Data Center Dominance

The rapid rise of AI is fueling explosive demand for computing power, making it a major driver for data centers. Local residents often passionately oppose the sprawling campuses of nondescript, continuously operating IT warehouses because they contrast sharply with rural lifestyles, by bringing big warehouse buildings in and around their neighborhoods and towns. In some cases, government officials have welcomed them because they generate significant tax revenues that help fund local budgets and schools. Others, including in Hall, Clayton, Pike, Coweta and Douglas counties, have placed temporary moratoriums on new development.

Amid the turmoil, operators are building them as fast as they can because data center capacity lags far behind in meeting current and projected demand for consumer and business technology. In the first half of last year, Metro Atlanta posted the planet’s largest year-over-year data center inventory growth, according to CBRE, the largest global commercial real estate services and investment firm. Based on inventory capacity, Metro Atlanta has become the world’s second-largest data center market behind Northern Virginia.

“Construction for data centers has tripled over the last year,” says Chris Clark, Georgia Chamber of Commerce president and CEO. “In the first seven months of 2025, we got more than $40 billion worth of investment from data centers. Data is now more valuable than anything else in the economy. We need to look at data centers as part of the critical infrastructure of this state for the next 50 years as we bring on new industries and transform existing businesses.”

Beyond their ability to impact business operations, the artificial intelligence and cloud computing capabilities of data centers power economic growth and influence sectors such as government, law enforcement, banking and academia. They enable U.S. households, which as of 2023 had an average 21 connected devices, to keep financial and health records, enjoy social media, stream video and interact with AI chatbots.

Atlanta’s Attraction

Metro Atlanta emerged as the world’s data center leasing leader because of a “combination [that] is a perfect storm that cannot be reproduced anywhere else, at least to [the] degree” that exists here, says Mike Lash, CBRE senior vice president of data center solutions. Metro Atlanta had a head start as a digital technology logistics hub, with railroad rights of way dating to Atlanta’s founding that provide a backbone for laying fiber optic cable.

Checking Boxes: Mike Lash, CBRE senior vice president of data center solutions, notes Metro Atlanta had a head start as a digital technology logistics hub. Photo credit: Kevin Garrett

Georgia also checks boxes data centers require, says Lash. It has a healthy and reliable transmission grid and a regulated utility, Georgia Power, which Lash says is among the best in the country as far as capacity of power. Georgia also has a balanced budget, plenty of tech talent and a relatively low cost to do business. These factors give Georgia a speed-to-market ability to bring data centers online other parts of the U.S. can’t match. “When you run the numbers, job creation, the potential for low-impact and high-value tax revenue with a large portion going to school districts and helping with county [and] city budgets, you see [data centers] are a gift,” says Lash.

In 2023, that “gift” was worth $25.7 billion to Georgia’s GDP (an 11% increase from 2022), $1.8 billion in taxes ($1.06 billion to state government and $767 million to local governments) and was responsible for creating 30,070 direct jobs and 176,790 total jobs (direct, indirect and induced), with a total labor income of $14.1 billion, according to the Virginia-based Data Center Coalition, the nation’s leading data center trade association. “More importantly, data centers create strong business ecosystems around them,” says Dan Diorio, Data Center Coalition vice president of state policy. “For every one job in a data center, six jobs are supported elsewhere in the economy.” The multiplier effect has the potential to benefit many Georgians. “We have 300,000 more jobs in Georgia than we have workers applying for those jobs,” points out Clark. “As we look at the long term, for communities that can attract a data center you get a double bang for your buck.” Critics say that because data centers largely consist of file servers and networking equipment, it does not take a lot of employees to staff them.

“Construction for data centers has tripled over the last year. In the first seven months of 2025, we got more than $40 billion worth of investment from data centers.” – Chris Clark, president and CEO, Georgia Chamber of Commerce

Rural Communities in the Game

Data center researcher Baxtel says there are at least 163 data centers in Metro Atlanta, including clusters in Alpharetta, Lithia Springs, Suwanee/Norcross and Downtown Atlanta. One of the most
interconnected is housed at 56 Marietta Street, a repurposed century-old Downtown building that operates as a regional hub where telecommunications providers are able to connect with other data centers. While data centers are largely built around Atlanta’s core, fiber-optic cable is speeding that double bang into rural Georgia.

Locations, Location: There are at least 163 data centers in Metro Atlanta, including this one at 56 Marietta Street in Downtown Atlanta, which operates as a regional hub. Photo credit: Kevin Garrett

“From Rome [in Floyd County] to Butts County – into even Monroe [in Walton County] – you’re starting to see more rural communities compete for these projects,” says Clark.

Data centers’ reputation, however, often precedes them – of server farms displacing traditional farms while consuming alarming amounts of energy and water. Nationwide, at least $64 billion in data center projects have been blocked or delayed, according to Data Center Watch, which tracks grassroots opposition to data center development across the United States as a research project of 10a Labs, an applied research and technology company specializing in AI security.

