Outside Mansfield, Georgia, just under an hour’s drive from Atlanta, Jeff and Beverly Morris live right where the road turns from pavement to gravel. They have horses, a dog, a small above-ground pool in the back of their Cape Cod house, and a sign in the kitchen that says, “I was raised on Country Sunshine.” And they have one other thing—a big problem.
Whatever the rural idyll they imagined when they bought the home and moved there in 2016, it was shattered when, about a year later, Meta began building a data center less than 400 yards away. The hulking concrete building peeks out through the evergreens, visible from their mailbox.
Last Wednesday, Congressman Ro Khanna, a Democrat who represents part of Silicon Valley, came to visit. The Morrises showed Khanna the canning jars full of the well water they’d kept, in various stages of opacity from whatever brown material had infiltrated their well and clogged their filters. They showed him how the water came straight up from the earth that same solid gray-brown. They showed him a thoroughly corroded hot water heater in their shed, which they’d had to replace, along with just about every other appliance that has water running through it. They say that out of three usable bathrooms in their home, they are down to one. “I did hire a well guy to come out, and I said, ‘Is my property just full of sediment? What is happening here?’,” Beverly Morris told Khanna. “And he looked at me, pointed across the road, and he goes, ‘There’s one answer to your question, and it’s not going to change.’”
They showed him a map of their well-water catchment area: Their well is the only water source they have, though their lawyer said Meta has a municipal water hookup for the data center. Brown water sometimes floods their front ditch. Photos of their rural, pastoral nights show it now lit bright as day from light pollution by the data center. “This affects not only your everyday living and what you’ve got to do to adjust your life, but you can’t change, you’re trapped,” Beverly Morris said.
“We’ve got to develop the technology in a way that’s going to help all of us,” Khanna said. “Right now, it’s just helping a few of these tech billionaires, and they’re riding roughshod over communities.” He listed the other threats from Big Tech—the Hugging Face incident, the potential loss of jobs—but zoomed in on the kinds of hits the Morrises and so many Americans like them were taking in their own home, and questioned the costs and the benefits, which right now seem to only be enriching billionaires.
Khanna is pushing for a Data Center Bill of Rights to outline new rules around where and how data centers can be built, meant to protect the people and environments they might impact. He also sent a letter to Meta demanding answers for the Morrises and their co-plaintiffs: they filed a lawsuit against Meta, development companies, and authorities in August.
The fight highlights something even bigger, though. From the center-left, pro-building Abundists have been putting pressure on Democrats to fund and build more and do it all faster—whether it’s housing or new transportation or research around the technologies that could change our futures—and ease up on the kinds of community-led concerns often dismissed as NIMBYism, which has become a dirty word. They’ve been arguing that this approach can increase unalloyed goods, like more green energy that will slow climate change.
But the data center explosion shows that sometimes bad things that may harm us and the environment can be built just as quickly if we let them, and that there are real questions about who bears the cost and who benefits when rules are waived. Some things might not belong in backyards, or front yards, at all.
The Morrises are just a tiny part of the data center rebellion unfolding across the country, the embattled frontlines that illustrate the downside risks to letting the data centers go into residential neighborhoods across the country. They want the harms they’ve listed to serve as a warning.
Meta named one of the roads leading to the data center “Move Fast Way,” borrowing from the early motto from Facebook, before it became the larger Meta, “Move fast and break things.” Breaking things are what the Morrises and their co-plaintiffs said the company did, and they want answers. They say the company has suggested that the problems they’ve encountered are their fault or due to lack of routine maintenance. They say they never had the problems they’re encountering now, especially with their water, before the data center moved in.
Beverly Morris told Khanna she felt like she was living in the early nineteenth century, having to boil water or cart it in from elsewhere for her animals to drink, which harkens back to the Flint, Michigan water disaster, which began in 2014. Big blue tubs of clean water sit in the bed of a side-by-side off-road vehicle in their front yard. “That shouldn’t be happening in twenty-first century America,” he said.
Khanna asked about whether they could move, but they said they wouldn’t be able to sell their home for what it is worth. They are retired and wanted this to be their home. For them to move would mean cutting their losses.
Democrats have seen a political opportunity in the data center and artificial intelligence fights, both of which have united Americans across the political spectrum in opposition. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Congresswoman from New York, also visited the Morrises earlier this year, and took a jar of their water back to the House floor in May to give a speech. Other Democrats, like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, have argued for public stakes in artificial intelligence development so that people can benefit from the money it generates for Wall Street and cushion themselves against possible job losses as the technology changes workplaces.
Americans have grown sharply more negative about data centers, according to Pew Research Center, and states are considering moratoriums on building them, like the one New York passed, until more environmental and community impacts can be studied. There’s a rare bipartisan sense of unity around the issue. Yet the Morrises’ attorneys said none of their representatives, including their current Congressman Representative Mike Collins, who’s running for Senate against Democrat Jon Ossoff, have reached out to them or visited. The Republican Party dismisses data center opposition as driven by Chinese propaganda, and House Republicans have urged the Trump administration to investigate China’s influence on the matter.
Whether Khanna and Ocasio-Cortez have presidential ambitions, they both seem to be acting like it, appearing on morning shows and visiting parts of the country far from their districts. The most likely end result is that they will raise their profiles in their own big, influential states, California and New York, where they could have an outsized impact on these issues for the country as a whole because of their prominence.
But what and how should they influence Big Tech to do? Khanna said the companies keep bringing up competition with China as the justification for building out new data centers so quickly. But he says it can come at irreparable cost. “We can compete without compromising our values,” he says in his letter to Meta. “As such, I also request a briefing from Meta on how, if at all, it will be revising its process of selecting sites for data centers and incorporating community inputs based on its clear failure to do so...”
It’s not the first time in history that rural areas have been asked to bear the brunt of rapid change for technology meant to benefit others. It wouldn’t be the first time in history that a rural or otherwise disregarded neighborhood had to disproportionately bear the brunt of any kind of development. And environments around the country show the scars left when boom and bust cycles destroy local ecosystems and communities only to leave ruin in their wake when they move on to the next big thing. If AI is a bubble and it crashes, it will leave an empty, hulking building in its wake, and studies from abandoned mining communities to urban brownfield sites show how declining infrastructure can damage individual health, further drive down property values, and leave communities empty and vulnerable to crime.
That history is why the hurdles that sometimes slow development, like environmental reviews and community meetings, existed in the first place. I asked Khanna about that tension: how do policymakers reconcile the need for more development around green energy and housing while showing caution around developments like data centers?
“We need to have strong safeguards and guardrails for clean water, for preserving the land, for keeping the air clean,” he said. “I am for building out clean energy, but I’m not for doing that at the expense of environmental standards, and that has to be a conversation about how we do that in the context of building out clean energy. But this is not building out clean energy. This is a data center that is making billions of dollars for these hyperscalers, and there’s no reason to give any waiver from our environmental protection for these data centers.”
That ability, to decide what’s beneficial and what is not, is exactly what so many voters don’t trust their representatives to do right now. Khanna may have been trying to build that trust when he went to visit the Morrises: People want to know someone will listen to their concerns. “Local communities should get to decide first of all whether they want them, and they shouldn’t be near residential communities or farmland,” he said. “I think it’s a pretty common-sense view, and until we get that, there should be a moratorium until, on a state-by-state local basis, because we can’t build in ways like this.”