When Beverly Morris retired in 2016, she thought she had found her dream home – a peaceful stretch of rural Georgia, surrounded by trees and quiet.

Today, it’s anything but.

Just 400 yards (366m) from her front porch in Mansfield, Georgia, sits a large, windowless building filled with servers, cables, and blinking lights.

It’s a data centre – one of many popping up across small-town America, and around the globe, to power everything from online banking to artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT.

“I can’t live in my home with half of my home functioning and no water,” Ms Morris says. “I can’t drink the water.”

She believes the construction of the centre, which is owned by Meta (the parent company of Facebook), disrupted her private well, causing an excessive build-up of sediment. Ms Morris now hauls water in buckets to flush her toilet.

She says she had to fix the plumbing in her kitchen to restore water pressure. But the water that comes of the tap still has residue in it.

“I’m afraid to drink the water, but I still cook with it, and brush my teeth with it,” says Morris. “Am I worried about it? Yes.”

Meta, however, says the two aren’t connected.

In a statement to the BBC, Meta said that “being a good neighbour is a priority”.

The company commissioned an independent groundwater study to investigate Morris’s concerns. According to the report, its data centre operation did “not adversely affect groundwater conditions in the area”.

While Meta disputes that it has caused the problems with Ms Morris’ water, there’s no doubt, in her estimation, that the company has worn out its welcome as her neighbour.

“This was my perfect spot,” she says. “But it isn’t anymore.”

We tend to think of the cloud as something invisible – floating above us in the digital ether. But the reality is very physical.

The cloud lives in over 10,000 data centres around the world, most of them located in the US, followed by the UK and Germany.

With AI now driving a surge in online activity, that number is growing fast. And with them, more complaints from nearby residents.

The US boom is being challenged by a rise in local activism – with $64bn (£47bn) in projects delayed or blocked nationwide, according to a report from pressure group Data Center Watch.

And the concerns aren’t just about construction. It’s also about water usage. Keeping those servers cool requires a lot of water.

“These are very hot processors,” Mark Mills of the National Center for Energy Analytics testified before Congress back in April. “It takes a lot of water to cool them down.”

Many centres use evaporative cooling systems, where water absorbs heat and evaporates – similar to how sweat wicks away heat from our bodies. On hot days, a single facility can use millions of gallons.

One study estimates that AI-driven data centres could consume 1.7 trillion gallons of water globally by 2027.

Few places illustrate this tension more clearly than Georgia – one of the fastest-growing data centre markets in the US.

Its humid climate provides a natural and more cost-effective source of water for cooling data centres, making it attractive to developers. But that abundance may come at a cost.

Gordon Rogers is the executive director of Flint Riverkeeper, a non-profit advocacy group that monitors the health of Georgia’s Flint River. He takes us to a creek downhill from a new construction site for a data centre being built by US firm Quality Technology Services (QTS).

George Dietz, a local volunteer, scoops up a sample of the water into a clear plastic bag. It’s cloudy and brown.

“It shouldn’t be that colour,” he says. To him, this suggests sediment runoff – and possibly flocculants. These are chemicals used in construction to bind soil and prevent erosion, but if they escape into the water system, they can create sludge.

QTS says its data centres meet high environmental standards and bring millions in local tax revenue.

While construction is often carried out by third-party contractors, local residents are the ones left to deal with the consequences.

“They shouldn’t be doing it,” Mr Rogers says. “A larger wealthier property owner does not have more property rights than a smaller, less wealthy property owner.”

Tech giants say they are aware of the issues and are taking action.

“Our goal is that by 2030, we’ll be putting more water back into the watersheds and communities where we’re operating data centres, than we’re taking out,” says Will Hewes, global water stewardship lead at Amazon Web Services (AWS), which runs more data centres than any other company globally.

He says AWS is investing in projects like leak repairs, rainwater harvesting, and using treated wastewater for cooling. In Virginia, the company is working with farmers to reduce nutrient pollution in Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the US.

In South Africa and India – where AWS doesn’t use water for cooling – the company is still investing in water access and quality initiatives.

In the Americas, Mr Hewes says, water is only used on about 10% of the hottest days each year.

Still, the numbers add up. A single AI query – for example, a request to ChatGPT – can use about as much water as a small bottle you’d buy from the corner shop. Multiply that by billions of queries a day, and the scale becomes clear.

Prof Rajiv Garg teaches cloud computing at Emory University in Atlanta. He says these data centres aren’t going away – if anything, they’re becoming the backbone of modern life.

“There’s no turning back,” Prof Garg says.

But there is a path forward. The key, he argues, is long-term thinking: smarter cooling systems, rainwater harvesting, and more efficient infrastructure.

In the short term, data centres will create “a huge strain”, he admits. But the industry is starting to shift toward sustainability.

And yet, that’s little consolation to homeowners like Beverly Morris – stuck between yesterday’s dream and tomorrow’s infrastructure.

Data centres have become more than just an industry trend – they’re now part of national policy. President Donald Trump recently vowed to build the largest AI infrastructure project in history, calling it “a future powered by American data”.

