OpenAI Signs 25-Year Power Deal for $30 Billion Georgia Data Center, Faces Resident Backlash

A landmark power deal with Georgia Power

OpenAI has signed a 25 year power supply agreement with Georgia Power to secure 3.2 gigawatts of electricity for Project Camellia, its first data center campus that the company is designing and developing itself, rather than leasing capacity from cloud partners such as Microsoft Azure or Oracle. According to Axios and Georgia Public Broadcasting, the site sits in Effingham County, roughly 25 miles northwest of Savannah, inside the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub. It marks the first time OpenAI has taken on the role of lead designer and developer of a data center rather than renting capacity from someone else.

The project's physical and financial scale

The campus is expected to span somewhere between 1,400 and 2,600 acres, depending on the source, and will include four data center buildings totaling about 4.4 million square feet. OpenAI puts the minimum construction cost at $20 billion, with full build out potentially exceeding $30 billion. The contracted 3.2 gigawatts will arrive in phases between 2028 and 2032, and Georgia Power retained the right to curtail up to 1 gigawatt during peak demand periods, a safeguard for the local grid, as reported by TechTimes and Interesting Engineering.

Tax breaks and job promises

Effingham County's Industrial Development Authority approved a 50% property tax abatement for 15 years as an incentive for the project. In return, OpenAI is promising around 400 full time jobs, an $80 million community investment fund, and up to $71 million in coding software credits for local college students, according to The Current.

Local backlash and a national pattern

The deal was struck with little public input, angering residents. Nearly 1,000 people packed a community open house on July 23 to confront OpenAI officials, and a petition calling for the data center's cancellation had already gathered more than 7,000 signatures that week, The Current reported. The case is not isolated: more than 800 community groups are now organizing against roughly 1,500 planned AI data centers across 49 US states, pointing to a broader national backlash against this kind of infrastructure.

The other side: Project Zero and lower homeowner taxes

County officials see a fiscal upside in the deal. Part of the tax revenue the project generates could fund Project Zero, Effingham County's plan to eliminate homestead property taxes altogether. The county manager, cited by Georgia Public Broadcasting, said homeowner tax rates could drop by around 40% as early as next year.

Why this matters for Brazilian agencies and SMBs

OpenAI's shift from renting cloud capacity to designing and owning its own multibillion dollar, power hungry data centers is a strategic signal of how capital intensive the AI compute race has become. It also shows that local political and community friction, over energy costs, land use, and tax fights, is turning into a genuine operational risk factor for AI vendors, not just a technology story. For any Brazilian agency or SMB whose business depends on a single AI vendor's infrastructure roadmap, delays caused by community pushback, permitting fights, or grid capacity constraints are now a real supply chain risk worth monitoring, much like tracking a supplier's factory construction timeline. Watching the ground beneath the data centers is no longer optional.