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Gage Bailey, a local concerned citizen who opposes data centers in LaGrange, looks at a kayak put-in on West Point Lake on Aug. 15, 2025.
Credit: Kala Hunter/Ledger-Enquirer
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Why LaGrange residents are concerned about incoming data center Project Pegasus
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An hour drive southwest of Atlanta, the city of LaGrange is next to a 25,000-acre reservoir, West Point Lake, supplying drinking water, boating and fishing to the region.
The 32,000-person town in Troup County also is an industrial town, with companies such as Duracell, flooring manufacturer Interface and the only U.S. Kia automotive plant, which produces 959 vehicles per day.
Now, LaGrange has been picked to host an $8 billion data center, called Project Pegasus, at the industrial park a few miles away from downtown.
For the past several months, there have been damning reports about data centers being built in Georgia and throughout the U.S. Some have been known to contaminate water or cause water to run dry near homes, plus they can create a low-level hum that causes noise pollution. Data centers are giant warehouses that compute and store information in the cloud for streaming services, social media, search engines and, more recently, artificial intelligence.
In June, Georgia was considered the fastest-growing and most-active data center market in the country.
Large data centers can use the same amount of energy and water as a car manufacturing plant or a small town. It’s not always clear how data centers are powered: by existing fossil fuel power plants that worsen air quality and contribute to human-caused climate change, or by building new plants like legacy coal power, or by adding more clean, renewable energy like solar and battery storage.
The gargantuan amount of water and energy used, and the speed with which data centers are emerging across the state, have alarmed river watchdog groups and science advocates across Georgia.
“They’ve been coming online rapid-fire,” said Amy Sharma, executive director of Science for Georgia. “They’re just like unchecked madness, and that’s what worries me. No one is thinking thoughtfully about them.”
That’s why Gage Bailey, a 27-year-old born and raised in LaGrange, is “vehemently opposed to data centers coming” to his hometown, he said.
Bailey just finished earning his second bachelor’s degree in environmental science. He enjoys the access to nature in LaGrange, including kayaking on the lake.
“West Point Lake is like a second home to me,” he said. “I strive to protect it in every way I can.”
In addition to fresh water use, he has concerns about emissions to power Project Pegasus, and how LaGrange can handle data centers without increasing transmission lines. Plus, he worries about utility bills rising to run electricity 24/7.
But the LaGrange Development Authority and the LaGrange city manager have dismissed these concerns. They argue LaGrange is well-suited to handle the load of data centers from incoming transmission projects, and it’s an “enterprise, full-service city,” so utility bills won’t be affected.
‘A slam dunk for schools’
In 2016, Scott Malone, president of the LaGrange Development Authority, began his venture alongside business partner Kelly Bush. They conceived the Georgia International Business Park, combining three industrial parks in LaGrange and stretching it all the way to Kia in West Point, more than 10 miles away, to comprise 10,000 acres. The goal: Attract the most sustainable businesses in the world.
Comprising 10,000 acres, it now is the largest business park in the Southeast and the fourth-largest in the country, according to Malone. Since 2016, they have done $11.7 billion worth of projects, he said.
Real estate developer Thor Equities Group of New York approached Malone in August 2024 to buy a 271-acre campus in the business park, where Jindal Films (a polypropylene plastic company) operated. They offered manufacturing companies and other projects, but when they offered a data center, Malone and Bush said yes.
“It’s the perfect project for us,” Malone said. “High capital investment, high utility user and low number of high-paying jobs.”
Malone said this is great for the community because LaGrange doesn’t have property taxes, and the low number of jobs data centers require takes “pressure off the school system.”
“This is a slam dunk for the school system,” he said. “(Jindal) was generating $900,000 of property tax a year for the county will now generate millions of dollars of property tax. We had a utility user as the number one customer for the city that will now be multiple times beyond that.”
This is outlined in a memorandum of understanding between the shell company, Rosewall Pines Holdings, and the Development Authority of LaGrange.
Project Pegasus is supposed to create 100 jobs that pay six figures, according to Malone, all based in LaGrange. The MOU highlights this as 30 new jobs each year for three years during each phase of the project.
