AI data centers spur growing environmental concerns amid muddy water, noise pollution

The widespread emergence of data centers across the US amid the artificial intelligence (AI) boom is sparking massive backlash from residents nationwide, who suffer from the environmental impact of these computational hubs, primarily in the form of depleted or muddied water resources and constant noise pollution.

Communities living near data centers report sudden drops in water pressure, withering vegetation and tap water running brown with sediment.

Beverly and Jeff Morris, who live less than 100 feet from Meta’s Stanton Springs data center in Georgia, are among four families who filed a lawsuit against the tech giant in August, claiming sediment accumulated in their wells and water pressure dropped after construction began, rendering tap water undrinkable.

The four families filing the lawsuit say the extensive cutting of trees and excavation damaged the aquifer that stores groundwater, mixing silt and sediment into their wells.

Meta argued that the data center is unlikely to have caused these problems after a hydrogeological study of the grounds, claiming the facility does not use groundwater in its operations.

A similar dispute is unfolding in Virginia’s Louisa County, less than 500 miles north of the Georgia families.

An Amazon data center is located directly across from the home of Austin Newsom, who alleges that shortly after construction began in March 2025, his tap water started running brown, while the heavy machinery and excavation equipment used on the site caused massive vibrations, cracking the walls of his home.

He also says the facility caused persistent road flooding, intrusive light pollution and constant industrial noise, ruining his quality of life.

Meanwhile, a recent University of Sydney report found that the energy consumption and carbon emissions generated by data centers could raise global temperatures, affecting bees. The report warned that even a marginal increase in hot days could disrupt breeding cycles and degrade sperm quality, possibly causing up to 14.1 million bees to go extinct every year.

Slava G. Turyshev, a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), told Anadolu that global electricity demand is expected to nearly double in the next half-decade, which in turn will require the construction of more facilities in various locations, running on different types of fuel, such as “oil, charcoal, or nuclear.”

“People are not happy seeing in their neighborhood, significant warehouses which will host computers, processors, chips that will produce sort of computational capabilities, enable computational capabilities to train large language models (LLMs) or whatever,” he said. “People are not happy with that, and so the reality is that we don't want to build large warehouses in the communities where we live, and so the idea: why don’t we move them to space?”

Turyshev stated that relocating data center infrastructure into Earth’s orbit is being seriously evaluated as a necessary step to protect the environment.

Clayton Swope, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told Anadolu that environmental preservation is the main driver of efforts to establish space-based data centers.

He warned that environmental concerns could take on a whole new dimension if data centers were to be established in orbit.

“The concerns that you would have about doing data centers in space look very different — more like the same concerns you have when we’re talking about thousands of satellites in orbit today, about traffic coordination,” he said.

“And about the creation of debris in orbit. What happens when there's a collision in space, or what happens when a spacecraft stops working in space, does it become now a debris hazard — what happens if there’s a malfunction on a satellite and that creates debris,” he added.

Swope stated that traffic management and coordination are operational issues, but these problems could grow significantly if thousands or even millions more satellites are launched into orbit than there are today.

“That's what SpaceX is proposing, a constellation of a million satellites to do AI compute in orbit, a huge increase than the number of satellites we have in space, and those issues that I raised would just grow greater than we need to think about,” he noted.