DL Open Thread: Monday, July 21, 2025

Build Data Center, Destroy Water Supply:

After Meta broke ground on a $750 million data center on the edge of Newton County, Ga., the water taps in Beverly and Jeff Morris’s home went dry.

The couple’s house, which uses well water, is 1,000 feet from Meta’s new data center. Months after construction began in 2018, the Morrises’ dishwasher, ice maker, washing machine and toilet all stopped working, said Beverly Morris, now 71. Within a year, the water pressure had slowed to a trickle. Soon, nothing came out of the bathroom and kitchen taps.

Jeff Morris, 67, eventually traced the issues to the buildup of sediment in the water. He said he suspected the cause was Meta’s construction, which could have added sediment to the groundwater and affected their well. The couple replaced most of their appliances in 2019, and then again in 2021 and 2024. Residue now gathers at the bottom of their backyard pool. The taps in one of their two bathrooms still do not work.

The Morrises’ experience is one of a growing number of water-related issues around Newton County, which is a one-and-a-half-hour drive east of Atlanta and has a population of about 120,000 people. As tech giants like Meta build data centers in the area, local wells have been damaged, the cost of municipal water has soared and the county’s water commission may face a shortage of the vital resource.

The situation has become so dire that Newton County is on track to be in a water deficit by 2030, according to a report last year. If the local water authority cannot upgrade its facilities, residents could be forced to ration water. In the next two years, water rates are set to increase 33 percent, more than the typical 2 percent annual increases, said Blair Northen, the mayor of Mansfield, a town in Newton County.

In the age of artificial intelligence, water has become as critical to data centers — which power the development of the cutting-edge technology — as electricity. The facilities pump enormous amounts of cold water into pipes that run throughout the buildings to cool the computers inside so that they can perform calculations and keep internet services like social networking humming.

A data center like Meta’s, which was completed last year, typically guzzles around 500,000 gallons of water a day. New data centers built to train more powerful A.I. are set to be even thirstier, requiring millions of gallons of water a day, according to water permit applications reviewed by The New York Times.

Shout-out to one of my fave Spies for alerting me to this article.  So, how would this impact residents of Delaware City were the proposed data center to be built?  Going out on a limb–not favorably.  Although–perhaps it’s a backdoor scheme to keep the Underwater City At Ft. DuPont from being underwater.

Yes, Delaware Would Suffer The Consequences:

At a time when many Delaware residents are already being struck by rising costs of power and state officials are debating how to remedy the situation, a new proposal for a massive data center near Delaware City would bring energy demands comparable to nearly double the number of households in the state.

Last month, Starwood Digital Ventures, a developer backed by a private-equity investment firm, submitted plans to New Castle County to build a 1.2-gigawatt data center on about 580 acres just north of the Delaware City Refinery.

A data center that size would consume as much power as 875,000 to almost 1 million homes, according to estimates from experts in the field — nearly twice the 449,000 housing units that exist in Delaware.

That’s just a snippet from an excellent article in Spotlight Delaware.  Read, be informed.

Trump Ignores Judges’ Orders.  Seems like there’s not much that can/will be done about it:

President Donald Trump and his appointees have been accused of flouting courts in a third of the more than 160 lawsuits against the administration in which a judge has issued a substantive ruling, a Washington Post analysis has found, suggesting widespread noncompliance withAmerica’s legal system.

Plaintiffs say Justice Department lawyers and the agencies they represent aresnubbing rulings, providing false information, failing to turn over evidence, quietly working around court orders and inventing pretexts to carry out actions that have been blocked.

Judges appointed by presidents of both parties have often agreed. None have taken punitive action to try to force compliance, however, allowing the administration’s defiance of orders to go on for weeks or even months in some instances.

I would normally post the Israeli Atrocity of the Day here.  But it’s the same killing of starving people vying for table scraps that we’ve seen for over a year now.  I’m trying to come up with a non-threatening synonym for genocide to placate the Rabbi Meir Kahanes amongst us:

From the moment he arrived in Israel in 1971, Kahane preached a shocking mixture of violent, exterminationist ethnonationalism and apocalyptic religious fundamentalism. He claimed that violence was a Jewish value and revenge a divine commandment. He agitated for the expulsion of Palestinians from all the territories under Israel’s control; the party he founded, Kach, was Israel’s first to make the idea its central policy demand. He envisioned “a state of Jewish totality” in which all matters would be decided according to his idiosyncratic interpretation of Jewish law.

That sounds exactly like Netanyahu’s government today.

Delaware Opioid Funds Flowing Again.  I look forward to seeing who got funded:

$13 million was approved for this round of grants, but close to an additional $1 million is leftover from previous cycles. Of the 122 organizations that applied for funds, over $50 million was requested in total — the commission is recommending 63 grant applications move forward.

“Some folks took major shots, like a $5-6 million project, and we don’t have the means for that right now. So cutting those was rather easy in comparison to some, but we tried to make informed cuts. Some of it felt a bit arbitrary, but getting to $13 million was hard,” POSDC Executive Director Brad Owens said during the commission’s Governance Committee on Monday.

What do you want to talk about?