AI Data Centers: Cautionary Tales from Other Communities

Every community that has faced what Oxmoor Valley faces was once quiet too.

Each town or city was told more or less the same things, and each believed there was time to sort out the details later.

The stories below are not warnings we invented.

They are the record of what happened after the earthmovers left and the problems began—and of what a few communities managed to stop before it was too late.

Vineland, New Jersey: Nebius’ flagship American data center. The neighbors have already gone to court.

The company building the AI Mega Factory in Oxmoor Valley already has an AI data center in America, one designed to reach 300 megawatts.

It is in Vineland, New Jersey, developed and operated by DataOne and built (in Nebius' own words) to Nebius' own design.

Nebius has committed to the site as a tenant for 10 years. The first phase went live in 2025. The campus is still under construction.

In May 2026, two residents filed a proposed class action in federal court against DataOne, the facility's owner and operator, alleging an industrial humming noise that can be heard day and night across the surrounding neighborhoods and farmland.

The suit describes roughly 1,000 residential properties within a mile of the site. "It's a very loud industrial noise," one plaintiff said. "Sounds like a helicopter hovering, loud fans like you're at an airport."

The federal suit was voluntarily dismissed without prejudice on June 19, 2026, a dismissal that preserves the residents' right to refile.

Vineland is what a Nebius facility sounds like on its way to 300 megawatts, to the people who live within a mile of one. Oxmoor Valley does not have to guess.

Sources: Nebius
Nebius
Data Centre Magazine
VinelandToday
CBS Philadelphia
WilmerHale

Eastern Oregon: Amazon agreed to pay $20.5 million over contaminated wells. It is the first settlement of its kind.

The Lower Umatilla Basin covers 562 square miles of Morrow and Umatilla counties in eastern Oregon. Roughly 45,000 people live there, and thousands of them draw their drinking water from private wells.

The Oregon Health Authority has found more than 600 domestic wells in the basin with unsafe levels of nitrate, some at nearly ten times the federal limit.

Nitrate overexposure reduces the blood's ability to carry oxygen, a condition called blue baby syndrome that is particularly dangerous for infants.

In adults, studies have linked long-term exposure to thyroid disease and certain cancers.

In 2024, residents sued the Port of Morrow and a group of agricultural and industrial operators in federal court.

In early 2026, the same residents filed a companion class action against Amazon, which has operated data centers at the Port of Morrow since 2011.

The lawsuit alleges that nitrate-laden water used to cool Amazon's servers partially evaporates in the process, leaving the water behind more concentrated with nitrates before it is channeled to canals or sprayed onto area farm fields.

Amazon settled almost immediately. On March 31, 2026, it agreed to pay $20.5 million, denying any wrongdoing.

The settlement awaits final court approval, with a fairness hearing set for January 2027. The money will fund private wells and public water treatment projects across the basin. The litigation continues against the Port of Morrow and the agricultural and industrial defendants.

It is the first time a Big Tech company has agreed to pay damages arising from alleged public health harms tied to the construction and operation of its data centers.

The settlement came two years after residents first went to court over the basin, and more than thirty years after the state first acknowledged its contamination.

Sources: Oregon Capital Chronicle
Rolling Stone and FERN
KGW
Hagens Berman

Coweta County, Georgia: thirty homes will be leveled for the power lines

Georgia Power is building more than 1,000 miles of new transmission lines across the state, crossing more than 330 parcels of land.

Along one 500-kilovolt corridor planned through Fayette, Fulton, Coweta and Heard counties, nearly 30 homes will be demolished.

Separately, Georgia Power says data centers would consume roughly 80% of the approximately 10,000 megawatts of new generating capacity it has requested statewide.

Homeowners in the path are given a choice: sell, grant the utility an easement, or face eminent domain. Georgia Power says it starts negotiations at 125% of appraised value and uses condemnation only as a last resort.

