A developer is looking to get the green light to move forward with a data center campus of historic proportions in Coweta County.
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Carrollton, Georgia-based Atlas Development filed an application to develop Project Sail, a 13-building, 4.9M SF data center complex off Wagers Mill Road south of Georgia Power’s Plant Yates power plant. The developer estimated the cost of the project could reach $17B.
Jonathon Ward, the owner of Atlas, said his firm plans to develop the project with an unidentified partner. He declined to say if it is a speculative development or it is being built for a specific enterprise user.
“We’re self capitalized. We got the finances to do it,” Ward told Bisnow.
Atlas, which owns a majority of the nearly 800 acres, originally planned to develop the parcels for residential uses but pivoted when more interest came from data center users, Ward said.
Atlas estimates the project would be completed by 2036, by which time it would pump nearly $1.6B annually into the local tax revenue stream, according to the Department of Regional Impact application filed with the Georgia Department of Community Affairs.
“If everything goes our way in zoning, we’re looking at starting a year and a month from now,” Ward said. “It’s going to be really great for the community. It really doesn’t have any impact on the school system.”
Project Sail is one of the largest among the explosion of data center developments in Metro Atlanta, which has become the fastest-growing market for the sector in the country.
Metro Atlanta's data center inventory is set to more than double based on its construction pipeline, with overall inventory up 118% since 2020. Developers like Edged Energy, DataBank, DC Blox, Strategic Real Estate Partners and tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon are developing campuses around the region. By the middle of 2024, developers were underway with 1.3 gigawatts of new data center capacity, a 76% increase from the second half of 2023, according to a CBRE report.
The deluge of new projects means Metro Atlanta is on track to become the second-largest data center market in the U.S., according to CBRE.
Atlas’ project would consume more than 900 MW across all 13 buildings, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
The deluge of new data centers has raised concerns among officials around their voracious consumption of energy. Georgia Power said the slate of potential economic development projects eyeing the state, most of which are data centers, would demand 36,500 MW of power by the mid-2030s, The Wall Street Journal reported. Georgia Power’s total capacity today is 21,500 MW.
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