Video by Dan Lieberman and Ian McKenna

We brought AOC to deep red Georgia to talk data centers. What we found: a data center rebellion, with people willing to radically shift their politics. One conservative voter said: “If there’s a chance that anything can be done, I feel like she’s gonna be the one to do it.”

TRANSCRIPT:

TINA SHEPHERD: When the blasting started, it went on a couple of months. My sister-in-law’s ceiling came crashing down.

PATRICIA SHEPHERD: Nobody from Amazon has bothered to say one word. It was three blasts a day, seven days a week, for months.

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: This is unbelievable.

DAN LIEBERMAN VOICEOVER: What happens when you take Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the heart of the data center revolt?

AOC: And they’re just trying to say that no one should cover this?

PATRICIA: Yes. And I’m sorry, but I’m on a Social Security check. I can’t afford to do that.

AOC: You didn’t blow up your ceiling!

PATRICIA: No, I didn’t.

DAN VO: We wanted to know how voters who feel politically homeless …

DAN: Raise your hand if your electricity bill has gone up and your water bill is gone up.

DAN VO: … from the Black suburbs of Atlanta…

AOC: Are the local politicians supportive?

PAMELA FELDER: No!

DAN VO: …to conservative rural communities …

SARAH KING: This is not a party issue. This is a people issue.

AOC: That’s right.

SARAH: So it doesn’t matter what party you are, it’s wrong.

DAN VO: … how are voters going to respond to a democratic socialist from New York?

AOC: People want to call me “woke”? Whatever. This is about power.

DAN VO: With the Trump administration pushing for more data centers…

TRUMP: The AI race is a big deal… the construction of colossal data centers… we have to get this built.

DAN VO: …where does that leave regular people like Beverly Morris?

BEVERLY MORRIS: I feel trapped because I have no way out.

DAN VO: How is the backlash against a data center boom the key to unlocking America’s politics?

AOC: We’ve never been more polarized. I just think we got to show up in these places and see these things for ourselves.

DAN: Well, do you want to show us there’s been some damage to your house?

PAMELA: Of course. Yeah, sure, come on in.

DAN VO: Pamela Felder purchased her dream home three years ago.

PAMELA: So the first time of shifting I saw was the crack in my porch, all the way across.

AOC: Right here, wow.

DAN VO: All was well until explosive blasts started to shake her home earlier this year.

PAMELA: It sounded like someone picked up my house and went boom. A week after that, that’s when I started seeing cracks all throughout my house. And I found out they’re putting a data center in my backyard.

DAN VO: The two-million-square-foot hyperscale data center is being built less than a mile from Pamela’s home.

PAMELA: You can still see where the paint is ripped all the way up my stairs. I noticed the ceiling — the crack crossed there.

AOC: My dad worked in construction. So if I look like I’m really sticking my nose in here it’s because I’m taking a real look.

AOC: And your neighbors are experiencing the same thing.

PAMELA: We’re all sending letters out to the blasting company.

AOC: And what are they saying when they deny it?

PAMELA: They say my house was settling.

AOC: Oh, so everyone here is settling at the same time?

PAMELA: At the same time.

DAN VO: Pamela’s neighbor also came by and insisted we see a giant sinkhole she said was caused by the blasts.

JANET ROBINSON: Makes you want to cry. That no one’s listening. Why a data center? Why now? Why here?

DAN VO: Unprecedented amounts of money are behind the race to build. Meta is investing $600 billion in data center infrastructure through 2028. OpenAI has pledged over $400 billion. Even the real estate company responsible for this site just closed a $3.25 billion funding round.

AOC: If these tech folks love these data centers so much, put it in your backyard.

PAMELA: That’s right. Put it away from people’s homes.

AOC: This is why we’re saying we need to slow the roll on this — because they’re moving fast. We’re just saying pause it so that we can move forward in a more just way.

PAMELA: That’s right.

AOC: And a fair way for everybody.

DAN VO: But far from the Black suburbs of Atlanta is much Trumpier country, and the idea of AOC isn’t as enthusiastically received.

ROBERT LYTTEN: There’s some really extreme liberal views out there.

DAN VO: Before they met her, I asked folks what they knew about AOC’s politics.

ROBERT: Just from an overall view, very fringe left.

SARAH: I’m probably a lot more conservative than she is.

DAN: How are your politics evolving?

CONNIE LYTTEN: They’re evolving!

BEVERLY: I’m not real impressed with the politics on either side.

DAN VO: We first met Beverly Morris and her husband Jeff last year, when they showed us how the construction of a 2.5-million-square-foot Meta data center is contaminating their drinking water, a charge which Meta denies.

BEVERLY: This is my cold water pressure in the kitchen.

DAN: You can see the sediment from the data center.

BEVERLY: And this is what’s in all of the pipes, too. They should be responsible for that, not us.

DAN: When we were here last year with them, Meta was still building this data center. Now it’s operational.

BEVERLY: I worry about using the water for everything. I don’t use the water for cooking anymore. I did for a while, you know, I thought, you know, I’ve got to use it. I wouldn’t drink it. I haven’t drank the water here in years.

AOC: This is my view but it should be a right for you to be able to turn on your tap and drink what comes out of it.

DAN VO: The Morrises aren’t alone. Other residents also came to us with stories of their contaminated water.

LINDSEY WILSON: This is the sediment it’s picking up. The cold water pressure everywhere is pretty bad. You cannot take a shower and wash dishes, or take a shower and fill up the horse’s water.

CHRIS WILSON: Our refrigerator broke. Our HVAC broke. We have issues with the pool. Anything that’s water-related, we have issues with. This is the filter from the filtration system after we pull it out.

AOC: And you used to change those filters once a year, or?

