eWhen I saw the headline about Microsoft building yet another data center near Atlanta, my first reaction was not excitement about jobs or innovation. I thought about water and power. Then, I thought about the same kinds of communities that always seem to get picked to carry the burden for everybody else’s comfort. What does it mean for Georgia to become a playground for more of them?

A data center is a warehouse full of computers that never sleep. It is the physical body of the internet. Your pictures, your email, your bank app, your favorite shows, your cloud backups, your work files, this article… they all live on servers sitting inside of these buildings

Those machines cannot overheat, and they cannot lose power. That is where the real cost comes in. Imagine a giant room where every wall is lined with equipment that is working at full speed all day and all night. All that work turns into heat. If you do not cool those machines constantly, they fail. So most data centers are basically huge air and water conditioners for computers.

A lot of them rely on water-based cooling. Clean water is pumped through systems that absorb heat from the servers, and then that heat is released back into the air through big cooling towers outside. The hotter the climate and the more powerful the computers, the more water they tend to pull. Studies of large server campuses have found that some individual sites use several million gallons of water in a single day just to stay cool.

That is only the visible water. There is also the water you never see, the water that is used to generate the electricity that feeds these places. Most power plants still boil water into steam to turn turbines. So when one of these big buildings pulls more and more megawatts off the grid, it is silently pulling even more water from rivers, lakes, and aquifers upstream.

Out of the power itself, data centers already use a noticeable slice of all electricity in the United States. Analysts say they account for several percent of national power demand, and that share is expected to grow fast through this decade, especially because artificial intelligence uses far more power for each query than a normal search.

All of this is wrapped in “feel-good” marketing about the cloud. They talk about digital transformation while they quietly build industrial-sized machines that must be fed water and electricity every second of every day.

Who pays for all of this

On paper, the pitch to small towns and suburbs always sounds pretty. A big tech company comes in with a polished slide deck. They promise tax revenue, jobs, and they flash pictures of clean white server rooms and happy workers. Local officials often sign agreements long before regular residents even know what is being planned.

Once construction begins, the story shifts. Neighbors wake up to noise, traffic, and a giant concrete box that looks nothing like the renderings. The cooling systems run and hum. Backup generators sit ready for outages. In some places, diesel generators add another layer of air pollution in communities that are already overexposed.

Then the water bills and usage numbers start to surface. Newton County, here in Georgia, is one real-world example. Reporting has shown that a single large data center has been using around half a million gallons of water every day, which is a significant share of the county’s total public water use.

Other Georgia projects on the table are planning to use up to several million gallons daily, which is like draining multiple city water towers every twenty-four hours. People who live on farms or rely on private wells do not have to be scientists to understand what that kind of demand can do over time in a state that already argues over water at the river basin level.

You also cannot ignore who is being asked to live beside this stuff. In metro Atlanta, many of the proposed or existing data center sites sit near Black and working-class communities that already deal with higher energy bills and lower investment in basic things like transit, groceries, and health care.

The pattern is familiar. Big companies extract value from the land and the grid. Local people absorb the noise, the risk, and the long-term uncertainty. When water feels less secure and property values feel shaky, some folks move away if they can. The ones who cannot move are the ones most exposed.

The growth is happening fast. Georgia has become one of the busiest states in the country for new server farms. New projects keep being announced around metro Atlanta and beyond as companies race to build capacity for artificial intelligence and cloud services.

The pushback is growing just as fast. County commissions and city councils across the state have started passing temporary bans and tighter rules on new data centers, at least for long enough to figure out what they are actually agreeing to.

Even the companies can see that the public mood is changing. That is why you now see announcements about new designs that claim to use little to no water for cooling. Microsoft has said that its newer data centers, including ones planned around Atlanta, will rely on different technology that does not lean on constant water withdrawal. If that is truly what they build and not just what they promise, that is a step in the right direction.

Still, one efficient building does not cancel out the impact of an entire wave of development. And here is the uncomfortable part. We actually do use the services these places provide. We like the convenience of streaming, remote work, telehealth, online school, instant storage, and smartphones that back up everything to the cloud. Community groups use these same tools to organize, to tell our stories, and to fight back against injustice. So the point is not to deny the usefulness of connected technology.

The point is to ask what kind of deal we are really making. If the internet is going to live in our backyards, then we deserve more than corporate press releases and one-time community grants. We deserve transparent numbers on water and energy usage. Not to mention, we deserve a real say in where these facilities go and where they do not go. We also deserve commitments that center on human life, clean water, breathable air, and long-term community stability over short-term corporate profit.

When I say not another data center, I am not saying shut down every server room on earth. I am saying no more blind consent. No more building in silence and fixing the damage later. No more treating certain towns and neighborhoods as the sacrifice zones that must quietly carry the weight so that the rest of the world can scroll without thinking.

These companies are tapping into our rivers, our power grids, and our public money. They are not doing us a favor. They are doing business. If they want to set up shop in Georgia and call it innovation, then they need to start by respecting the people who live here, telling the truth about the cost, and proving that the land and the water will still be livable for our children.

Until then, every new ribbon-cutting for another massive server campus feels less like progress and more like a warning siren. Not another data center without real accountability and real consent from the people who have to live with it.