Wondering how many data centers there are in Georgia?
A data center expert tells the Ledger-Enquirer he does not know, and the answer “would be tricky” to get.
Ahmed Saeed, an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech, teaches an undergraduate introduction to computer networks course and a graduate class on data center systems. He’s been working in the data center space for 10 years. He jokingly said 10 years ago, people couldn’t quite understand what he was teaching. Now it’s in the lexicon.
While the number of data centers is hard to find, some data center database suggests there are 160, and Science for Georgia says there are at least 100. But research indicates the Peach State became the fastest-growing data center hub in America earlier this year, according to law firm McGuireWoods.
Hyperscale data centers that power streaming services, social media apps, search engines, banking software and now AI use millions of gallons of water every day to reduce the heat from the energy-intensive racks of servers. They use as much energy as small towns, according to information from projects planned in Georgia.
Georgians and watchdog groups are concerned about these giant warehouses’ resource use and how quickly these sites are setting up shop, with many of the upfront costs not shared due to non-disclosure agreements signed between development authorities and the developer. Many have begun asking local governments to better monitor and share information on the billion-dollar projects.
“Data center development right now in Georgia kind of feels like the wild west,” said Chris Manganiello, river watchdog water policy expert for the nonprofit Chattahoochee Riverkeeper. “There aren’t very many guardrails.”
In an article Saeed wrote this summer, he stressed the importance of regulating data centers to mitigate environmental impact and stress on the electric grid.
“The most central piece of regulation is transparency; knowing how much power is being generated by publicly subsidized utility companies, and how much the deployment of the new data center might affect the resiliency of the power grid,” Saeed said. “The same goes for water.”
Saeed said machine learning and AI have been on an exponential growth curve since 2011, and they exploded in deployment in 2019.
Georgia’s lawmakers also set the stage for a data center ramp-up. In 2018, the state General Assembly passed a law that made it so all of the equipment inside giant data center warehouses, such as computer systems, cooling infrastructure, cables and technical wiring, became exempt from state and local taxes. That law also enabled a tax credit for job creation, and created a local property tax abatement.
This was the beginning of incentivizing a wave of data center migration to Georgia.
The tax rule was expected to last until 2028. However, in 2022, the General Assembly extended the tax incentive to 2031.
But in 2024, there was an effort to pull back. Three House republicans in districts near Atlanta and Macon created a bill that would suspend the exemptions, counteracting the 2018 and updated 2022 law. Some representatives such as Shaw Blackman cited the immense subsidy for data centers using up a “tremendous amount of resources, power and water” as reason for voting in favor of the tax incentive repeal.
That passed the legislature. But when the 2024 bill reached Gov. Brian Kemp’s desk, he vetoed it, saying it would “undermine investments made by high-technology data center operators” and “inhibit infrastructure and job development.”
During this spring’s legislative session, Democratic Rep. Debbie Buckner introduced a bill that to create incentives for data centers to be a good neighbor. She said she heard from several constituents who said they had concerns over resource use.
Buckner told the Ledger-Enquirer her bill would “require data centers to share with the community where they want to (build it), their estimated water use, their estimated utility use, and their estimated sound level (measured by decibel)” if they wanted the state’s tax incentives.
She called it a carrot and stick approach to allow for appropriate citing, and keeping information on how much water and energy the data centers would use. That information would have needed to be filed with the Department of Revenue under Buckner’s bill.
The legislation went “nowhere,” Buckner said.
“I was confounded,” Buckner said. “I could not figure out why a bill that had support from both sides and seemed logical couldn’t at least have a hearing.”
Despite the bill dying, Georgia House Speaker John Burns initiated a special resource committee that would have a subcommittee focused on energy and water resource use across the state.
The chair of the special resource committee, Rep. Brad Thomas, is leading a group of 15 representatives to absorb as much information about water and energy in the Peach State through monthly meetings around the state.
Thomas told the Ledger-Enquirer that one of the questions he is trying to answer is the same question that Saeed didn’t have an answer to: how many data centers are out there?
“I’ve got a couple of different lists, but maybe not any that can give me conclusive (answers),” Thomas said.
The group has had two water meetings (July 17 and Aug. 27) and one energy meeting (Sept. 4). Thomas said special committees intend to pass policy when all of the meetings wrap, but he wasn’t sure when that would be. He suspects they will carry into the 2026 legislative session, starting Jan. 12.
At the August water subcommittee meeting in Moultrie, Rep. Robert Dickey, a peach farmer in northern Georgia, laid out his concerns about large industries using water over the agriculture industry.
“My concern is, who’s going to make the decisions allowing a large industrial (facility) such as a data center or another park manufacturing facility coming in and leaving agriculture high and dry with the short supply of water?” he said. “Chairman, that’s what I want this committee to try to find in this process: who gets priority use of water.”