Patrick Bowie, the city manager and director of utilities who has been in a utility management role since 1988 in LaGrange, told the Ledger-Enquirer the “full-service city” or enterprise city means utility operations are a department of the city. So the profits from the enterprise funds along with sales tax go to government services, all without charging property tax.
“The school system and county collect property tax,” Bowie said.
Bowie, a LaGrange Development Authority Board member, said the goal of Project Pegasus is to contribute something to the system to relieve the burden of residents.
LaGrange is a member of the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia, a nonprofit utility business that helps acquire power for the city. MEAG works in 92 cities in Georgia and supplies about 2,500 megawatts of power. According to its website, the company’s energy sources are about 70% carbon-free.
Bowie, also on the MEAG Board, said LaGrange has MEAG getting power from nuclear plants, such as Plant Hatch in Baxley, and Plant Scherer, a coal power plant in Juliette, among other resources.
LaGrange requires about 130 MW to power the city. Jindal was the city’s highest energy user at 30 MW before closing its LaGrange plant last year. Because of that high usage, a substation with a capacity of 100 MW remains next to the property.
Construction for Thor’s Project Pegasus began six weeks ago to retrofit the existing building for the data center. The project customer is under a nondisclosure agreement, so the customer isn’t publicly identified, but Malone said it is one of the most “sustainable data center companies in the world.”
The entire area is in an industrial zone and in the first phase of work will need only 32 MW of power.
“They basically just replace what Jindal used,” Malone said. But Thor purchased up to 420 acres to build out additional facilities, Malone added.
A plan is also in the works to generate an additional 900 MW of energy for LaGrange from the Georgia Transmission Corporation, which Malone said is fortunate timing.
The Georgia Transmission Corporation is two years into a four-year project that would build high-voltage lines to power to LaGrange. However, Terry Butrill, the public affairs director of Georgia Transmission Corporation, said their team estimates a maximum flow to that line of 450 MW, which will be ready for service by January 2027.
Based off the square footage of the existing Jindal building, 233,000 square feet, Sharma calculated the data center may need up to 400 MW of energy.
“We’re still negotiating with (Project Pegasus) in terms of what their needs are and what we’ll have to do to go out and help them acquire the capacity that’s needed,” Bowie said. “But the main point that (residents) need to understand is that capacity will be paid for by the customer. It won’t be a risk, and the cost will not be borne by the existing customers.”
Transparency for the sake of efficiency
Project Pegasus is being built in an industrial zone, so a Development of Regional Impact is not required. A DRI is a planning document sent to local officials and an official public planning document overseen by the Georgia Department of Community Affairs.
A DRI is how science advocates such as Sharma or water policy experts like Chris Manganiello of Chattahoochee Riverkeeper learn more about the scale and resource needs of some of the 100 data centers around the state.
Because this project does not have a DRI, it is not publicly known how much energy will be needed by the end of construction nor how much water will be needed. Malone shared only the initial phase of 32MW of energy and that water requirements to cool the data center could be between hundreds of thousands to 2 million gallons per day.
“We won’t know until we get operational,” he said. “The city is finishing out modeling.”
Kia, which has access to water and energy 24/7, is the largest manufacturing plant in Troup County and uses 1 million gallons of water per day, West Point utility manager, Sammy Inman, said in an email.
The automotive manufacturing plant uses 362 MW per day, Natalie Tullberg, KIA press relations said in an email.
“What makes (data centers) different is that we don’t have a bunch of Kia plants popping up all over the state at the same time,” Manganiello said. “We don’t have a bunch of Coca-Cola bottling plants popping up all over the state at the same time. We do have data centers — large, unprecedented, resource-intensive facilities popping up all over the state at the same time.”
Data centers are considered critical infrastructure, allowed to run 24/7, and Sharma said they could be more efficient.
“As a former computer architect, I know these guys can do better, to make much more efficient chips and much more efficient designs,” Sharma said. “But there is no incentive to do so because we’re just giving them power for pennies on the dollar. So, like, why bother? Like, there’s no incentive. There’s no business reason for them to invest in being better citizens and being more data efficient and being more water efficient and more power efficient.”
One of the options for water efficiency is using a closed-loop water system. Manganiello described it like a hula hoop.