In Georgia, Monroe County commissioners rejected a request to rezone 900 acres for a $6 billion data center near Bolingbroke after residents raised environmental concerns and worried that it would destroy the town’s pastoral character. Their decision faces a legal challenge, filed in Monroe County Superior Court, alleging the county improperly denied the rezoning proposal. Coweta, DeKalb, Douglas and Troup counties have imposed temporary moratoriums on data center development to give local leaders time to evaluate zoning codes. Atlanta has banned them in some neighborhoods, including Little Five Points, East Atlanta Village and within a half mile of MARTA stops and the Beltline.

About a year ago, Whitesburg-based Atlas Development filed an application with the Coweta County Board of Commissioners to rezone 832 acres of forest in the Middle Chattahoochee River Basin from rural conservation to light industrial. Atlas sought to build a data center with 13 buildings and substations on the property, according to the application. In May, Prologis, a San Francisco-based global developer of logistics real estate, including data centers, agreed to buy the site from Atlas. Prologis reduced the site plan from 13 to nine buildings after receiving feedback from local and community leaders. It intends to develop the data center and eventually own the property, which currently has multiple private owners.

The group Citizens for Rural Coweta has lobbied heavily against the application and planned data center, known as Project Sail. “Our opposition isn’t to Prologis building a data center,” says Steve Swope, a Citizens for Rural Coweta organizer. “The opposition is to a data center in a conservation area.”

Rural conservation zoning aims to protect agriculture, forestry and other attributes of rural communities. The Muscogee Nation, National Parks Conservation Association and Georgia Department of Natural Resources also oppose the rezoning due to concerns about the impact on archeological sites, rare species and the nearby Chattahoochee River.

“We chose this site because it’s already close to existing power infrastructure, which means energy can be delivered efficiently without adding new transmission lines through other parts of Coweta County. Our goal is to create a development that offers lasting local benefit while keeping the footprint as low-impact as possible,” Prologis said in an emailed statement. Georgia Power’s Plant Yates is adjacent to the property, which is traversed by transmission lines. Prologis, which owns 1.3 billion square feet of industrial space across 20 Georgia counties, does not have a tenant for the planned data center.

Data centers are such a new form of development that in November the state Department of Community Affairs, which provides local economic development and housing support, unanimously expanded what constitutes a “development of regional impact” to explicitly include data centers. DRI is not a regulatory process. It is an intergovernmental communications mechanism that ensures local governments communicate with their neighbors about significant projects that may affect more than a single, local jurisdiction before conflicts relating to them arise.

Impact on Water and Energy

Two years ago, the General Assembly passed a bill, which Gov. Brian Kemp vetoed, that would have suspended a tax break for data centers for two years to give the state time to assess their impact on the power grid.

Critical Infrastructure: Chris Clark, president and CEO of the Georgia Chamber, says data centers are valuable to Georgia. Photo credit: Kevin Garrett

A House Special Committee on Resource Management is asking the General Assembly to consider the issue of data center energy and water use in its 2026 session.

Chair Rep. Brad Thomas (R-Holly Springs) split the committee into energy and water subcommittees that began holding meetings last spring. They are discussing Georgia’s data center policy – how to meet the needs of Georgia citizens and ensure they have good and affordable access to water and power while also meeting the rising demand for data centers to power artificial intelligence. He admits it hasn’t been easy. “We don’t have all the facts. … You can’t plan for something if you have no idea what it is. … A lot of this is run through local governments, so trying to get a good picture of what’s happening [in] all the cities and counties in the state [has] been a challenge.”

Part of the challenge is there isn’t one specific state agency, regulatory or economic development group tasked with statewide data center oversight. Consequently, Georgia lacks such basic data center information as an official count of how many exist in the state. Numbers from other sources – the Atlanta Regional Commission, nonprofit and trade groups – vary widely, from around 100 to almost 200.

Many data centers receive power from Public Service Commission-regulated Georgia Power, the state’s largest electric utility, with approximately 2.8 million customers and operations in 155 of Georgia’s 159 counties. Some receive power from the Electric Membership Cooperative or municipal suppliers, neither of which the PSC regulates. Earlier in 2025, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the PSC and Georgia Power had an agreement that both entities said would protect residential and small business customers from bearing data center costs. However, PSC staff analysts said that agreement might not prevent residential customers’ bills from increasing if the commission approves the company’s request to expand its power generation. The issue of rising residential power bills was a major factor in the November election of two Democrats to the previously all-Republican PSC; the commission was set to vote on Georgia Power’s request in December, a few days before the newly elected Democrats are sworn in.

Looking ahead, Georgia Power is in the process of determining how it will produce electricity for proposed data centers. The company keeps a diverse grid that includes natural gas-fired electricity production plants as well as a significant amount of solar power, nuclear, coal and hydroelectric power. Georgia Power has told the PSC it wants to use natural gas to produce a significant amount of its power for proposed data centers. The utility also wants to use other production methods, including solar.