The family whose fight has drawn the most attention has lived in their home since 2003, bought through a government loan program. “My childhood home is being taken by Georgia Power,” Ansley Brown said. “They are going to bulldoze this entire property to the ground.”

One more detail. The QTS data center campus that drew 29 million gallons of Fayette County water through unbilled taps, a story we’ve told on this page, sits less than five miles from the new substation.

Sources: Fortune
Tom's Hardware

Louisa County, Virginia: brown water, red dust, and a neighbor who sold to Amazon and left

In Louisa County, Virginia, the harm did not wait for the ribbon-cutting. It arrived with the first dump truck.

Austin Newsom runs a boat detailing and repair business out of his home there, across the street from the site of Amazon's newest data center campus in Louisa County.

Most days he watches dozens of dump trucks barrel down Route 33, hauling dirt and debris.

The road is stained rusty red from the displaced soil. He says the mud washes into his driveway, and his well water has turned brown.

One day his neighbor across the street was simply gone; when Newsom looked up who owned the property, it was Amazon.

In August 2025 he filed suit against the company over the construction’s effects on his home and his business. Environmental advocate Erin Brockovich has described his case publicly, walking through it in a series of videos.

“You know, one person can make a difference,” Newsom said. “So if one person like myself can get as far as I have and make the differences that I have with everything, everybody else can, too.”

Source: Virginia Mercury

A rare bacterium turns up in a city’s water, traced to a data center

In Cheyenne, Wyoming, officials detected Cupriavidus gilardii, a rare environmental bacterium, in the city’s reclaimed water system in February 2026. It was traced to wastewater from the construction and commissioning of a Meta AI data center that had entered the city’s wastewater network.

The finding forced a months-long cleanup and disinfection effort.

The bacterium was never found in drinking water, only in water used for irrigation and other non-potable purposes. Even so, officials worried that residents could be exposed by inhaling aerosolized droplets where the water was used, in places like parks and golf courses.

After Cheyenne’s utility traced the contamination to Meta’s Project Cosmo site, contractor Goat Systems LLC’s authority to discharge was revoked. Cheyenne has since stopped accepting this class of wastewater from all data centers, not merely Meta’s contractor.

Sources: Forbes
Cowboy State Daily

A data center drank a quarter of a city’s water, then went to court to hide the number

Google’s data centers in The Dalles, Oregon, a city of about 16,000, consumed 355 million gallons of water in 2021. That was roughly a quarter of the city’s total water use that year, during a multi-year drought.

Google’s consumption in The Dalles did not level off after the 355-million-gallon disclosure.

It rose past 430 million gallons by 2024, roughly one-third of all water used in the city, more than triple its 2012 use.

Google barred city officials from disclosing projected water use for its expansion, and when the local newspaper demanded actual figures, the city sued to keep them secret while Google agreed to pay the city’s legal costs.

Sources: Fortune
Oregon Capital Chronicle (OPB)

Their taps ran dry when Meta built next door

After Meta broke ground on a data center in Newton County, Georgia, the water taps in Beverly and Jeff Morris’ home went dry. Their house relies on well water and sits about 1,000 feet from the site.

Months after data center construction began in 2018, the Morrises’ dishwasher, ice maker, washing machine and toilet all stopped working. What water remained turned into a gritty sludge, littered with sediment. They estimate $5,000 spent so far and cannot afford the roughly $25,000 to replace the well.

Meta denies causing the damage, but the Morrises had usable well water before the excavation began and unusable water afterward, while living roughly 1,000 feet from the site.

At a congressional hearing, a member of Congress held up jars of discolored well water from the area, and the EPA said it would review the situation.

Source: WSB-TV

Two water taps, one of them undisclosed, neither one billed

About 20 miles south of Atlanta, residents of the Annelise Park subdivision in Fayette County, Georgia, watched their water pressure fall for a year.

The county utility investigated and found two industrial-scale water hookups feeding a 615-acre data center campus, developed by Quality Technology Services (QTS), a company owned by Blackstone.

