As Effingham County data center plan advances, next step is state evaluation process

OpenAI offered an official agreement to build a massive $20 billion data center in Effingham County approximately one month ago, according to the county manager. But despite months of earlier planning and project leaders describing the data center as a done deal, fundamental details about the facility remain opaque.

Before construction can begin on Project Camellia, the 1,400-acre data center coming to the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub in 2028, the proposed facility must first go through the state’s Developments of Regional Impact (DRI) process, an evaluation for large-scale developments.

---

Browse Data Centers & Coastal Georgia
Stories on projects, policy, legislation

See more

---

The form, submitted Wednesday by Effingham County Senior Planner Kimberly Barlett hours after publicly announcing the project, has left blank spaces about water usage, energy supply and potential impacts on the surrounding environment. No other information is given for other elements of the project. 

The county can only fill out those answers after receiving a feedback report from the state, which will then be incorporated into a formal site plan prepared by OpenAI, County Manager Tim Callanan told The Current GA.

According to the Georgia Department of Community Affairs, the state’s Coastal Regional Commission must evaluate the project in no more than 30 days. 

The county must wait until the DRI process is complete before initiating its own further evaluations for the site, including engineering reviews, fire and stormwater plans or noise levels, Callanan said. 

“We’ve preliminarily seen some site plans starting last week,” Callanan said. “But I think the major kind of digging deep into this is going to be when those formal site plans are submitted to the county.”

“We couldn’t have started it before because we didn’t have an agreement,” he said. “So now that we have an agreement, we can move forward with that planning.”

The lack of detail contrasts with DRI forms filed this week for data centers in two other Georgia counties — one in Troup County and another in Clayton County. In those forms, officials from those municipalities provided supplemental information about estimated annual local tax revenues, daily water demands, expected traffic volumes and surrounding environmental conditions.

OpenAI’s project website promises the data center will bring enormous positive returns to Effingham County. The company will receive tax abatements, but will become the largest property taxpayer in the county. It will provide 400 permanent on-site jobs and invest approximately $80 million to community projects. As well, the company pledged to enact measures to reduce environmental impacts.

The promises are the culmination of months of closed-door negotiations with Effingham County.

Brandt Herndon, the CEO of the county’s Industrial Development Authority, said the planning team spent time “doing our due diligence” to determine if the data center was right for the community.

Herndon told The Current GA that the tech company first contacted him last fall, and Callanan said he was brought into the discussion in January. 

Around late April and early May, OpenAI paid for a delegation of local elected officials to fly to Abilene, Texas, including Callanan, to the company’s data center there. 

Callanan said the overnight trip lasted one work day. There, he and the other attendees were able to see fully operational data centers with closed-loop water systems, as the one in Effingham is planned to have. The closed-loop, Callanan said, requires relatively less water than other methods and works well with the county’s infrastructure planning.

OpenAI’s vice president for communications told The Current on Thursday that the trip was planned to help answer skepticism among Effingham County officials about data centers.

The delegation also walked inside an inactive data center to see its scope and spoke with Abilene representatives for advice on best practices.

“You didn’t have to yell in order to hear each other,” Callanan recalled about the site visit, a fact he hoped would quell criticism that a new Effingham data center would create noise pollution. 

Weeks after flying the Effingham delegation to Texas, OpenAI officials met with Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, along with Georgia Power, in a private meeting attended by the company’s site development engineers, although no Effingham County officials were on the attendee list. 

One reason Effingham commissioners cited for the secrecy surrounding the deal was that OpenAI did not offer the county a written proposal until very recently, according to District 2 Commissioner Roger Burdette. “We didn’t want to scare them away,” he told irate constituents on Thursday.

At the data center open house Thursday, Effingham County’s elected officials, the county’s Industrial Development Authority and OpenAI repeatedly redirected constituents seeking information about the proposed project — and OpenAI’s immense promises to the county — in circles.

For example, the head of Effingham’s development authority encouraged The Current to speak with an OpenAI representative at the event about planned water usage at the proposed plant. 

Commissioners deflected their constituents’ anger by saying decisions were made by the development authority and told residents that they had little influence over the deal. 

By Friday, details about the project were apparently still being hashed out.

Callanan said elected officials met with development authority managers — who he said had spoken with OpenAI separately —  and was told the software company was “going to be more concrete on their plans on this.”

Meanwhile, a petition calling against the data center has garnered over 10,000 signatures, a jump of about 30% since the Thursday open house where approximately 1,000 people converged.

“Is this how we believe democracy should work?” the petition description reads. “Decisions made behind closed doors, in secrecy?”

The dissenters who gathered Thursday in Rincon came from diverse social and political backgrounds, yet on a state and national level, data centers have taken a partisan tone. 

Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp strongly supports data center growth for economic development, and this week joined an effort backed by President Donald Trump to promote data centers while still protecting regular consumers from power grid costs.

Georgia Dem. Senator Raphael Warnock wrote a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday urging the federal agency to provide guidance to local communities to ensure safe, clean water amid the data center boom.

“As new data centers are built, they place new demands on Georgia’s limited water resources,” he wrote. “Meanwhile, the entire state has been engulfed in a historic drought, with 100 percent of Georgians experiencing severe to exceptional drought earlier this year for the first time in recorded history.”

In Effingham, Callanan said he doesn’t expect many hurdles to stand in the way of the site permit approvals. Since the parcels selected by OpenAI are already zoned for data centers, discussions with the company through the spring were primarily focused on issues such as environmental buffers and fire safety for the facility. Those factors are also discussed in the submitted DRI.

“We tried to work on everything that we could think of in advance to mitigate some of the trouble points that a lot of these data centers have,” he said. “I think they have them because of bad planning, and I think this one came with some very good planning and a very willing partner to take those extra steps to protect the public.”