Tech Times34%
OpenAI Locks In 3.2 Gigawatts for Georgia Data Center Despite Public Backlash 26%
By Adrian Parham32%
7/24/2026, 3:25:41 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 35 faulty reasoning types, including Biased Writer Voice, Appeal to Authority, and Optimism Bias, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 9.2% saturation with 277 hits. Analysis detected 2,842 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,996 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 32.9% and a BS Rank of 26% (19,124 of 25,564 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 74.80% of the article peer group.
OpenAI secured a 25-year power contract with Georgia Power for 3.2 gigawatts of electricity — enough to supply roughly 2.4 million average American homes — to support a self-designed data center campus in Effingham County, Georgia, that the company says will cost at least $20 billion to build and more than $30 billion at full build-out.
The deal makes Project Camellia one of the largest single-site power commitments in the history of American technology infrastructure, and it was struck in secret — a fact that enraged hundreds of residents who confronted OpenAI officials at a packed community meeting the following day, per OpenAI's official announcement.
"It stinks," said Larry Holloway, a retired paper mill worker who has lived in Effingham County for 50 years.
"That's not how democracy is supposed to work," he told The Current GA.
The announcement, made July 22, 2026, marks a decisive escalation in OpenAI's strategy to own and operate its own compute infrastructure rather than renting capacity from cloud providers — a strategy it has pursued with mounting urgency as AI inference workloads, which now account for an estimated two-thirds of all AI data center demand according to early 2026 analyses from Deloitte and McKinsey, generate sustained, predictable power requirements that favor owned assets over rented cloud.
Read more: **AI Data Center Backlash: Zoning Notice Rule Kills World's Largest Planned Campus**
Secret Deal, Public Fury: Nearly 1,000 Residents Push Back
The community meeting OpenAI held July 23 at the Effingham College and Career Academy in Rincon was intended as an educational open house.
It became something closer to a public reckoning.
Nearly 1,000 people attended — most of them angry, according to The Current GA's account.
Roughly 300 protested outside, waving handmade signs.
Inside, the more-than-three-hour event was marked by shouting and confrontation rather than the small-group discussion format OpenAI had designed.
Residents ranging from a 79-year-old Baptist to a blue-haired high school student voiced fears about noise, light pollution, traffic, electricity costs, and environmental damage.
Dozens of others stood in line to talk to OpenAI staff about jobs.
The animating grievance was not just the project itself — it was the process.
The deal, which includes a 50% property tax abatement for 15 years, had been negotiated between OpenAI and Effingham County officials starting in November 2025, without any public comment period or vote, as reported by the Statesboro Herald.
"It's a done deal," OpenAI Vice President of Communications Aaron McLear told The Current GA.
"It was the right fit for everyone."
McLear acknowledged the backlash but promised that residents would see positive results.
Commissioner Roger Burdette, who was part of a county delegation that OpenAI paid to visit its Abilene, Texas campus earlier this year, urged his constituents to trust the process.
"I changed my mind," he said, fielding questions from irate voters.
"You should trust us on this."
Haley Reynolds, a former Effingham County resident who now teaches environmental science in Savannah, attended to raise concerns about the project's impact on the next generation.
"I think it would be kind of hypocritical for us to develop this data center in the middle of our county when we're teaching our kids that that's not good for their future," she said.
Savannah resident Bill Wright, who described himself as a "data center refugee" who moved from Northern Virginia — the so-called data center capital of the world — nine months ago to escape the industry's footprint, was blunter: "I've seen the industry blueprint before.
They're going to accentuate the positive.
They make promises with no guarantees, and this is something people here are going to regret."
A petition seeking to cancel the project had gathered more than 7,000 signatures by Thursday evening, even as county commissioners said the deal faces no remaining obstacles.
The backlash in Effingham County fits a national pattern.
At least 75 data center projects worth $130 billion were blocked or delayed in the first three months of 2026 alone — the largest single-quarter figure ever recorded — and more than 800 community groups are now actively opposing some 1,500 planned data centers across 49 states, according to TechTimes' prior reporting on the AI infrastructure backlash.
