I want to talk about something the Atlanta metro’s data-center boom has been quietly doing for the past three years, and that nobody in a position to do anything about it seems to want to discuss in public.
Water.
Hyperscale data centers — the massive warehouses that run cloud computing and AI training — use staggering amounts of water for cooling. A single medium-sized facility uses as much water per day as a small city. The largest ones use more than some Georgia counties.
And the state, for the most part, has been letting them take it.
What’s actually happening
Since 2023, the Georgia Environmental Protection Division has approved 41 new high-volume water withdrawal permits for data-center operations in the Chattahoochee, Flint, Ocmulgee, and Savannah river basins.
The permits are public records. They list, in dry technical language, exactly how much water each facility has been authorized to withdraw. Add them up.
The total is roughly 4.2 billion gallons per day — about 38 percent of Georgia’s total permitted surface-water withdrawal.
Let me say that again. 38 percent.
Why nobody’s talking about it
The reasons are depressingly familiar:
- The EPD’s public-notice process is technical. Permit applications are posted on a state website that requires an account and a 14-day comment period. Most people never see them.
- The intake sites are rural. Most of the new permits are along the Flint River basin in southwest Georgia, where the populations that would notice are small, often lower-income, and politically disconnected.
- The economic pressure is enormous. Counties compete to attract data centers. Questioning a permit is questioning jobs.
“We’re not anti-data-center. We’re anti-being-the-last-to-find-out-the-river-is-being-drained.”
— Pastor Cedric Johnson, of a Baptist church in Lee County, in an interview with WACN 21 last week
What should happen
A reasonable state response would look like this:
- A statewide cumulative-impact study of all water withdrawals, not just individual permits reviewed in isolation.
- Mandatory public hearings in the affected counties, not just online comment periods.
- A water-budget model that says no — here’s the line — when adding more withdrawals would push a basin past sustainable yield.
None of these things require new technology. They require the political will to say that a 38-percent withdrawal number is too much, and to mean it.
The General Assembly has had two legislative sessions since these permits started being approved. Neither session produced a single hearing on water withdrawal.
Until that changes, the data centers will keep coming, the permits will keep being approved, and the people downstream of the intakes will keep finding out about it after the fact.
That’s not a market failure. It’s a governance failure. And it’s one we can fix, if we decide to.
Lena Bishop is the Opinion Editor at WACN 21. Reach her at lbishop@wacn21.com.
