Meta Data Center Allegedly Turned a Georgia Town's Tap Water Brown — AOC Brought the Jars to Congress

Meta's Data Center and a Georgia Town's Brown Tap Water

In Morgan County, Georgia, residents living near Meta's data center operations began pulling murky, brown water from their taps. The complaints were dismissed until the jars showed up in Washington.

The Jars

At a May 20, 2026 hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez held up two jars of water drawn from Morgan County homes. They were visibly contaminated — murky and brown. The EPA's Assistant Administrator for Water pledged an immediate investigation on the spot.

The Water Math

Hyperscale data centers like those run by Meta, Google, and Microsoft consume between 1 and 5 million gallons of water per day for cooling. When that demand lands on a rural county's aquifer, the strain is not abstract — it shows up in the pressure, the sediment, and the color of what comes out of the faucet. Residents connected the timeline of their water problems to the facility's construction and operation.

Meta's Defense

Meta's response has been to point to a third-party groundwater study the company itself commissioned, which concluded there was no connection between its data center operations and the well-water issues. That is the familiar shape of these disputes: the affected community sees the timeline, the company commissions the study, and the regulator arrives only after the water is already brown. The EPA investigation is now underway.