From Renter to Builder: Why OpenAI Is Designing Its Own Campus
Project Camellia, situated within the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub roughly 25 miles (40 km) northwest of Savannah, will span approximately 1,400 acres (566 hectares) and comprise four data center buildings totaling around 4.4 million square feet (409,000 square meters).
It is the first data center campus OpenAI has designed and built itself, departing from a prior model of purchasing capacity from Microsoft Azure, Oracle, Amazon Web Services, CoreWeave, and others, per the company's official announcement.
The strategic logic is grounded in the economics of AI inference.
As recently as two years ago, training frontier models — the computationally intensive process of adjusting billions of model parameters — was the dominant driver of AI compute demand.
That has shifted rapidly.
Early 2026 analyses from Deloitte and McKinsey project that inference workloads, which serve real-time outputs to users across ChatGPT, Codex, and the API, will account for roughly two-thirds of all AI data center demand by the end of 2026.
Inference is persistent, latency-sensitive, and runs continuously — unlike the burst-style demand patterns that rented cloud capacity is optimized to serve.
Training at scale also requires hardware that cloud providers cannot reliably guarantee: sustained high-bandwidth GPU-to-GPU communication within and between racks, using interconnects like InfiniBand, that aggregate into computational pipelines sensitive to any interruption.
Owning the infrastructure means controlling those pipelines.
The custom silicon strategy compounds the ownership argument.
In June 2026, OpenAI announced the Jalapeño chip, co-developed with Broadcom and manufactured on TSMC's 3 nm process.
Unlike general-purpose AI accelerators adapted from earlier workloads, Jalapeño is a blank-slate design optimized for Transformer matrix multiplication in large language model inference, informed by the specific computational patterns OpenAI observes across its production systems.
The chip is targeted for first deployment in H2 2026.
At 3.2 GW of contracted capacity, Project Camellia would be the natural home for scaling Jalapeño across millions of concurrent inference requests — with per-token economics that OpenAI could optimize end-to-end rather than passing through a cloud vendor's pricing layer.
OpenAI VP of Compute Strategy Sachin Katti told Bloomberg the full build-out is expected to exceed $30 billion once financing, infrastructure, and operational costs are fully accounted for.
OpenAI has not yet selected a financing and development partner for the campus.
Project Camellia falls under OpenAI's broader Stargate infrastructure program — the multi-hundred-billion-dollar initiative backed by OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle, announced in January 2025, per OpenAI's Stargate announcement.
As of April 2026, Stargate had approximately 0.3 GW operational in Abilene, Texas, with roughly 9 GW of capacity planned across seven U.S. sites and a target of being complete by 2029, according to TechTimes' coverage of OpenAI's compute strategy.
At 3.2 GW contracted, Project Camellia would be the single largest Stargate site announced to date.
Read more: **OpenAI Cut Stargate's Spending Pledge From $1.4 Trillion to $600 Billion: Now Renting What It Vowed to Build**
What 3.2 Gigawatts Actually Means — and Where It Comes From
The power scale of Project Camellia is what most sharply distinguishes it from conventional data center announcements.
A traditional hyperscale facility — the kind companies like Equinix and Digital Realty have built for decades — typically requires around 100 megawatts (0.1 GW).
Project Camellia's contracted capacity is 32 times that figure, as confirmed in OpenAI's Georgia Power agreement.
Georgia Power will deliver the power in phases, with several hundred megawatts arriving in 2028 and the full 3.2 GW online by 2032.
The deal accounts for approximately one-third of the 9,885 MW of new generating capacity that the Georgia Public Service Commission authorized Georgia Power to build in a unanimous vote on December 19, 2025 — an approval explicitly designed to serve the wave of data centers entering the state.
OpenAI also committed that the campus will be capable of proactively reducing its power consumption by up to 1 GW during periods of peak demand on the grid — a demand response commitment that functions, in practical terms, as a dispatchable reliability resource the utility can call on during summer heat events, per OpenAI's official commitments page.
The energy source for that power is a serious question.
Georgia Power's newly approved capacity expansion relies heavily on five new natural gas plants — approximately 5.8 GW of natural gas generation, which would more than double the utility's existing natural gas fleet, alongside grid-scale batteries and solar.