One connection had been installed without the utility’s knowledge. The second was not associated with the company’s account, and so was not being billed. By the time the county caught the problem, QTS had consumed more than 29 million gallons over roughly 15 months and paid $147,474 in back charges. The county imposed no fine.

QTS has a history. In Iowa, state officials discovered 40 unpermitted wells at the company’s data center site in Cedar Rapids in 2025, prompting Linn County to seek a $20,000 fine. In both states, the problem was discovered only after the company had already been using public water or groundwater outside the permitting and billing systems meant to control it.

Source: Fortune

Dozens of gas turbines, no permits, in a neighborhood already suffering poor air quality

To power its Colossus supercomputer in South Memphis, Elon Musk’s xAI installed 35 natural-gas turbines near the predominantly Black Boxtown neighborhood without obtaining air permits, claiming the supposedly temporary equipment was exempt from normal permitting requirements.

The turbines emit nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, fine particulate matter and formaldehyde. Nitrogen oxides help form smog and can aggravate asthma and other respiratory illnesses. Formaldehyde is a known carcinogen.

The turbines were placed in a community already burdened by decades of industrial pollution, where the cancer risk is estimated at four times the national average.

At TIME’s request, researchers at the University of Tennessee analyzed satellite air-quality data from before and after xAI began operating. They found that average nitrogen-dioxide concentrations around the facility rose 3%, while peak concentrations rose 79%.

In nearby Boxtown, peak concentrations rose 9%. The researchers said the changes likely reflected several sources, including xAI’s turbines and increased operation of a nearby TVA power plant—but xAI itself was consuming about 13% of that plant’s generating capacity.

The Memphis installation was not an isolated improvisation.

xAI later installed another 59 unpermitted turbines to power Colossus 2, including 57 in Southaven, Mississippi, just across the state line from Memphis.

Reuters found that the number was about twice what xAI had publicly acknowledged and that the turbines’ potential emissions far exceeded the threshold requiring a federal Clean Air Act permit.

Mississippi regulators and xAI maintain that the turbines need no permit because they are mobile and temporary, even though they operate together as one of the nation’s largest private gas-power installations serving a single customer.

Mississippi subsequently approved a permanent 41-turbine power plant for Colossus 2 after a single public hearing. A Harvard-led study estimated that pollution from those turbines could cause between $30 million and $44 million in health damages each year through premature deaths, hospital visits, illness and lost productivity.

The NAACP and environmental groups have sued xAI, alleging that it violated the Clean Air Act by installing and operating the turbines without the required permits. xAI claims its operations comply with applicable law.

In June 2026, the U.S. Justice Department intervened on the company’s side, arguing in a court filing that restricting the turbines could threaten national security because xAI’s systems support U.S. military operations.

Sources: TIME
Reuters
U.S. Department of Justice

Everyone else’s power bill pays for the buildout

Data centers are already reshaping electricity bills for tens of millions of households. PJM’s independent market monitor estimated that data centers were responsible for 63% of the price increase in the 2025/2026 capacity auction, which translates to $9.3 billion in costs to be recovered from customers across the grid in higher electric rates.

By 2028, according to an NRDC analysis, an average family could see monthly electricity bills rise by about $70. In Washington, D.C., Pepco residential customers saw their bills go up by an average of $21 a month starting in June 2025, about half of it tied to the capacity spike.

Source: IEEFA

Microsoft built the “world’s most powerful” AI data center; the neighbors say it’s a freight train that never leaves

Residents near Microsoft’s Fairwater AI data-center complex in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, say the facility produces a relentless mechanical roar and low-frequency hum that continues day and night, interferes with sleep and makes ordinary life inside their homes impossible.

In July 2026, three residents filed a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging that noise, vibration, construction dust, traffic and extreme nighttime lighting from the $7.3 billion complex have damaged the use and value of more than 1,000 nearby homes.

Microsoft has acknowledged that sound from the facility traveled farther than it expected and says it is installing additional noise barriers and other mitigation.

