I Live Next To Amazon's Largest Data Center. They're Stealing Our Water

Our Take

Credit to More Perfect Union for putting a camera in front of the people actually living next to the machine — not the press release, the well. Indiana's pitch to hyperscalers has been cheap land, cheap power, and county officials eager to sign, and the video shows the other side of that ledger: residents watching their water pressure and their trust in local government evaporate at the same time. This is the pattern GridWatch keeps documenting nationwide — the deal gets cut long before neighbors get a seat at the table.

Data centers this size don't sip water, they gulp it for cooling, and in rural Indiana that draw competes directly with the same aquifers feeding household wells. When a company can build a campus bigger than most factories and the public still can't get a straight answer on gallons-per-day, that's not a technicality, that's the whole fight. 'Data center alley' isn't a cute nickname — it's a warning about what happens when a state stacks up incentive after incentive without ever tallying the cumulative cost to water and land.

Check our facility map to see how many of these projects are clustering in your county, and if you want to push back before the concrete is poured, our take-action page has the tools.