Developer Beefs Up Plans For $1.2B Data Center Project South Of Atlanta

A 1-year-old data center development company led by Meta and Microsoft alumni is boosting the size of a billion-dollar proposed digital infrastructure campus roughly 70 miles south of Downtown Atlanta. 

Cloverleaf Infrastructure is readying a 1,200-acre site off Interstate 75 near Forsyth for a 4.2M SF data center project, according to an application filed with the Georgia Department of Community Affairs, which assesses projects that will have a regional impact on infrastructure.

Cloverleaf already obtained zoning approval from the Monroe County Board of Commissioners in November to build on more than 900 acres of the site, the firm’s chief development officer, Aaron Bilyeu, told Bisnow Monday.

Now, it wants to acquire an additional 325 contiguous acres off Rumble Road to spread out the data centers on the site and avoid impacting a substantial amount of wetland on the greenfield site.

“It’s really about making it a better project than just coming in and clear-cutting,” Bilyeu said.  

Cloverleaf wouldn’t undertake the development itself. Instead, the firm, which launched last year after raising $300M in private equity, ties up land sites, entitles them for data center projects and then flips the shovel-ready sites to developers, said Bilyeu, a veteran data center developer with stints at Meta and Microsoft.

“We then work with the local power companies to get the power commitments secured and we sell that as a package to end users,” Bilyeu said.

According to the development of regional impact application, the proposed project, named Rumble Technology Park, would contribute $20M a year to Monroe County’s tax base.

Coming off a year of record data center absorption, Metro Atlanta’s capacity tripped to more than 1 gigawatt of energy, driven by demand from hyperscale users such as Meta, Amazon and Alphabet, according to a March CBRE report. Atlanta is now the second-largest data center market in the country, passing Chicago and Phoenix. 

Another 2 GW of data centers are under construction in the state.

Companies such as Digital Realty, Microsoft and T5 Data Centers are among those that have announced new data center projects, spurred on by the rampant growth and storage demands of artificial intelligence.

But concerns over power usage and water consumption have created backlash against proposed data center projects across the metro area. Georgia Power projected that power demand is set to triple by the mid-2030s, in part because of rising data center demand.

DeKalb, Bartow, Coweta and Douglas counties have all issued moratoriums on new data center development, and Atlanta recently banned new data center projects along the 22-mile stretch of the Atlanta BeltLine.

Georgia’s popularity has grown over the years because of Georgia Power’s ability to supply electricity to data center projects, Bilyeu said. He said Cloverleaf is in talks with the state’s power supplier on feeding electricity to the Rumble Road site.

“Power is 100% the name of the game,” he said. “There’s land everywhere, but there are large quantities of power in very few areas.”