In other words, the company built the project, turned it on and only then discovered how far the industrial noise would carry into the surrounding community.

Source: Wisconsin Public Radio

A data center buzzed so relentlessly that the city rewrote its zoning law

Residents living near CyrusOne’s Chandler, Arizona, data center complained for years about a persistent industrial hum and vibrations that rattled windows and disturbed sleep.

In 2018, the company was required to install noise-reduction equipment.

Chandler ultimately concluded that ordinary zoning rules were not enough. The city adopted a dedicated data-center ordinance requiring preconstruction sound studies, noise mitigation, annual testing during peak operations, controls on backup-generator testing and advance notice to nearby residents.

The ordinance took effect in 2023. Chandler did not impose those requirements because data centers proved to be silent, invisible neighbors. It imposed them after residents learned the opposite the hard way.

Source: City of Chandler

Virginia nearly turned Data Center Alley into a vast diesel-generator field

Northern Virginia packed so many data centers behind an already constrained transmission system that, in 2023, state regulators proposed allowing facilities to run their diesel backup generators for extended periods when the grid could not deliver enough electricity.

The proposal covered data centers across the three counties, where Loudoun alone holds more than 4,000 diesel backup generators.

Residents objected to the resulting air pollution, noise and public-health burden.

Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality first narrowed the proposal to Loudoun County and then withdrew it in April 2023, amid public opposition and after the operators themselves said they would not use it.

The episode exposed the infrastructure trap: data centers demanded more electricity than the transmission system could reliably provide, and the proposed remedy was to burn diesel fuel throughout populated communities.

Source: Virginia Department of Environmental Quality reporting summarized by the Piedmont Environmental Council

Ashburn, Virginia: paid to burn diesel in a heat wave

(Updated: July 29, 2026)

On June 30, 2026, with a heat wave bearing down on the eastern half of the country, the U.S. Secretary of Energy signed an emergency order.

It authorized PJM Interconnection, the grid operator that serves 67 million people across 13 states and the District of Columbia, to run data center diesel backup generators as a last resort to keep the lights on. The order was set to expire at 11:59 p.m. on July 3.

PJM acknowledged in advance what the order would mean: exceedances of the permitted limits for sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and ammonia, along with wastewater releases.

July 3 reached 102 degrees in Ashburn. The heat index in Virginia hit 114. PJM served the highest peak demand in its history that week, 168,158 megawatts, breaking a record that had stood since 2006.

Dark smoke rose over ACC9, one of dozens of data centers clustered in Ashburn, and photographs and video of the plume circulated.

Its owner said the generators were running under a program that pays large electricity users to pull their load off the grid when demand peaks.

Across PJM’s footprint, large users shed more than 6,000 megawatts on July 2 and just over 5,000 on July 3.

The air quality restrictions were lifted during those windows. Roughly 3.25 gigawatts of generation ran beyond environmental permit limits.

Two weeks later, a Dominion Energy executive told the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors how close it had come.

“We were minutes away from turning every data center in Ashburn to a backup generation,” he said, “and literally, it was by luck or by great skill from PJM operators or our operators we avoided that.”

Virginia has permitted more than 8,000 diesel generators at data center facilities. Northern Virginia’s 600-plus data centers now consume more than a quarter of the electricity in the entire state.

This is what it looks like when a region builds more computing than its grid can carry. The neighbors breathe the exhaust.

Sources: Business Insider, via AOL
Loudoun Now
New Jersey Monitor
Foreign Policy Journal

Ireland’s data centers consume almost as much electricity as every home in the country

Ireland’s data centers consumed 7,663 gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2025—23% of all metered electricity used in the country. Every residence in Ireland combined used 28%.

Data-center electricity consumption rose 10% in a single year and 360% over a decade. The concentration became so severe that Ireland’s grid operator effectively stopped granting new connections around Dublin from 2021 until late 2025.