David Gattie, an engineering professor at the University of Georgia, presented a myriad of issues two weeks later related to energy at the energy subcommittee meeting. Gattie didn’t leave data centers out of the discussion.
“(Georgia) can respond to (data centers) strategically,” he said. “(Georgia) has the regulated structure to respond to it strategically. We don’t need data centers coming in here dictating terms to us. We need to dictate terms to them.”
Data centers have benefits that include high-paying technical jobs. For example, Amazon Web Service is hiring a data center engineering operations technician with a salary range of $59,600-$133,200 depending on location.
“There have to be data centers, there has to be AI, because this is a tip of the spear 21st century competition around a technology that’s going to have national security implications,” Gattie said during his presentation.
Saeed said data centers are our digital infrastructure.
“The way I think about data centers, they are the digital infrastructure,” Saeed said. “If roads and bridges are for getting around data centers are the digital infrastructure. They are very very important.”
One Fayette County resident told the energy committee their work wouldn’t be done until they came to her neighborhood to see how her community has been negatively impacted by data centers.
Diana Dietz said Georgia Power has used eminent domain to place massive transmission line poles in front yards and neighborhoods throughout Fayette County to power the QTS data center, “bringing down property value” and “clear-cutting forests.” “We need to remember the context for all the things we’re talking about,” she told the committee. “I appreciate what you are doing. This is not an anti-AI or anti-data center issue; it’s about putting these things in properly cited areas that are industrial as opposed to right in the middle of neighborhoods.”
She requested the committee come to the county to see this in person, and gave a warning: her community is the guinea pig for how data centers can go awry. Dietz told the Ledger-Enquirer via email that none of the members have reached out to schedule a time to visit her.
The project in Fayette County, QTS, is a gargantuan 7 million-square-foot hyperscale data center. It went through the required public transparency process known as a Development of Regional Impact study.
The Georgia Department of Community Affairs set up the Development of Regional Impact process 35 years ago. The city and developers must submit their plans to the Department of Community Affairs so all egional commissioners around counties and local planners know what is coming down the pipeline.
The Department of Community Affairs does not approve or reject these plans, they just share them with the Georgia community.
“We’re simply a repository for (that report),” Department of Community Affairs Commissioner Christopher Nunn said during a presentation at the water subcommittee meeting in August.
The developments in these plans are placed in one of 19 existing categories including airports, offices, mixed use, truck stop, hotels, housing, industry, commercial, or other. Data centers are not consistently listed as data centers. Sometimes they are listed as technology campuses, or under another name. QTS was listed as “Project Excalibur” and put into the “other” category.
Today, interested parties such as Manganiello, who uses the reports to become privy to the water footprint of some of the data centers around the state.
“The (data centers) that we’re looking at in the development phase are on a very different scale and level of those that have been operating,” he told the Ledger-Enquirer. “So it would be helpful to know how much (water) existing facilities are actually using.”
In June, the Department of Community Affairs announced a shift in processing these development plans for data centers after receiving input from regional commissioners about the cumbersome process and a lack of a category for these giant developments. There was confusion about whether data centers were still being added to the Development of Regional Impact list because the director of the Department of Community Affairs said in an email that there was a “pause” to the process for data centers.
“The DRI process is imperfect, it’s a tool in the toolbox, and it’s the only tool we had,” science advocate Amy Sharma told the Ledger-Enquirer.
But Nunn cast aside any doubt that data centers were not listed this summer. “Of course, data centers are part of the DRI process,” Nunn said during the water subcommittee meeting.
On Aug. 27, The Department of Community Affairs announced it would have a hearing for public weigh to create a new category for data centers for their own category for Developments of Regional Impact. The last update to the DRI was in 2014, accordion to Nunn.
Sharma commented during the hearing this past Tuesday, making similar requests to what the Georgia Water Coalition has requested: they’ve asked Georgia to lower the threshold of square footage for data centers to 250,000 square feet and share information about water use and transmission lines.
“This is about transparency, it’s not going to do anything to ebb the tide (of data center regulation),” Sharma told the Ledger-Enquirer. “In theory we should start to be able to answer the question (of how many data centers there are),” she told the Ledger-Enquirer.
Public comments on the DRI rule change will be accepted through 5 p.m. Friday. Community affairs intends to enact a new rule Nov. 20.
This story comes to GPB through a reporting partnership with The Macon Telegraph and The Ledger-Enquirer.
An earlier version of this story read: Data center transparency process will be updated in Georgia The project in Fayette County, QTS, is a gargantuan 7 million-acre hyperscale data center.
