OpenAI data center would fill 72 acres of wetlands

To build its hyperscale data center in Effingham County, OpenAI seeks to fill 72 acres of forested wetlands, a plan that requires a Clean Water Act permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to proceed. 

OpenAI, through its affiliate Octans GA, filed an application for this wetlands fill earlier this month. The document indicates the footprint of the data center’s four buildings plus supporting infrastructure will total 183 acres. That’s about the size of six Walmart superstores and their parking lots. 

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The original permit for the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub, where the data center is to be built, allowed 22 acres of wetlands impact. 

Why wetlands matter

 “That is a significant increase in the amount of wetlands that are being filled,” said Jeff Beauvais, the south coast advocate for One Hundred Miles, an environmental nonprofit encouraging the public to comment on the application before the Nov. 4 deadline. 

Wetlands supply no-cost services to local communities, such as providing wildlife habitat and improving water quality.

“They hold and filter water as it trickles down into our higher level aquifers and recharge some of those groundwater stores,” Beauvais said. 

Beauvais noted that the site is bordered by Sweigoffer and Dasher creeks, the latter of which already faces flooding issues.  

“If you plop this much concrete on top of the wetlands that are part of that system, you’re going to reduce the amount of permeable land there that could slow the speed of stormwater, and you’re probably going to exacerbate the speed with which rainwater falls into that system and worsens flooding,” Beauvais said.

‘Consolation prize’

OpenAI offered to compensate for loss of wetlands with the purchase of credits from a mitigation bank, a wetland that’s been enhanced or preserved to make up for unavoidable impacts under the federal Clean Water Act.

Beauvais calls mitigation banking a “consolation prize” that doesn’t fully account for geography. 

“Those wetlands provide real services, particularly to people who live downstream on Dasher and Sweigoffer (creeks),” he said.  “And if you fill and you restore some wetlands in Burke County or something, you’re not actually solving the problem for the people who’ve lost that function.” 

Focus on Southeast Georgia

For this type of permit the applicant is required to provide a list of other locations that could be considered for the data center. OpenAI considered only sites in Coastal Georgia, which Beauvais said was unnecessarily limited.

“This facility could have been built literally anywhere in the United States,” he said. “If you read the application materials from OpenAI, they very clearly point out that the biggest factor for them in their search was that the site was close to a sufficiently large substation.” 

One Hundred Miles is encouraging those who provide public comment to ask why the four alternative sites were restricted to Coastal Georgia, and why sites in other parts of the country are not considered.

The Current GA put this question to OpenAI spokesman Aaron McClear, who pointed to the guidelines laid out in the Clean Water Act, which state that an alternative is practicable if it is “available and capable of being done after taking into consideration cost, existing technology, and logistics in light of overall project purposes.”  

“As we mention in our permit application a key site selection criterion was that power must be available in proximity to the property, available on a timeline that works for the project. Given this criteria, our alternative search area was initially Southeast Georgia,” he wrote in an email reply. “From there, we then evaluated sites based upon land area, road access, zoning, water and sewer service, and potential wetland impacts.”

Asked to clarify if Southeast Georgia was the only region of the US that can provide power to the OpenAI data center in a timely manner he replied, “No, sorry for a misunderstanding there. We have data centers in several other states, as do other companies.” 

Pressed for further clarification, McLear responded:

“The alternatives analysis is for the specific proposed project, rather than a review of every location where OpenAI could build.”

OpenAI does limit the project area in its stated purpose, but doesn’t indicate why only Southeast Georgia is considered. The project purpose is “To construct a data center campus capable of supporting phased, high-capacity computing operations for artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and other data intensive services in Southeast Georgia where the needed electricity supply is available.”

Beauvais suspects the real reason for choosing this area relates more to promised tax breaks from Effingham County and the company “working hand-in-glove” with Georgia Power.

Limited alternatives

One of the four alternatives provided  is the Union Carbide property in Camden County, now owned by Dow Chemical. It’s a 6,765-acre tract where a yearslong attempt to build a commercial spaceport was thwarted by a referendum in 2022. The property is now zoned as a Conservation Preservation District, as noted in the application. The Georgia Department of Natural Resources in December received approval to acquire about 3,856 acres of the site for $4.8 million for inclusion in the Ceylon Wildlife Management Area.

DNR Deputy Commissioner Trevor Santos said Tuesday that the department is ironing out the last details of the purchase.

“While we have not closed on the property yet, we continue to work with Dow (Chemical Co., which acquired Union) as they finalize some internal procedures that are required prior to our acquisition,” he wrote in an email to The Current. We hope to complete the project in the near future.

The Clean Water Act notes that an otherwise practicable alternative not owned by the applicant may be considered if it  “could reasonably be obtained, utilized, expanded or managed in order to fulfill the basic purpose of the proposed activity.”

A site well on its way to being part of a state-owned wildlife management area falls short on these parameters.

“The amount of marshland plus DNR’s acquisition made it completely unviable and an absurd property for them to include as an alternative,” Beauvais said. “The fact that it’s the Union Carbide property makes it even worse.”

McLear declined to comment on its choice of the Union Carbide site as an alternative.  

Along with questions about alternative sites, Beauvais is also encouraging commenters to ask if the chosen site could be reconfigured to minimize wetland impacts by reducing the number of buildings or the overall scale. 

The comment period is also an opportunity to ask the corps to hold a public hearing. A hearing would be the first opportunity since an OpenAI open house in July for the public to interact with company representatives, Beauvais noted. 

“Forcing them to come and defend their decisions in public, I think, would be a real boost to transparency and allow people an opportunity to address them directly that they have really not been afforded,” he said.