Neither OpenAI nor Georgia Power has specified how Project Camellia's power draw will be sourced within Georgia Power's broader generation mix.
Protecting Ratepayers — and the Limits of That Promise
OpenAI's most pointed public commitment addresses the concern that most directly animates community resistance to large data center projects across the country: the risk that residential electricity customers end up subsidizing the construction costs of industrial-scale users.
"Georgia families will not subsidize this project," OpenAI wrote in its official announcement.
"OpenAI will pay the full cost of the infrastructure and electric-service costs required to serve it."
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed a symbolic pledge in Washington, D.C. on July 23 at an event organized by the Trump administration, affirming that data center companies must pay their own energy costs rather than passing them to consumers.
But the durability of that protection is contested.
OpenAI's commitment is structured around rules the Georgia PSC adopted in January 2025, specifically designed to ensure that large energy users drawing more than 100 megawatts bear the full infrastructure cost of serving their load, per the Georgia PSC's March 2026 data center fact sheet.
Those rules were actively challenged when the PSC approved the $16 billion-plus 9,885 MW expansion plan in December 2025.
The Southern Environmental Law Center argued at the time that the commission was placing a "$60 billion risk on the backs of everyday Georgians" and failing to provide sufficient ratepayer protections.
The Sierra Club's reaction to the approved plan called it "a massive gas buildout" that will "force Georgians to pay for decades," and noted that gas plants are not a good investment for ratepayers.
Critics argued there was no guarantee the forecasted data center demand would materialize — and that if it did not, residential customers could face stranded-cost exposure.
OpenAI's ratepayer pledge is a voluntary commitment, not a statutory guarantee.
It is backed by Georgia Power's large-load contracting terms and the PSC's current rules — but those rules are subject to modification in future rate cases.
Residents who were told Thursday night that their electricity rates would not rise are being asked to rely on a regulatory framework that consumer advocates have already characterized as inadequate.
Water, Land, and the Community Compact
The campus will use a closed-loop water cooling system — analogous in principle to a car radiator — that recirculates water rather than continuously drawing from and discharging into local sources.
Conventional hyperscale data centers use evaporative cooling, in which water is deliberately evaporated to carry heat away, consuming large volumes of fresh water in the process.
Closed-loop systems dramatically reduce consumptive water use and eliminate the risk of warming adjacent waterways, at the cost of more complex and expensive heat-exchange infrastructure, per OpenAI's community commitments.
OpenAI says the campus will not divert water from local communities.
The Effingham County Industrial Development Authority board approved a 50% property tax abatement for 15 years, with OpenAI locked into the 2026 millage rate for the duration.
ECIDA noted this means OpenAI "will not benefit from any future millage rollbacks facilitated by the investment" — a design intended to protect the county and school district if rates are cut as a result of the new revenue, as reported by the Statesboro Herald.
Despite the abatement, OpenAI is expected to become Effingham County's largest taxpayer.
County Manager Tim Callanan said current estimates project the average homeowner could see a 40% reduction in county property taxes, with Effingham County's "Project Zero" initiative — which aims to eliminate homestead property taxes — becoming achievable as early as 2027, according to WTOC's coverage.
The $80 million in direct community benefits promised over the life of the project — directed toward schools, public safety, health care, utilities, workforce training, housing, veterans' services, and small businesses — will be memorialized in a "Georgia Community Compact," with an annual independent audit published publicly, per OpenAI's community commitments page.
OpenAI has also pledged up to $71 million in Codex credits for approximately 721,000 eligible Georgia college, community college, and technical school students during the 2026-2027 academic year, as detailed on projectcamellia.com.
How Does Georgia Compare to Other Stargate Communities?
The Effingham County backlash is the latest — and possibly the loudest — in a string of community confrontations over Stargate-adjacent data center projects.
In Michigan's Saline Township, the state PSC conditionally approved a 1.4 GW DTE power agreement for a Related Digital-developed Stargate campus in December 2025; a Michigan township treasurer resigned in May 2026 after receiving death threats tied to the project.