New large users must now provide their own on-site generation.

Ireland allowed one industrial sector, dominated by a relatively small number of multinational companies, to grow until it consumed nearly as much electricity as the country’s entire residential population.

Source: Reuters

Microsoft promised modest water use in the Netherlands, then used four to seven times as much

Microsoft and local officials initially said the company’s Middenmeer data center in North Holland would use between 12 million and 20 million liters of drinking water each year.

Actual consumption in 2021 was 84 million liters.

The true figure emerged while the Netherlands was suffering drought, extreme heat and water shortages.

Microsoft said the 84 million liters included a large amount of water used to construct the next phase of the site, and that it returned 36 million liters to the local supply. That explanation does not change the central fact: the public was given one range before the project’s impact was known, and the 2021 figure came in four to seven times greater.

Source: Data Center Dynamics

A Chilean court stopped Google’s approved data center over the threat to a drought-stressed aquifer

Google secured approval to build a $200 million data center in Santiago, Chile, using a water-based cooling system. Residents and local officials challenged the project because it would draw on the Central Santiago Aquifer after more than a decade of drought.

In February 2024, Chile’s environmental court partially reversed the permit and ordered a new assessment that accounted for climate change and the project’s effect on the aquifer.

Google subsequently abandoned the approved design and started over with plans for air cooling.

A project that had already cleared the permitting process was halted because the original environmental review had failed to confront the water reality facing the community.

Source: Reuters

Uruguay considered feeding a Google data center while residents drank salty water

During Uruguay’s worst drought in 74 years, reservoirs serving Montevideo fell so low that authorities began blending salty water into the public drinking supply.

At the same time, Google was pursuing a data center whose original design was projected to consume millions of liters of fresh water every day.

The contrast provoked protests and public fury: residents were being told to endure deteriorating drinking water while a multinational technology company sought an enormous new industrial allocation.

Google eventually redesigned the project to use air cooling and sharply reduce its direct water demand. The originally projected consumption therefore never occurred—but only because public opposition forced the issue before the facility was built.

Source: The Guardian

Texas is permitting private fossil-fuel power plants as though they were dry cleaners

Since 2024, at least 38 Texas data-center projects have received “minor source” air authorizations to operate on-site power equipment. The permitting route was designed for genuinely small pollution sources and avoids the scrutiny and public participation required for major industrial plants.

Texas regulators have used it to approve more than 2,100 backup diesel generators for data centers.

At OpenAI’s Stargate campus in Abilene, developers obtained approval for 10 natural-gas turbines and 62 diesel generators, with plans for 41 additional turbines.

Equipment on that scale is not merely backup power for a computer building. It is a private fossil-fuel power station assembled piece by piece under permits intended for much smaller operations.

Source: The Texas Tribune and Floodlight

Communities that already know data centers are beginning to ban them

Governments that have lived with concentrated data-center development are increasingly applying the brakes.

Amsterdam stopped approving new data centers in 2019 and later barred new facilities and expansions through at least 2030.

Ireland froze new connections around Dublin for four years.

New York imposed a one-year moratorium on permits for data centers using 50 megawatts or more.

In June 2026, voters in Monterey Park, California, permanently banned new data centers after opposition to a proposed facility.

These places did not suddenly become hostile to technology or economic development. They learned that data centers can consume extraordinary amounts of electricity, water and land while imposing infrastructure costs and quality-of-life burdens on everyone around them.

Communities still being courted by the industry should pay attention to what communities with actual experience are doing.

Source: Reuters

A data center one-tenth the size of the one proposed for Oxmoor is being sued over the unrelenting noise

In Dowagiac, Michigan, residents living across the street from a data center describe a sound “almost like having a vacuum cleaner running all the time.”

One neighbor has measured it at 50 to 62 decibels at every hour of the day and night.

Residents say they cannot sit on their porches or open their windows, and that a row of trees that had long buffered the sound between the facility and their homes was removed without notice.

