“I can’t drink the water’ – life next to a US data centre. When Beverly Morris retired in 2016, she thought she had found her dream home – a peaceful stretch of rural Georgia, surrounded by trees and quiet.

Today, it’s nothing but.

Just 400 yards (366m) from her front porch in Mansfield, Georgia, sits a large, windowless building filled with servers, cables, and blinking lights.

It’s a data centre – one of many popping up across small-towns in America, and around the globe, to power everything from online banking to artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT.

According to McKinsey, AI is expected to use about 12 per cent of the country’s energy by the end of the ongoing decade

“I can’t live in my home with half of my home functioning and no water,” Ms Morris says. “I can’t drink the water.”

She believes the construction of the centre, which is owned by Meta (the parent company of Facebook), disrupted her private well, causing an excessive build-up of sediment. Ms Morris now hauls water in buckets to flush her toilet.

She says she had to fix the plumbing in her kitchen to restore water pressure. But the water that comes out of the tap still has residue in it. “I’m afraid to drink the water, but I still cook with it, and brush my teeth with it,” says Morris. “Am I worried about it? Yes.”

Meta, however, says the two aren’t connected.

In a statement to the BBC, Meta said that “being a good neighbour is a priority”.

The company commissioned an independent groundwater study to investigate Morris’s concerns. According to the report, its data centre operation did “not adversely affect groundwater conditions in the area.

While Meta........

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