Meta is building several gigawatt-sized data centers to power AI, . CEO Mark Zuckerberg will spend “hundreds of billions of dollars” to accomplish this feat, with an aim of creating “superintelligence.”
The term typically refers to artificial general intelligence (AGI), which describes AI systems that boast human-level intelligence across multiple domains. This is something of a holy grail for .
The first center is called Prometheus and it comes online next year. It’s being built in Ohio. Next up, there’s a data center called Hyperion that’s almost the size of Manhattan. This one should “be able to scale up to 5GW over several years.” Some of these campuses will be among the largest in the world, as most data centers can only generate hundreds of megawatts of capacity.
Meta has also been staffing up its Superintelligence Labs team, recruiting folks from OpenAI, Google’s DeepMind and others. Scale AI’s co-founder Alexandr Wang .
However, these giant data centers do not exist in a vacuum. The complexes typically brush up against local communities. The centers are not only power hogs, but also water hogs. The New York Times on how Meta data centers impact local water supplies.
There’s a data center east of Atlanta that has damaged local wells and caused municipal water prices to soar, which could lead to a shortage and rationing by 2030. The price of water in the region is set to increase by 33 percent in the next two years.
Typical data centers guzzle around 500,000 gallons of water each day, but these forthcoming AI-centric complexes will likely be even thirstier. The new centers could require millions of gallons per day, according to water permit applications . Mike Hopkins, the executive director of the Newton County Water and Sewerage Authority, says that applications are coming in with requests for up to six millions of water per day, which is more than the county’s entire daily usage.
“What the data centers don’t understand is that they’re taking up the community wealth,” he said. “We just don’t have the water.”
We’re going to have to decide soon how to regulate the growing data center industry which pose several issues for desert communities. “They consume large amounts of electricity and water 24 hours per day, seven days a week.” https://t.co/sTq97kFADL
— Arizona Green Party 🌻 (@AZGreenParty) July 10, 2025
This same worrying story is playing out across the country. Data center hot spots in Texas, Arizona, Louisiana and Colorado are also taxing local water reserves. For instance, some Phoenix homebuilders have been forced to due to droughts exacerbated by these data centers.
If you buy something through a link in this article, we may earn commission.
