Atlanta's data center boom has a water problem nobody wants to solve

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 11:00:00 -0400

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.

Ai on WACN 21 News

Atlanta's data center boom has a water problem nobody wants to solve