Whatever the rural idyll they imagined when they bought the home and moved there in 2016, it was shattered when, about a year later, Meta began building a data center less than 400 yards away. The hulking concrete building peeks out through the evergreens, visible from their mailbox.
They showed him a map of their well-water catchment area: Their well is the only water source they have, though their lawyer said Meta has a municipal water hookup for the data center. Brown water sometimes floods their front ditch. Photos of their rural, pastoral nights show it now lit bright as day from light pollution by the data center. “This affects not only your everyday living and what you’ve got to do to adjust your life, but you can’t change, you’re trapped,” Beverly Morris said.
Khanna is pushing for a Data Center Bill of Rights to outline new rules around where and how data centers can be built, meant to protect the people and environments they might impact. He also sent a letter to Meta demanding answers for the Morrises and their co-plaintiffs: they filed a lawsuit against Meta, development companies, and authorities in August.
But the data center explosion shows that sometimes bad things that may harm us and the environment can be built just as quickly if we let them, and that there are real questions about who bears the cost and who benefits when rules are waived. Some things might not belong in backyards, or front yards, at all.
Meta named one of the roads leading to the data center “Move Fast Way,” borrowing from the early motto from Facebook, before it became the larger Meta, “Move fast and break things.” Breaking things are what the Morrises and their co-plaintiffs said the company did, and they want answers. They say the company has suggested that the problems they’ve encountered are their fault or due to lack of routine maintenance. They say they never had the problems they’re encountering now, especially with their water, before the data center moved in.
Khanna asked about whether they could move, but they said they wouldn’t be able to sell their home for what it is worth. They are retired and wanted this to be their home. For them to move would mean cutting their losses.
Americans have grown sharply more negative about data centers, according to Pew Research Center, and states are considering moratoriums on building them, like the one New York passed, until more environmental and community impacts can be studied. There’s a rare bipartisan sense of unity around the issue. Yet the Morrises’ attorneys said none of their representatives, including their current Congressman Representative Mike Collins, who’s running for Senate against Democrat Jon Ossoff, have reached out to them or visited. The Republican Party dismisses data center opposition as driven by Chinese propaganda, and House Republicans have urged the Trump administration to investigate China’s influence on the matter.
But what and how should they influence Big Tech to do? Khanna said the companies keep bringing up competition with China as the justification for building out new data centers so quickly. But he says it can come at irreparable cost. “We can compete without compromising our values,” he says in his letter to Meta. “As such, I also request a briefing from Meta on how, if at all, it will be revising its process of selecting sites for data centers and incorporating community inputs based on its clear failure to do so...”
That history is why the hurdles that sometimes slow development, like environmental reviews and community meetings, existed in the first place. I asked Khanna about that tension: how do policymakers reconcile the need for more development around green energy and housing while showing caution around developments like data centers?
That ability, to decide what’s beneficial and what is not, is exactly what so many voters don’t trust their representatives to do right now. Khanna may have been trying to build that trust when he went to visit the Morrises: People want to know someone will listen to their concerns. “Local communities should get to decide first of all whether they want them, and they shouldn’t be near residential communities or farmland,” he said. “I think it’s a pretty common-sense view, and until we get that, there should be a moratorium until, on a state-by-state local basis, because we can’t build in ways like this.”
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