Impact of Data Centers on Communities

This is my cold water pressure in the kitchen.

This is where I fill up water for storage.

Those are the things we have to fill up to flush the toilets.

So you can see the sediment from the data center.

Wow. And that's just from the water coming out of your faucet? Yeah.

And this is what's in all the pipes.

Just the well itself is probably

20 000, and that's not counting any of the faucets.

All the replacement of

the fixtures and faucets and toilets and the lines that come underneath the house.

It's overwhelming because you really feel like you are up

against this huge wall that you can't penetrate.

There's nothing that you can do, and they don't care.

I'm here in Mansfield, Georgia,

driving by MEDA's new 2 million square foot data center facility.

Facilities like this are being used to power things like chatGBT and other

AI tools that are becoming integrated into our daily life.

Data centers can be a very hot item.

This entire supercomputer is built to power Grok.

We see data centers as the most exciting asset class.

MEDA is building a 2 gigawatt plus data

center that is so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan.

But data centers come with big costs,

from light and noise pollution to the environmental impacts to the potential

rising costs of energy bills.

These facilities put extraordinary demand on the power grid and

require entirely new infrastructure.

Oh my god. They should be responsible for that, not us.

Search the internet for profits that MEDA has made, Amazon, Microsoft.

They can afford to pay for their own generation.

We came to Georgia to ask two questions.

What's the true cost of the AI revolution and who

should be paying for it?

Your house is here and the data center is right there. It's less than 400 yards.

Beverly and Jeff Morris bought their home an hour's drive from

downtown Atlanta in 2016.

But their roots in the community run much deeper.

Being in the country has always just been my peace and my therapy.

When we found this place, we decided that this was it. It was perfect.

I was actually raised probably five miles from here.