primary reason" for the increase, attributing 63 percent of the price rise in the 2025/26 auction to data center demand — a $9.3 billion cost passed directly to ratepayers. Cumulative costs are projected at $100 billion to $163 billion through 2033, working out to roughly $70 more per month for an average family by 2028.

Georgia approves the bill

In December 2025, the Georgia Public Service Commission approved a 10-gigawatt capacity expansion for Georgia Power specifically to serve data center demand. The build itself costs $16.3 billion. The estimated cost to customers over the following decades, including financing and utility profit, runs $50 billion to $60 billion.

The same regulators froze Georgia Power's base rates through 2028, a move explicitly intended to blunt data-center costs from shifting onto residential customers — a tacit admission, on the record, that the risk was real. No jars were required for that admission. It came through the ordinary channel: a regulatory filing, a vote, a press release.

A member of Congress had to carry jars of brown well water into a federal hearing room to get the EPA to agree to look at what a trillion-dollar company's data center did to a rural Georgia county's water supply. The same industry's electricity costs — $16.3 billion becoming $50 to $60 billion, passed to ratepayers who never asked for any of it — were approved by regulators without anyone needing to bring anything to a hearing at all.

Filed from public reporting:

• Press Democrat/NYT — "Meta built a new data center in Georgia. Their neighbors' water ran dry"
• Atlanta Journal-Constitution — "Georgia families sue Meta, accuse its data center of tainting their water"
• Yahoo Finance — "AOC holds up jar of brown water at EPA hearing"
• Bloomberg Law — "EPA Official Agrees to Review Data Center Impacts on Water"
• The Covington News — "Social Circle enacts 90-day moratorium on data centers"
• KGW — "Google data center water use revealed after The Dalles drops fight to keep it private"
• OPB — "As Google's water demands grow, The Dalles aims to pull more from Mount Hood forest"
• Utility Dive — "Data centers 'primary reason' for high PJM capacity prices: market monitor"
• Canary Media — "PJM's capacity costs hit record as grid falls short on supply"
• Georgia Recorder — "Georgia regulators approve massive power grid expansion to serve data centers"
• Fortune — "America's data centers are thirsty. Rural towns are paying the price"