Back in Georgia, the sun beats down through thick humidity – a reminder of why the state is so attractive to data centre developers.

For locals, the future of tech is already here. And it’s loud, thirsty, and sometimes hard to live next to.

As AI grows, the challenge is clear: how to power tomorrow’s digital world without draining the most basic resource of all – water.

Correction: This article originally said that Beverly Morris lives in Fayette County, Georgia, and has been amended to explain that she lives in Mansfield, Georgia.

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Prices for all-inclusive family package holidays in some of the most popular desinations have soared over the past year.

But there are ways of saving money if you want to escape abroad. Here are six tips to help keep costs down.

The price you pay for your accommodation depends on when you book.

July and August are the peak months for summer holidays, not just for Brits but for people in other parts of Europe.

“If you’ve ever been to Paris in August there’s hardly anyone there, everybody goes to the beach or heads for the mountains,” says Sean Tipton, spokesperson for The Travel Association (ABTA), which represents tour operators and travel agents.

“That’s when the hotels put their prices up,” he says. Therefore, it is usually cheaper to book a holiday aboard for June or September.

If you do have to go during the peak months, Mr Tipton says: “It is generally a good idea to book it as early as you can.

“It can be a bit of a lottery because you can’t 100% predict what the demand will be but as a rule of thumb in the majority of cases if you know you’re travelling in July, August or over Christmas or Easter, book early.”

The best time to travel is the middle of the week, according to Mr Tipton.

“The weekend is the most expensive time to go because people prefer to fly over the weekend so if you fly mid-week it is generally cheaper,” he says.

“Just simple little things like that get the price down.”

The same goes for the time of the day you travel.

“It is common sense really,” he says. “I don’t particularly like getting up at 3am for a 6am flight and I’m not alone in that so those flights will be consequently cheaper.”

If you have some flexibility around when you can travel, there are some last minute bargains to be had.

Package holiday operators may have booked a lot of hotel space in advance which they may not have been able to sell at the holiday date approaches.

“They’ll discount it just to make sure they get something for it,” says Mr Tipton.

“Travel agents get sent notifications of last minute good deals so they’re a good place to go if you’ve left it late and you want a good, cheap deal.”

Another option is house-swapping. Instead of paying for a hotel or villa, people can register with an online platform which acts as a fixer between homeowners in different countries who want to stay in other’s houses.

Justine Palefsky, co-founder and chief executive of Kindred, says that people who register with her site pay only a service and a cleaning fee.

For example, someone booking a seven night stay at a three bedroom house in Majorca would pay a $140 (£103) service fee to Kindred as well as $140 for cleaning before and after a stay in the house.

Ms Hawkes advises that travellers go through a reputable site if they are choosing a house-swap.

“People need to be wary of social media ads at this time of year, advertising cheap holidays because scammers do tend to use those portals to show you images of a wonderful location.

“Then when you book it and do you bank transfer, you find it doesn’t exsist,” she says.

She recommends doing a reverse image search on websites such as Google to check the images haven’t been lifted from somewhere else to promote a home that doesn’t exist.

Avoid changing money at the airport, says Alastair Douglas, chief executive at TotallyMoney, a price comparison site.

“Airports are normally the most expensive places to change cash,” he says.

Instead, change your money well in advance.

Mr Douglas says that if people are worried about exhange rate shifting between booking a holiday and the date of departure they can “hedge their bets” by changing half in advance and half nearer the time.

However, he says that people don’t really travel with lots of cash anymore. Most spending is done on cards.

This is a good thing, Mr Douglas says, because it will often allow you to select the local currency which is “probably the thing that will save you the most amount of money”.

Even before you reach your destination, costs can pile up. Make sure you print out your boarding pass ahead of time.

“Some airlines can charge a lot of money just to print out at the airport,” says Nicky Kelvin, editor at The Points Guy website. “Not all of them but just be safe.”

If you’re bringing a small suitcase on board the plane, bear in mind both the weight and the size of the luggage if you have to measure it in a metal sizer at the airport.

If it doesn’t fit, you may be charged a fee to check it into the plane’s hold.

Ms Hawkes recommends documenting the luggage dimensions an airline provides on its website just in case you have followed them but get to the airport and discover your bag does not fit.

“In that case, if the airline makes you put it in the hold and you’ve adhered to their website conditions, document everything and make a complaint after,” she says.

Food, drink and toiletries are often more expensive at the airport.

One of the reasons, according to Mr Kelvin, is because of the 100ml onboard liquid rule. While restrictions have recently been relaxed at airports in Edinburgh and Birmingham, it applies everywhere else in the UK.

One way to cut costs is to order your suncream or other toiletries online and pick them up in-store at the airport once you’ve been through security.

Some retailers allow you to do this, Mr Kelvin tells the BBC’s Morning Live programme.

“So it’s a double whammy – you’re going to save because you’re going to get the cheaper online pricing and you’re going to avoid the security issue because you’re going to pick up your big liquids after.”

Another cost-saving tip is to take a water bottle with you. Most airports have free water refill stations.

He also recommends taking along your own snacks in lunch boxes, especially handy if you’re travelling with children.