U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock on Friday called for a moratorium on data center construction in Georgia, describing the secrecy surrounding plans to build a $20 billion data center in Effingham County “unacceptable.”
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With “hundreds” of data centers already being planned in Georgia and a “feckless” U.S. Congress “moving too slowly” to regulate the artificial intelligence boom and the data centers that are tooling it, Warnock declared it was time for a data-center pause in the state.
“In the absence of Congress not getting its act together and putting some common-sense guardrails in place, local communities and states find themselves in a race to the bottom,” said Warnock, speaking to reporters at Mt. Zion Lutheran Church in Guyton, some 11 miles from the proposed 1,440-acre site of the tech giant OpenAI’s data center.
In offering his own proposal for such a “common-sense guardrail” on Friday, Warnock appears determined to address some of the downsides of the data-center boom while making it clear he doesn’t oppose data centers in principle.
Both he and fellow Georgia senator, Jon Ossoff, have urged federal officials in recent months to help protect consumers from any water shortages and rising power bills caused by data centers, but have received no response, their offices confirmed Friday.
Under the proposal presented by Warnock on Friday, a general moratorium on construction of data centers in Georgia could be lifted in a specific case, provided the proposed builder met specific guarantees.
Those promises, he said, would include no increases in water and electrical bills for residents due to the presence of a data center; prevention of any water, air, noise and light pollution; a ban on nondisclosure agreements for parties to the deal; and no “sweetheart tax giveaways to developers.”
‘Height of arrogance’
Beyond his concern that communities considering data centers are overmatched in contract talks by the money and other resources wielded by rich high-tech companies, Warnock’s remarks on Friday indicated that what has exasperated him most about the deal between Effingham County officials and OpenAI is the secrecy surrounding it.
Like other critics of the agreement, he noted that no public hearings were held about the proposed data center, and only a few county officials – bound to secrecy by nondisclosure agreements — knew of the negotiations before the July 22 announcement of a memorandum of understanding.
The agreement was “worked out in the dark, under the cover of night” with the citizens of Effingham now “basically being told, ‘You deal with it’,” Warnock told reporters outside the meeting hall of the church, where he had met with a handful of county residents for some 30 minutes to discuss their concerns after touring the proposed site of the Rincon data center.
Members of the Effingham Industrial Development Authority, which negotiated the memorandum of understanding, have defended the secrecy.
“You can’t have a public negotiation,” one member, Eric Johnson, has reportedly said. “If we’d have put it out in front of the public, they’d have said ‘No data center’ based on misinformation and what Virginia looks like, or what they’re reading on social media.”
On Friday, Warnock pointedly disagreed with such views.
“If you listen to the answers of local officials, basically they’re saying they know what’s best” and that “‘we can’t trust the people to get it right.”
“It is the height of arrogance and hubris to presume that you should do this without even hearing from the people who live here,” the senator said, adding: Effingham’s residents “deserve better than that.”
“This is not OpenAI County — this is Effingham County.”
