“Our last home, the surrounding area was becoming very overdeveloped. We had a distribution center less than a mile from our house, and it was just kind of this urban encroachment,” she says. “We knew about the land behind us, and [thought] the worst thing it could be was a subdivision, because who in their right mind would want to build anything out here?”
“I didn't know who to reach out to, who to talk to, who could give me some more information,” she says. So she decided to start a Facebook group called “Stop Project Sail” to connect with her neighbors and discuss the proposed plan. More than 8,000 people have now joined the group, and have been organizing petition signings, installing yard signs, and mounting a legal fight against Coweta County and Atlas Development, the company behind the project.
The Georgia town is not alone. If there’s one thing most Americans across the country agree on, it’s that they hate data centers. A June Reuters poll found that just a third of Americans approve of the pace of data-center construction, and only 14% are comfortable with a data center being built nearby. On July 18, a national day of protest against data centers saw 142 protests across 42 states.
According to one count by The Information, more than 300 cities, towns, and counties—including Monterey Park, Calif., Dekalb County, Ga., and Jefferson County, Pa.—have placed bans or moratoriums on the construction of hyperscale data centers. In the first three months of 2026, 75 major projects worth more than $130 billion were delayed or canceled in part due to organized local opposition. And on July 14, New York governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order to create the nation's first moratorium on new hyperscale data centers, while several other states, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, and South Carolina are considering similar pauses.
Why data centers are straining local water and power supplies
“We've been aware of data center development as early as 2010, but they were much smaller in scale,” says John Farner, executive director of land and water at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a non-profit which has been researching the land and water use of data centers over the last few years. “What we're seeing now, especially with the advent of hyperscale data centers, is that they're much larger, much more powerful. They're much more resource intensive.”
Steve Swope, another Coweta County resident, relies on wellwater, and is concerned that the construction of the data center could damage septic tanks or leak into the groundwater. “Our wells will either run dry or they'll become polluted and caked with sediment and mud,” he says.
Soon after Project Sail was approved, four more data centers were proposed in Coweta County. In May, Coweta County approved a data center moratorium on any future projects, but residents say it’s too little, too late.
The fight has left Beth and her family in limbo. They bought their home intending it to be a fixer-upper—the house is drafty, the windows need replacing. But they're hesitant to invest in a home they’re not sure they’ll stay in. “The unknown drives this cycle of [asking] do we move? I don't really want to move. Where do we move to?” she says. “They're everywhere. We'd want to move somewhere that also has a little bit of land, but all of that is that threat. We feel like there's no safe place to move.”
But, as of now, remaining put comes with its own set of problems. “If we stay here, this is going to be in our backyard.”
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