Meta's Georgia Data Center Under Congressional Scrutiny as Residents Report Contaminated Well Water
In the pine country east of Atlanta, where subdivisions give way to farmland and the aquifer is the only source of drinking water for thousands of households, residents say the water started changing last year. Brown. Cloudy. Sometimes smelling of chlorine. They blame Meta's $10 billion data center campus, one of the largest private infrastructure projects in Georgia history.
The company broke ground on the facility in early 2025. By the end of the year, residents in surrounding Morgan County had begun filing complaints with the Georgia Environmental Protection Division. Some hired private water testers. A community group formed. And on Thursday, the controversy reached Washington, where Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pressed Meta's head of global infrastructure on the company's water consumption and its responsibilities to neighbours whose wells draw from the same aquifer.
The exchange, at a House Oversight Committee hearing on tech sector environmental impact, was pointed. Ocasio-Cortez cited initial water testing results shared by Morgan County residents showing elevated levels of sediment and, in at least two cases, contaminants the EPA flags for neurological concern. She asked whether Meta had conducted baseline water studies before construction and whether the company had any obligation to compensate residents for degraded water quality. The Meta executive said the company had engaged an independent environmental consultant and was cooperating with state regulators.
The episode underscores a tension that data center construction has increasingly produced across the American Southeast: the physical weight of AI infrastructure — enormous, water-hungry, grid-dependent — coming down in places with limited regulatory bandwidth and aquifers that are, for many residents, the only water supply.
What residents are reporting
Morgan County has a population of roughly 20,000. Many households, particularly outside the small city of Madison, the county seat, rely on private wells that tap directly into the Upper Floridan Aquifer. That aquifer also supplies municipalities across the region. The county has no municipal water system to buffer contamination or provide alternative sourcing if a private well fails.
Residents who spoke with local media described water that began changing colour and smell shortly after heavy earthwork began on the Meta site. Several said their previous water was clear and had no notable odour. Private testing commissioned by at least three households identified higher-than-baseline sediment loads and, in one test, traces of a chemical compound associated with industrial equipment degreasing — a substance the EPA notes can affect blood and neurological systems at sustained exposure levels.
Meta has disputed the causal link. The company's environmental consultant provided the Georgia EPD with modelling suggesting construction activity alone could temporarily disturb sediment levels in shallow wells near the site. The EPD has not issued any findings or enforcement actions as of May 23, 2026, and declined to comment on the timeline for a review.
The state agency has received at least eleven formal complaints from Morgan County residents, according to records the agency released in response to a public records request by a regional news outlet. The agency confirmed the complaints are under review but has not described what remediation, if any, it is requiring of Meta.
The infrastructure calculus behind the site
Meta chose Morgan County in part because Georgia offers some of the cheapest industrial electricity rates in the country, generated largely by nuclear and natural gas. The state has actively courted large data center operators through tax abatements and expedited permitting, making it a favoured location for hyperscale projects from multiple major tech firms. The Morgan County site is planned to occupy approximately 600 acres — roughly the footprint of 450 football fields — and is expected to draw tens of millions of gallons of water daily for cooling systems.
That water demand sits uncomfortably with Georgia's recurring drought conditions. The state experienced significant water shortages in 2022 and 2024, prompting the Georgia Water Planning and Policy Center to warn that major new industrial users would strain already-constrained allocations. Meta has committed to water efficiency targets for the facility and said it will use air cooling for some operations, but has not released a full water usage projection or an agreement with local water authorities to manage drawdown during dry periods.
The conflict is not unique to Georgia. Data centers in Virginia, Texas, and Arizona have faced similar resident complaints and regulatory scrutiny as hyperscale construction accelerates to meet demand from AI model training and deployment. The industry consumed an estimated 17 billion gallons of water in the United States in 2024 alone, according to a study published in Nature Water. Researchers at the University of California and Carnegie Mellon who studied data center water use found that efficiency improvements in cooling technology have not kept pace with the scale of new construction, meaning absolute water consumption continues to rise even as per-unit efficiency improves.
What Congress is asking
Ocasio-Cortez's line of questioning at the Oversight hearing drew on the Morgan County complaints but expanded into a broader critique of data center environmental oversight. She noted that the Clean Water Act permits that govern industrial discharge do not require pre-construction baseline water quality studies for projects on private land with private well users downstream — a regulatory gap, she argued, that leaves communities without recourse until contamination is documented after the fact.
The Meta executive responded that the company supports strengthened permitting standards and that it would work with the EPD on any required mitigation. He did not commit to compensating affected residents or funding alternative water supply for those whose wells have been degraded.
A separate question — whether Meta has consulted with the Army Corps of Engineers regarding its stormwater management plan for the site — remains open. The Army Corps confirmed it has received Meta's erosion and sediment control plan for review but said no permit decision has been issued. Stormwater runoff from large earthwork sites is a documented pathway for sediment and chemical introduction into shallow groundwater systems.
The Georgia EPD said it expects to issue a determination on the Morgan County site environmental compliance by the end of the second quarter. A spokesperson for Morgan County's Board of Commissioners said the county has no regulatory authority over the site but has formally requested that the state expedite its review of the water complaints.
The stakes for Meta and the region
For Meta, the issue represents a reputational and regulatory risk at a moment when the company is competing aggressively to secure power and land for AI infrastructure at a scale that has attracted antitrust scrutiny in Europe and concern from environmental groups in the United States. The Morgan County project is central to Meta's stated capacity expansion. Any delay in permitting — or any finding that the site contributed to water contamination — could affect financing terms and future site selection decisions by other large operators eyeing Georgia.
For Morgan County residents, the stakes are more immediate and less abstract. Several households have already paid for bottled water delivery and temporary filtration systems. Private water testing runs several hundred dollars per sample — a cost that, if remediation is ultimately required, would fall on residents rather than the company whose construction activity is alleged to have caused the harm. Without a municipal water system to fall back on, those residents have limited options if their wells do not recover.
The congressional hearing has not produced legislation. But it has placed the issue on a public record that environmental lawyers in the state are watching. One attorney who handles groundwater contamination cases in Georgia said in an interview that the regulatory framework covering private well harm is, in her words, "a genuine gap" — and that Meta's project may have exposed it in a way that prompts legislative attention.
Whether that attention arrives before more residents lose access to clean water is the question now before state regulators and the company alike.
This publication reported the congressional hearing using the Telegram thread that first surfaced the Morgan County residents' accounts, supplemented by public records released by the Georgia Environmental Protection Division. No independent water testing was commissioned by this desk. The claims of contamination rest on resident-submitted test results not yet validated by the EPD.