The PSC will have to approve all Georgia Power energy production for data centers, which are increasingly exploring and pursuing natural gas as an energy solution, both as a primary source and for backup generation. Atlanta Gas Light would provide gas delivery service to data centers under PSC-approved tariffs and/or PSC-approved service agreements between Atlanta Gas Light and the data center. Atlanta Gas Light anticipates rates would be structured so data centers pay the full cost of natural gas service.

“Thanks to new rules [the PSC] approved in January 2025, [data centers] pay upfront the full local costs of serving them, commit to long-term contracts and provide financial guarantees,” Aaron Mitchell, Georgia Power senior vice president of Strategic Growth, writes in an email. In addition, he adds, they “are paying for the costs Georgia Power incurs to serve them and are helping us keep base rates frozen for the next three years.”

Mitchell acknowledges that “data centers require substantial energy to operate” – in 2023 Georgia Power revised load growth estimates to the PSC through the 2030/2031 winter upward more than 1,550%, mostly for data center growth, according to a PSC email. But he adds, “They also play a vital role in driving economic growth by creating jobs and attracting investment in our local communities and in Georgia.”

For its part, “the industry is committed to paying its full cost of service for energy it uses,” says the Data Center Coalition’s Diorio, adding he thinks there is a misperception that data centers don’t use water sustainably. Companies in the coalition use closed-loop systems that recycle water and use the same amount of water, or less, than a same-size office building, he points out.

Energy Options: QTS will use a water-free cooling system and is planning to rely on mostly carbon-free energy at its data center under construction in Fayetteville. Photo credit: QTS

QTS, which is building a data center campus on 615 acres in Fayetteville with plans for at least 13 buildings, utilizes a water-free cooling system that once operational will not withdraw, consume or discharge water while cooling the buildings. QTS also says it will seek to source the maximum amount of carbon-free energy for the campus. Microsoft, which aims to improve water efficiency by
40% by 2030, has begun operations on the same campus in a space exceeding 1 million square feet, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Amazon Web Services, which plans to expand on the $18.5 billion it has invested in Georgia since 2010 by investing another $11 billion to support AI and cloud technologies, beginning in Butts and Douglas counties, says 100% of electricity consumed by its data centers was matched with renewable energy sources in 2024, for the second consecutive year. AWS also says its data centers will be water-positive by 2030, returning more water to communities than they use in direct operations. QTS and AWS are Data Center Coalition members.

Even so, data center water use remains a concern for local governments and agencies. The Atlanta Regional Commission, for example, is encouraging local governments to contact their water utility early in the proposal process to coordinate on possible water withdrawal issues, allow time to update codes and comprehensive plans, as needed, engage the public and balance the benefits of data center investment with the realities of land use, infrastructure and environmental impacts.

It’s important for these data centers to be good neighbors and partners because our future relies on them, says the Georgia Chamber’s Clark. Some have done that really well, while others haven’t, he says. Georgia cultivates a pro-growth, pro-business environment, and Clark says data is an emerging industry. As a result, he believes, it’s taking operators some time to understand how they are expected to do business in Georgia because many are based out of state and have grown very fast here.

He predicts that there will be a big change in how they engage with their communities, local chambers and school systems. He expects that to be more like “a traditional employer knows to adopt the Georgia way of being good corporate citizens.” 

Georgia Chamber President & CEO Chris Clark thinks something is being overlooked in the passionate public debates about data centers: national security.

Some of the localized opposition might be driven by a “not-in-my-backyard mentality, and if it wasn’t data centers it would be something else” in economic development facing resistance, he says. But there’s another perspective Clark says needs more attention: It’s better to have data centers in Georgia’s backyards than on China’s Digital Silk Road. Georgia’s backyards, it turns out, are some of the best national security locations for data centers in the U.S.

Georgia is a national leader in cybersecurity, which helps protect the vast amounts of sensitive information in the state’s data centers, prime targets for the nation’s adversaries and bad actors, from cyberattacks. Georgia has more than 120 cybersecurity companies, 12 cyber innovation centers and incubators and a unique federal-state-academic-industry cyber hub in Augusta. That hub includes Fort Gordon, home to the U.S. Army’s Cyber Command Center, the Georgia Cryptologic Center and Georga’s cyber crown jewel, the Georgia Cyber Innovation and Training Center, one of the nation’s single largest investments in a state-owned cybersecurity facility.

Cyber Center Executive Director Eric Toler calls the $106 million facility at Augusta University the “proverbial one-stop shop for cyber operations and cyber security.” That’s important for Georgia’s data center ecosystem, he says, “because it significantly increases the ability to secure our data and helps ensure compliance with U.S. privacy regulations.” If imitation, as the saying goes, is the finest form of flattery, the nation and the world are flattering Toler and the center in a big way.

“We have had almost 40 states and over 50 countries visit us to see what we’re doing,” he says. “Our hope is that every state has one or two or five of these centers, that we can work together, connect the dots and then really help protect America.”