In May 2026, neighbors filed a class action in federal court against the facility’s owner, Alliance Cloud Services, a subsidiary of Hyperscale Data, Inc. The complaint alleges the site “has emitted and continues to emit, unreasonable and excessive noise” onto their properties, and points to the cooling fans and the absence of sound barriers.

The Dowagiac facility is rated at 30 megawatts. The facility proposed for Oxmoor Valley is rated at 300.

Sources: Spectrum News
WWMT

Louisiana approved three gas plants for a Meta data center. Customers will help pay for them for decades

In Richland Parish, Louisiana, Meta is building a data center that will span roughly 70 football fields and consume about three times as much electricity as the entire city of New Orleans uses in a year.

To power it, the Louisiana Public Service Commission approved Entergy’s plan to build three new gas plants, at an estimated cost of $3.2 billion.

The vote was taken before the commission’s own judge, who had been hearing arguments from stakeholders in the case, had issued a formal recommendation.

All 1.1 million Entergy Louisiana customers are now set to pay for:

• Fuel and operating costs for the plants, the details of which are redacted
• A $550 million transmission line that Entergy acknowledges would not be necessary but for the Meta data center
• The costs of the plants themselves after Meta’s 15-year contract expires, if it is not renewed. Gas plants routinely run for 30 or 40 years.

Nearly a quarter of Richland Parish lives in poverty. One local family showed CBS News power bills on which fuel costs had already risen about $13 a month over the year before.

And the project keeps growing. Advocates monitoring the case say seven additional gas plants are now under discussion, on top of the three already approved.

Sources: CBS News
Union of Concerned Scientists
Louisiana Radio Network

At 2:14 in the morning, a Texas city said no

In San Marcos, Texas, a developer sought approval for a $1.5 billion data center campus on roughly 200 acres southwest of downtown.

The facility would have consumed up to 70,000 gallons of water a day, more than 25 million gallons a year, in a region where water officials warn that a single data center can run a municipality out of its supply.

The fight ran for nearly a year.

The planning commission recommended denial. The city council initially voted to move the project forward, one vote shy of the supermajority required.

The developer restarted the application, and the commission reversed itself to recommend approval.

Then, on February 18, 2026, after a nearly nine-hour meeting and hours of public testimony, the San Marcos City Council voted 5 to 2 to deny the project.

The vote came at 2:14 a.m., with the overflow room still full.

Water was the defining issue.

Nearly 400 data centers already operate in Texas, with 53 more under consideration in the region. San Marcos decided it did not have the water to host another one.

Sources: CBS Austin
KUT

Tucson said no to a secret data center. The developer used the city’s water anyway

In Tucson, Arizona, a massive data center known publicly only as Project Blue was negotiated under nondisclosure agreements so tight that residents were not even told the end user was Amazon.

When the secrecy came to light, public outrage followed, and in August 2025 the city council voted unanimously to end negotiations and keep the project out of city limits.

The developer, Beale Infrastructure, obtained zoning from the county instead and announced the facility would be air-cooled rather than water-cooled.

Amazon later pulled out of the project altogether.

Then, in May 2026, protesters at the construction site noticed contractors spraying down dust and asked the city where the water was coming from. Tucson Water had issued the contractor a permit to tap a city line and truck the water out to the site.

Once the city understood what its own permit was being used for, the city manager revoked it and demanded the return of two acre-feet of water in credits, warning that the city would review its legal options if the credits were not delivered.

Sources: AZ Luminaria
KJZZ

When officials said yes anyway, the voters removed them

In Warrenton, Virginia, residents in November 2024 voted out every town council member who had supported Amazon’s proposed data center.

The newly elected council was composed entirely of the project’s opponents.

In Cascade Locks, Oregon, voters recalled two Port Authority officials in June 2023 for supporting a $100 million data center project. The following month, the new board canceled it.

In both towns, the question was eventually decided by citizens who made sure their voices were heard.

Source: Data Center Watch