Two mason jars of murky brown water became the most-talked-about props on Capitol Hill last week — and the story behind them is far more complicated than the congresswoman who brought them wants Americans to believe.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez held up jars of discolored water during a congressional hearing, claiming families in the area had resorted to shipping water to their homes for cooking and bathing. “This is not just inconvenience,” the New York Democrat declared.
The hearing took place before the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, and centered on complaints tied to the Stanton Springs industrial area east of Atlanta, where Meta operates a large data center campus.
Ocasio-Cortez was questioning Jessica Kramer, the EPA’s assistant administrator for water, when she produced the jars and said, “I think both of us can agree that neither one of these things are drinkable.”
Ocasio-Cortez stated that the samples were collected during a personal visit to Morgan County earlier that month. “This is the current drinking water in Morgan County, Georgia, right after a data center was constructed,” she said during the hearing.
The congresswoman told Kramer that affected residents — living in a rural area — had experienced falling water pressure, broken appliances, and were being forced to ship in water for basic household needs.
Before the jars appeared, Kramer had already told the subcommittee that she had not received any complaints linking data center construction to drinking water contamination.
That acknowledgment came moments before Ocasio-Cortez made her dramatic presentation.
Kramer responded to the congresswoman’s concerns by saying, “As soon as I get back to the office, I will be looking into exactly what you’ve just talked about. Because anywhere, whether it is […] whatever type of construction it is, it is a priority to ensure that water quality standards established by EPA are being met.”
What Ocasio-Cortez did not clarify during her presentation is that the water problems documented in Morgan County affect a far smaller population than the hearing implied.
According to New York Times reporting, only four homes near the data center have experienced the issue — not the broader county community.
The Joint Development Authority of Jasper, Morgan, Newton, and Walton Counties, which manages the industrial park housing Meta’s facilities, acknowledged that no well water study was conducted before construction began.
JDA spokesman Ben Sheidler told the Times, “The timing of the problems could be a coincidence.”
Ocasio-Cortez also used the hearing to challenge President Trump’s executive orders designed to fast-track data center construction “when we know that water quality is encountering major issues.”
The water concerns driving opposition to data centers, however, collapse quickly under scrutiny.
In Maricopa County, Arizona — among the most water-stressed counties in the nation — data centers are projected to consume approximately 900 million gallons of freshwater in 2025.
Golf courses in that same county will consume 29 billion gallons during the same period.
Even if AI data center water consumption triples by 2030, it would remain negligible compared to other industries. Data centers currently account for just 3.3 percent of the water consumption of all golf courses in the United States.
No investigative reporting has surfaced a single instance where data center operations raised household water bills anywhere in America — not in Loudoun County, Virginia, home to the world’s largest concentration of data centers, and not in The Dalles, Oregon, where 29 percent of city water flows to a Google facility.
The economic benefits of data center expansion are landing directly in the pockets of American tradespeople.
Mike Rowe, founder of the mikeroweWORKS Foundation, recently visited a data center in Plano, Texas, where he met three electricians under 30 years old, each earning approximately $260,000 annually with no college degree and no student debt.
Rowe noted, “The most consequential component of that meeting was the fact that all three of them had been poached three times in the prior 18 months. It’s like the draft in the major leagues.”
In Virginia alone, the data center industry is estimated to contribute 74,000 jobs, $5.5 billion in labor income, and $9.1 billion in GDP each year.
For every data center job created, an estimated 3.5 additional jobs are generated in the surrounding local economy.
