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When residents of Annelise Park, an affluent subdivision in Fayetteville, Georgia, started noticing weak water pressure, they assumed a busted pipe somewhere nearby. What investigators found instead was far more alarming: a corporate giant had been draining millions of gallons of water through connections the local utility didn’t even know were active. No meter. No bill. No accountability. And by the time anyone noticed, it had been going on for months.
The data center at the center of the controversy is operated by Quality Technology Services, known as QTS, a subsidiary of the private equity firm Blackstone. Its Fayetteville campus, codenamed “Project Excalibur,” covers 615 acres roughly 20 miles south of downtown Atlanta, making it one of the largest data center developments in the United States. Currently comprising 13 buildings spanning approximately 6.2 million square feet, the campus is still expanding, with plans for up to 16 buildings at full build-out in three to five years.
Investigators discovered two industrial-scale water hookups supplying the QTS campus that had gone completely untracked. One was installed without the county utility’s knowledge. The other was never connected to a billing account. Together, they allowed the facility to draw more than 29 million gallons of water, roughly equivalent to 44 Olympic-size swimming pools, without paying a cent. The bill, when it finally arrived, totaled $147,474 in retroactive charges. That figure, detailed in a May 2025 letter from the Fayette County water system to QTS, was only the beginning of the story.
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“Stop Watering Your Lawns” — While the County’s Biggest Drinker Paid Nothing
Around the same time the water was quietly disappearing into the QTS campus, local officials sent a notice to Fayetteville residents asking them to cut back on outdoor water use. James Clifton, a property rights attorney who later obtained the county’s letter to QTS through a public records request, said the contrast left him furious. “We get this notification from Fayette County water system saying you need to stop watering your lawns to help conserve water,” Clifton told reporters after sharing the letter on Facebook.
Clifton, who is also running for a seat on the Fayette County Board of Commissioners, did not hold back. “So the first thing they do is lean on the individuals and the citizens to stop water consumption when we have QTS that’s just absolutely draining us,” he said. He noted that QTS is, by the county’s own reckoning, the number one water consumer in Fayette County most months, and yet households were told to sacrifice their lawn sprinklers while the facility’s consumption went entirely unmetered and unbilled for an extended period.
Vanessa Tigert, director of the Fayette County water system, attributed the oversight to a procedural mix-up during the county’s transition to a cloud-based metering system. She said her department had just one employee handling both inspections and plan reviews. “Just like any water system, we don’t have enough staff,” Tigert said. She also left open the possibility that her team may have been aware of the connections but that she had not located the inspection records, adding, “I may have hit ‘send’ too soon” about the letter to QTS. But for residents already stretched thin, the explanation felt insufficient.
Why the Water Authority Let QTS Walk
Despite the unauthorized connections and months of unbilled consumption well beyond agreed limits, Fayette County chose not to fine QTS. The utility did charge a higher construction rate for the unmetered water, but no penalty was levied. When asked why, Tigert offered a frank answer. “They’re our largest customer, and we have to be partners,” she said. “It’s called customer service.” The statement drew immediate criticism from residents and outside observers who said it signaled that large corporations operate under different rules than individual households.
Gregory Pierce, director of the UCLA Water Resources Group and a researcher studying the growing influence of data centers on local water systems, said the decision not to fine QTS was highly unusual. “I don’t know exactly what’s happening here, but they probably don’t want to upset one of their new and largest customers,” Pierce said. QTS disputed the broader accusation of overconsumption, saying its Fayetteville campus uses a closed-loop cooling system that does not draw municipal water for cooling and attributing the high usage to temporary construction activities like concrete work, dust control, and site preparation.
QTS added that once the campus is fully operational, its water use for domestic purposes, such as bathrooms and kitchens, would amount to the equivalent of what four American households consume monthly. The company said the unmetered period lasted between nine and fifteen months, while county officials estimated roughly four months. That discrepancy, a gap of nearly a year in the account of events, remained unresolved. Clifton put the community’s frustration plainly: “It’s just frustrating to see them come into our community and run all over us like the citizens don’t matter, and then they’re above the law when they do break it.”
Georgia Is Ground Zero for a Fight Over Who Water Belongs To
The QTS incident did not occur in a vacuum. Georgia is home to more than 200 data center facilities, and the state’s thirst for tech investment is colliding head-on with a water crisis. The entire state is experiencing moderate to severe drought conditions, and Governor Brian Kemp declared a state of emergency last month in response to one of the worst wildfire outbreaks the state has seen in years. Metro Atlanta sits near the headwaters of several river systems, making overconsumption there a risk felt far downstream.
The Fayetteville City Council voted last month to ban new data centers in every zoning district within the city limits, citing the facility’s massive appetite for water and electricity. Fayetteville is now one of at least 50 cities across the United States with active bans on new data center construction. Georgia’s Public Service Commission also froze base electricity rates through 2028 specifically to prevent data centers from shifting their power costs onto residential customers. Taken together, these moves signal a growing backlash against an industry that has long operated with minimal public scrutiny over its resource consumption.
QTS’s Fayetteville campus is projected to generate between $150 million and $200 million annually in property tax revenue, a sum that gives the company significant leverage with local officials. That economic weight is precisely why researchers like Pierce worry that communities are poorly positioned to hold tech giants accountable. The Fayetteville case stripped away the assumption that oversight systems were quietly working in the background. They weren’t. As data centers multiply across drought-prone regions, the real question is not whether another community will face the same problem, but whether anyone in power will be watching closely enough to catch it before the pressure drops again.