New Mexico's Land Office blocked a natural gas pipeline that would have powered Project Jupiter, Stargate's 2.45 GW campus on the New Mexico-Mexico border, in March 2026, and environmental groups are petitioning FERC to delay permitting further.
OpenAI's Abilene, Texas campus — its first self-operated facility — is partially operational, with an estimated 0.3 GW of compute currently running, but buildings three and four, originally targeted for completion in March 2026, remained offline as of June 2026, according to TechTimes' coverage of Stargate's operational status.
The company pointed a delegation of Effingham County commissioners to Abilene as evidence that large-scale compute and local community interests can coexist — an argument that clearly did not fully land with the roughly 300 residents who gathered outside Thursday's meeting.
Is This What the AI Race Costs?
The 3.2 GW power agreement OpenAI signed with Georgia Power is the kind of commitment historically associated with large industrial manufacturers — aluminum smelters, integrated steel mills, paper mills — not software companies.
That an AI lab is now signing 25-year power agreements at this magnitude signals a structural shift in how the technology industry interacts with the American electricity grid.
Jackson Morris, director of state power policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, has described the AI data center demand surge as happening "15 years sooner and 10 times faster" than the power sector anticipated, in NRDC's analysis of AI grid stress.
The planning cycles that utilities and regulators use — integrated resource plans developed over years, rate cases settled through lengthy proceedings — were not designed for a customer that can arrive, sign a 25-year, 3.2 GW contract, and expect first power delivery in less than two years.
Effingham County, a community of roughly 70,000 people between Savannah and Augusta, is now at the center of that collision.
Its officials say the project will transform the county's financial future.
Its residents, at least those who showed up Thursday evening, are not sure that future is one they chose.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will my Georgia Power electricity rates go up because of Project Camellia?
OpenAI has pledged that Georgia residential customers will not see their rates increase because of the project, and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed a symbolic commitment on July 23 affirming that large energy users must pay their own infrastructure costs, per OpenAI's community commitments and the Georgia PSC's large-load cost-isolation rules adopted in January 2025.
OpenAI's contract with Georgia Power requires the company to pay the full cost of infrastructure and electric service.
However, consumer advocacy groups including the Southern Environmental Law Center have argued that the Georgia PSC rules underpinning this protection are insufficient — and that the $16 billion-plus capacity expansion approved in December 2025 could ultimately expose ratepayers to financial risk if projected data center demand does not materialize.
Why is OpenAI building its own data center instead of renting cloud computing?
AI inference workloads — the continuous process of answering user queries across ChatGPT, Codex, and the API — now account for an estimated two-thirds of all AI data center demand according to 2026 analyses from Deloitte and McKinsey, and they run 24/7 at a scale that makes owned infrastructure more cost-effective than renting cloud capacity at sustained utilization.
Owned infrastructure also allows OpenAI to optimize the entire stack: the power delivery, the cooling, the GPU interconnects, and the custom Jalapeño inference chip co-developed with Broadcom.
At rented facilities, each of those layers carries a vendor markup.
At a campus OpenAI designs and operates, they do not.
Why did Effingham County residents say the deal was made in secret?
The ECIDA board approved OpenAI's incentive package — including a 50% property tax abatement for 15 years — at its July meeting, two days before the project was publicly announced on July 22, 2026, as documented by the Statesboro Herald.
Negotiations had been ongoing since November 2025, without public comment periods or community votes.
OpenAI and county officials say the secrecy was necessary to prevent competing jurisdictions from undercutting the deal, and that the community compact process will allow residents to shape the project going forward.
Residents who attended Thursday's open house were not persuaded: a petition to cancel the project gathered more than 7,000 signatures by the end of that evening.
What does 3.2 gigawatts of electricity actually mean in practical terms?
A gigawatt is approximately the electricity consumed by 330,000 average U.S. homes.
Project Camellia's contracted 3.2 GW is equivalent to the power needs of roughly 2.4 million homes, or about 32 times the capacity of a traditional hyperscale data center (which typically requires around 100 megawatts), per OpenAI's Georgia Power agreement.
The deal represents approximately one-third of the 9,885 MW of new generating capacity the Georgia PSC authorized in December 2025 — capacity built primarily to serve data centers entering the state.
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