CHRIS: Yeah.

LINDSAY: Typical people are probably six months to a year.

AOC: And now you’re doing it once a month?

LINDSEY: Yes.

AOC: And now you feel stuck, right? You feel like — even if you wanted to leave, you can’t?

LINDSEY: Not and be able to get the value that we put into our home.

DAN: Let’s keep going down the line. Connie?

CONNIE: Our fight is in Coweta County. We just had a large parcel of land rezoned for a data center, but we don’t know who it is yet that’s coming.

TINA: And I’m Tina. I live in Oxford, Georgia. It’s the Amazon data center.

SARAH: We’re not just fighting Facebook or Amazon or any of these data centers. That’s not who we’re fighting. We’re fighting the entire institution that allows it.

AOC: They think people aren’t paying attention. This is usually what happens. They’ll go sniffing around. I say it’s like they’re jiggling every door handle to see what county they can push these things through on.

SARAH: It is necessary. I understand the need for all of this. But the manner in which they’re going about it is not only wrong, it doesn’t even make sense.

CONNIE: I don’t blame Amazon. I don’t blame those businesses. I blame our government. That’s who is supposed to be taking care of us. My commissioner should’ve been looking after our community. Our governor should be looking after our state. Like, it goes up. A business is a business. It’s about making money. They don’t care what they’re doing to people. That’s a shame.

AOC: That’s the way it is.

SARAH: We appreciate you taking the time to come here, because until someone from the national level gets really serious about it, nothing’s going to happen.

AOC: We should be starting congressional investigations on the effect of these, and figuring out with precision how we protect our water supplies, how we protect your power bills and water bills, and keep people from getting sick.

DAN VO: Fifty miles away from the Morrises, a group of residents successfully pushed for a moratorium on a 95-acre data center project.

TERRENCE BROOKS: And wait a minute, where do I know you from?

AOC: I’m a congresswoman from New York.

TERRENCE: Oh! Come here. Yeah, you’re my girl.

CAROLE HUTCHERSON: We organized because we know what we want in our community. And they did not anticipate when they had the board of commissioners meeting that hundreds us were going to show up. And they couldn’t deny us. They had to stop and say, wait a minute.

DAN VO: Across the country, more than 50 local data center moratoriums have already been enacted, with dozens more proposed or under consideration across the U.S. But this patchwork approach has left a lot of communities vulnerable.

ALAINA REAVES: We’re in a neighborhood that’s in unincorporated Clayton County. But just over the fence line is the city limits of Forest Park, and that is where the facility is being built.

AOC: Wow, okay. So the county has a moratorium, but the city does not?

ALAINA: Correct.

AOC: Wow. And so ethe city, even though the city’s inside the county, it’s not covered?

ALAINA: Correct.

AOC: Talk about a loophole.

DAN VO: For now, the local fight continues.

CAROL: The community has said we want walkability in our neighborhoods, we want clean air, we want clean water. But we have to keep fighting. It’s like a continual fight. It’s like we’re surrounded by piranhas, you know, that just keep trying to pick at us, but we just kep fighting.

DAN VO: In March 2026, AOC and Senator Bernie Sanders introduced legislation at the federal level called the AI Data Center Moratorium Act — both a response to growing opposition to these facilities and a push to establish a nationwide policy about their construction.

AOC: Our responsibility is to take care of people. And that is what we’re here to do today.

ROUNDTABLE PARTICIPANT: What you’re proposing is a national moratorium?

AOC: It’s not the same thing as an outright ban, but it’s saying we need to meet some basic protections for people. We need some guarantees on your water, on the air that you breathe. We need to make sure that the jobs that are wiped out, that there’s a plan for that and we’re not just leaving people, you know, out to try. And we need to just have some really basic common sense protections for people.

DAN VO: The bill would require a building moratorium until the federal government passes laws mitigating job losses, preventing utility rate hikes, and establishing environmental protections, among other things. The question is whether this is enough to persuade conservative voters to support someone far across the political aisle.

DAN: Do you think the people here could get behind someone like AOC and her ideas for AI and data centers?

SARAH: I think they would get behind anyone who was going to fight for their right to clean water and to live their life without dealing with this.

AOC: Now tide on this is starting to turn. The politics on this, because everyday people are starting to catch on to what’s going on.

ROBERT: She may be on the left, but on the data center issue she seems more centered and genuinely concerned about people. And that’s refreshing to hear.

DAN: How do you wrap your head around addressing this at the national level?

AOC: We need to put people first. And we need those protections to be ironclad and guaranteed before we can have a conversation about what does and doesn’t get constructed.

DAN: Do you think that this is an issue that could maybe pull our country together?

CONNIE: I don’t know if it’s going to pull our government all together. It’s pulling the people together.

BEVERLY: If there is a chance that anything can be done, I feel like she is going to be the one to do it.

DAN VO: Days later, AOC showed Beverly’s water samples to an EPA water official testifying before her committee.

AOC: I have a jar right here. The only difference between the clean water and this was that data center. I have another one as well. This is what the drinking water now looks like next to that data center. And I think both of us can agree that neither one of these things are drinkable.

JESSICA KRAMER, Assistant Administrator, EPA Water: As soon as I get back to the office, I will be looking into exactly what you’ve just talked about. Because anywhere, whatever type of construction it is, it is a priority to ensure that water quality standards established by the EPA are being met.

DAN: There are a lot of people with a lot of money who don’t want to see this thing slow down. They’re like, ‘The train is moving fast, we can’t afford to stop, doesn’t matter, we’ll figure it out later.

AOC: I’ve been in a lot of political fights that have seemed insurmountable before that we’ve won. I just don’t believe in impossible. If you think something’s impossible, that’s an imagination problem.

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