OpenAI plans a $30bn Georgia data centre, and a charm offensive to match

Building a data centre used to be a quiet affair. Not any more. OpenAI’s plan for a giant new site in Georgia arrives with a charm offensive attached, because the industry has learned that the hard part is no longer the concrete. It is the neighbours.

The company will spend tens of billions of dollars on a complex near Savannah, Bloomberg reported. It has contracted with Georgia Power for 3.2 gigawatts of electricity in Effingham County. A single gigawatt is enough to run about 750,000 homes.

Codenamed Project Camellia, the site would rank among OpenAI’s largest, DataCenterDynamics reported.

The figures are staggered. OpenAI has committed $20bn in the county to qualify for an incentive package due for a vote this week. At the full 3.2GW, the bill would top $30bn, said Sachin Katti, its vice-president of compute strategy.

Several hundred megawatts come online from 2028, the rest by 2032. The company is hunting for partners to help pay for and build it.

The more interesting shift is who now holds the pen. OpenAI is no longer just renting these places. It is designing them, and it wants to give the designs away.

Open-sourcing the factory

Stargate, OpenAI’s infrastructure programme, began as a joint venture with Oracle and SoftBank. Now the partners vary, and OpenAI is leading the planning itself.

“There’s a bunch of lessons around how these things should be designed,” Katti said, that “cut costs as well as make it faster to build.” The company plans to open-source its blueprints for data centres, hardware, and networking. It is echoing the Open Compute Project that Meta started in 2011.

A selective doubling-down

This is not blanket expansion. OpenAI has recently paused projects in the UK and Norway, and declined to grow its flagship Texas campus, trimming spending as it eyes a stock-market debut. Rivals keep pushing. Anthropic has leased more than 300MW from SpaceX’s Colossus 1 in Memphis, and Meta has committed over $250bn to a single Louisiana campus.

Winning over Effingham County

The pitch to locals is the tell. Data centres now draw fierce local opposition over power prices and water.

So OpenAI says it will pay the full cost of the electrical work, which state rules bar it from passing to existing customers, and it will throttle power at peak times. It promises a closed-loop cooling system, hundreds of millions in taxes, a community fund, and AI credits for local students.

It will also listen. The company met county officials and starts talking to residents on Thursday, said global affairs chief Chris Lehane, and it will commission an independent audit of its promises. “All issues are going to be local,” he said.

Whether that is enough to keep a 3.2-gigawatt machine welcome in a Georgia county is the question the next few years will answer.