OpenAI has unveiled Project Camellia, a data center campus planned for Effingham County in the U.S. state of Georgia — not the country of the same name. The company said on July 22 that it will invest at least $20 billion in the facility, the first data center OpenAI is designing and building itself rather than leasing capacity from partners such as Oracle or Amazon Web Services.
From tenant to landlord
The campus will rise inside the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub, roughly 45 minutes from Savannah, on about 1,400 acres, according to county officials. Georgia Power has signed a 25-year agreement to deliver up to 3.2 gigawatts of electricity in phases between 2028 and 2032 — enough, OpenAI says, to power more than 2 million homes at full capacity. The project extends a broader shift in the industry, as leading labs increasingly build and control their own data center capacity directly instead of renting it wholesale, even as AI infrastructure spending keeps climbing and squeezes the balance sheets of rivals whose free cash flow has already turned negative under the same buildout pressure.
Community commitments — and pushback
OpenAI says the project is entirely privately funded and that it will cover the full cost of infrastructure and electric-service upgrades, so that, in the company’s words, “Georgia families will not subsidize” the buildout. It pledged $80 million toward local schools, public safety, healthcare, workforce training, housing and veterans’ services, plus up to $71 million in Codex software credits for students at Georgia colleges and technical schools. County officials said tax revenue from the site could accelerate “Project Zero,” a plan to eliminate homestead property taxes, potentially cutting the average homeowner’s bill by 40%.
The campus is projected to create 400 long-term jobs at launch, growing toward 1,000 by 2032, plus thousands of construction jobs. OpenAI said it will rely on a closed-loop cooling system that recirculates water without drawing from local supplies, and it committed to publicly releasing annual independent audits under a forthcoming “Georgia Community Compact.”
Reaction wasn’t uniformly positive: at a public open house on July 23, some Effingham County residents pressed officials on transparency, light pollution and long-term strain on the regional power grid — concerns that have slowed or blocked similar data center projects elsewhere in the US.