Why developers come here
Georgia has become the Southeast’s default answer to “where else besides Virginia.” Metro Atlanta was already a major fiber and colocation hub, and the state combines that with large tracts of rural land within reach of Georgia Power’s transmission system, a vertically integrated utility that has committed to build generation for large customers, and a state sales tax exemption on data center equipment that the legislature has tried and failed to repeal twice.
The scale of what is being asked for is unusual. Georgia Power told regulators in November 2025 that its pipeline of large-load projects stood at about 50.9 GW through the mid-2030s, with 28 committed projects representing about 11 GW and 18 of them under construction. Regulatory staff also noted that 33 data center projects totaling more than 11,000 MW had dropped out since 2023, so the pipeline is large but not firm.
Industrial power averaged 7.62 cents per kWh in Georgia through June 2026 according to EIA’s Electric Power Monthly, well below Virginia.
Incentives
- Sales and use tax exemption on high-technology data center equipment under O.C.G.A. 48-8-3(68.1) and Department of Revenue Rule 560-12-2-.117. Thresholds are tiered by county population: $250 million in equipment spending and 25 new quality jobs in counties over 50,000 people; $75 million and 10 jobs in counties of 30,001 to 50,000; $25 million and 5 jobs in counties of 30,000 or fewer. Spending is measured over a seven-year period. The exemption sunsets December 31, 2031. A December 2025 state audit cited by Bloomberg Tax put the 2025 cost at about $474 million.
- Repeal attempts. In 2024 the legislature passed HB 1192 to pause new exemption certificates for two years; Governor Kemp vetoed it in May 2024. In the 2026 session at least five bills targeted the exemption (SB 408, SB 410, SB 436, HB 559) or paused construction statewide (HB 1012). SB 410 passed the Senate on March 6, 2026 but died in the House, and the session ended in April 2026 with the exemption intact. Expect the fight to resume in 2027.
- Property tax abatements are negotiated county by county. Georgia counties cannot directly exempt a private company, so the local development authority issues bonds, takes title, and leases the facility back; the operator pays a negotiated payment in lieu of taxes. There is no statutory formula and terms vary widely.
- Large-load ratepayer protections are handled by the Public Service Commission rather than statute (see Power).
Power
Georgia is not in an ISO. Georgia Power, a Southern Company subsidiary, is the dominant vertically integrated utility; the electric membership cooperatives (supplied by Oglethorpe Power) and municipal systems (MEAG Power) serve much of rural Georgia. Interconnection is a bilateral negotiation with the utility, and the PSC approves the generation the utility builds to serve new load.
In January 2025 the PSC adopted rules, effective February 1, 2025, for customers of 100 MW or more. Each such customer must sign a customized contract rather than take a standard tariff. Contracts can run up to 15 years, may include minimum bills that are owed regardless of actual usage, may require upfront infrastructure payments and financial guarantees, and must be filed with the PSC for review before signing. Georgia Power filed its first roughly 2 GW of contracts under the rules in September 2025. In August 2026 PSC staff approved the service agreement for OpenAI’s Project Camellia near Savannah, reported at 3,200 MW firm, though the financial terms were largely redacted.
On the supply side, the PSC approved Georgia Power’s 2025 Integrated Resource Plan in July 2025, forecasting roughly 8,500 MW of load growth over six years, mostly from data centers, and keeping coal units at Plants Bowen and Scherer running longer than planned. A separate certification of nearly 10 GW of new capacity followed. Consumer and environmental groups argue residential customers are exposed if the forecast load does not show up; the utility and PSC say the minimum-bill contracts shift that risk to the data centers.
Where the projects are
Activity clusters in three bands: the metro Atlanta ring (Douglas, Coweta, Fayette, Clayton, DeKalb, Bartow, and Butts counties), the I-85 and I-75 corridors north and south of the city, and the Savannah area. Tracked projects include Project Camellia (OpenAI, Effingham County), Project Sail (Atlas Development, Coweta County), AWS campuses in Butts and Douglas counties, Microsoft’s Fairwater Atlanta, and the QTS and Lancium campus in Hall County.
Local politics
Georgia has seen one of the fastest local backlashes in the country. GPB counted eight jurisdictions that adopted temporary moratoria between March and October 2025, including Coweta, Pike, Lamar, Troup, and Clayton counties and the City of LaGrange, and several more have followed, among them DeKalb, Douglas, Dougherty, Walker, and the City of Fayetteville. Counties that kept the door open wrote ordinances instead: Bartow set 200-foot buffers and 55 to 65 decibel noise limits, Jones requires closed-loop cooling, Forsyth bars use of county water for cooling, and Atlanta banned data centers near the Beltline.
The objections are consistent: water use and its source, noise, construction blasting and well damage reported by neighbors of the Meta campus in Newton County and the AWS site in Social Circle, farmland conversion, and the question of who pays for new power plants. Coweta’s Project Sail drew a 1,750-signature petition and a legal appeal from neighbors before it was permitted.
Supporters point to the property tax base: county commissions have approved bond-lease abatements on the argument that even a discounted payment from a multibillion-dollar campus dwarfs existing revenue, and state officials continue to recruit hyperscalers.
What a landowner should know
Hyperscale campuses in Georgia are running 500 to more than 1,000 acres, and the first question a site selector will ask is distance to a Georgia Power 230 kV or 500 kV line or an existing substation. Under the 2025 PSC rules the developer, not the landowner, negotiates the power contract, and that process can take a year or more, so option agreements with long due-diligence periods are the norm. Check whether the parcel is in Georgia Power territory or an EMC’s; both can serve large loads but the process and timeline differ.
Local zoning now matters as much as state policy. Before signing, confirm whether the county has a moratorium, a data center overlay, or new setback and noise rules, because many were adopted in 2025 and 2026. The state contact is the Georgia Department of Economic Development, and the sales tax certificate is issued by the Georgia Department of Revenue. Counties post the aggregate exemption spending by county, which is a useful signal of where activity already is.