“They kind of load water into the hula hoop, and then the facility starts operating, and the whole hoop never loses water,” he said. “And so depending on how big the facility is, it could be really big, but the water loss over time is very minimal.”
Manganiello said the trade off with closed-loop water is high energy use.
“Usually, closed-loop systems, while they may have a smaller water footprint, tend to have a much larger energy footprint,” he said.
There are no regulations over how much water can be used for these facilities in Georgia.
Data centers critical infrastructure. During drought too?
The LaGrange water intake plant has a permit to pull up to 22 million gallons of water per day. According to Malone and Bowie, that amount never has been met.
Although, in the 1980s and ‘90s when textile manufacturing still operated in LaGrange, Malone said the numbers got into the high teens of water usage per day. Now that those mills have closed, Malone and Bowie see no issue with a data center using the high amounts of water that the textile mills used.
“We’re blessed with excess capacity,” Malone said, talking about the lake holding all of the water coming down the Chattahoochee River from Atlanta.
Since the dam was put in and West Point Lake was created in 1975, the lowest the lake levels have been were around 620 feet in 1981, 1986, 2007 and 2012. The lake level averages around 632 feet and is managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who control the dam levers.
Bowie said the water plant never has been restricted from removing water during a drought.
Water from data centers doesn’t re-enter the water stream or river system stream, like a toilet flush would from a sewage plant.
“When it evaporates here, it’s no longer part of what I would call our local Georgia ecosystem,” Sharma said. “So that is the water that we can’t use to water our crops or drink or cook or all of the other things that we use water for.”
Georgia hasn’t had a serious drought in about 10 years. And in that time, many data centers have begun humming around Atlanta, removing water from the Chattahoochee River.
The last big droughts were 2015-16, 2011-13 and 2007-09, plus a brief one in 2023, according to Pam Knox, director of the UGA Weather Network and an agricultural climatologist. She noted outdoor water restrictions, like bans on watering lawns, in the 2007 drought.
Georgia has been in an extreme rain and flood period for a few years, but Knox said it is just a matter of time before we see another drought.
“Climate change means we’re going to have more heavy rain, but it also means we’re going to have longer dry spells,” she said, “And those longer dry spells, combined with higher than usual temperatures, are going to really contribute to the development and expansion of drought.”
“As far as we know,” Sharma said, “No one is addressing any of the water-use agreements, and data centers are calling themselves critical infrastructure. No one is asking questions like, 'Are we not going to water our crops so we can have AI? Are we going to have to cut our water for lawns? What will data centers have to do then?’”
‘You can’t just put these things anywhere’
Bowie said the project customer continually asks how they can help with energy efficiency or offset some of their footprint by doing some things in the community.
“We’ve been really, really, really impressed with their focus and their desire to be a community partner and contribute to helping the people who live here.” he said.
Another proposed data center project south of LaGrange on farmland is currently being stalled for a myriad of reasons, called Project West, was not done through the LaGrange Development Authority. They were on farmland, not in an industrial park, and created conflict with the city, according to Malone.
When West was being discussed, Bailey’s concerns grew.
Malone, however, considers Project Pegasus the complete opposite.
“It really is kind of like your unicorn project,” he said.
A third data center, called Project Crow, recently was proposed for LaGrange, but Malone said they are in initial stages and little is known about the project.
“What many people don’t realize is that with these data centers being in such a short radius, this is going to put a significant strain on our drinking water,” Bailey said.
Bailey created the Say No to Data Centers in LaGrange, Georgia, Facebook group a few weeks ago. He is leading a coalition of locals to write a 90-day moratorium letter to the city to pause all data center development.
“We’re just trying to figure out what’s going on,” Bailey said in an email.
He is following the model of other counties like Coweta and Douglas, which, in May, created 90-day moratoriums on pausing new data center projects.
Bailey does not want data centers anywhere in LaGrange. He believes they don’t belong here.
Malone, who sees LaGrange as an ideal place for data centers, suggests they belong in specific parts of cities. “You can’t just put these things anywhere,” he said.
This story comes to GPB through a reporting partnership with Columbus Ledger-Enquirer.
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