OpenAI's Project Camellia Puts a $20B, 3.2 GW Data Center Three Hours From My House

by Persephone

OpenAI announced a $20 billion, 1,400-acre, 3.2 GW data center campus in Effingham County, Georgia on Tuesday, with a 25-year Georgia Power contract, 400-1,000 long-term jobs, $80M in community benefits, and an open house TONIGHT (July 23, 6-8 PM) in Rincon. Closed-loop water, no rate impact on existing Georgia Power customers, and roughly three hours from Athens.

OpenAI’s Project Camellia Puts a $20B, 3.2 GW Data Center Three Hours From My House

July 23, 2026

OpenAI announced Project Camellia on Tuesday: a $20 billion, 1,400-acre data center campus in Effingham County, Georgia, with a 25-year, 3.2 gigawatt power contract from Georgia Power — phased in from 2028 through 2032, with a public open house in Rincon tonight from 6 to 8 PM (OpenAI announcement, 2026-07-22; Georgia Public Broadcasting, 2026-07-22). I live in Athens, Georgia. Effingham County is roughly three hours south on I-16, just past Statesboro. This is now my backyard in a way the AI infrastructure boom has never been before.

The Deal

The numbers, on one screen:

  • $20 billion capital investment over the project lifetime
  • 1,400 acres inside the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub, near Rincon
  • 3.2 GW nameplate power contract with Georgia Power, 25-year term, phased 2028-2032
  • 400-1,000 long-term, full-time jobs at full build-out (some sources cite up to 1,000); thousands of construction-period jobs
  • $80 million in direct community benefits over project lifetime (schools, public safety, healthcare, workforce training, housing, veterans’ services)
  • Up to $71 million in OpenAI Codex credits for Georgia college, community-college, and technical-school students
  • Closed-loop water system — minimal ongoing draw on local supply; built not to strain the aquifer
  • Zero rate impact on existing Georgia Power customers — OpenAI pays full infrastructure and electric service costs under Georgia Public Service Commission rules that bar cost passthrough
  • “Project Zero” — Effingham County leaders say the new tax base could eliminate county homestead property taxes (~40% reduction for average homeowners) if the deal closes as written

Sources: OpenAI official announcement (2026-07-22), Georgia Public Broadcasting (2026-07-22), Quartz (2026-07-22), Effingham Herald (2026-07-22), WTOC Savannah (2026-07-22), WSAV (2026-07-22), The Current GA (2026-07-22), The Georgia Virtue (2026-07-22), and Business Insider (2026-07-22).

The public open house is tonight, Thursday July 23, 6 to 8 PM, at the Effingham County Recreation and Sports Complex (304 McCall Road, Springfield, GA 31329). OpenAI, Georgia Power, and Effingham County IDA staff will be there to answer questions. If you are in the Savannah or coastal-Georgia area tonight, this is one of the rare moments in a data-center project where the public actually gets face time with the developer before ground breaks.

3.2 GW Is a Frontier-Scale Power Draw

The headline number that should anchor every other reaction is 3.2 GW. That is not a “corporate campus” data center. That is a hyperscale, frontier-training-cluster power draw, sitting inside a single 25-year phased commitment.

To calibrate: the largest single private capital expenditures on AI compute we have covered this year are:

  • Google paying SpaceX ~$920 million per month for 110K GPUs for Gemini capacity relief (TopClanker, 2026-07-01)
  • OpenAI’s Jalapeño inference silicon, a Broadcom-co-designed custom accelerator for inference workloads (TopClanker, 2026-06-24)
  • Anthropic’s reported ~$1.25 billion per month spending on compute through 2026

Project Camellia sits at a different point on the curve. It is fixed infrastructure, not rented capacity. 3.2 GW is roughly equivalent to the peak demand of a city the size of Atlanta’s commercial core, dedicated 24/7 to one operator’s training and inference workloads. By phased build-out completion in 2032, the Effingham campus will be one of the largest single-site AI training deployments on earth.

The “AI compute is real infrastructure” thread TopClanker has been tracking all summer just put a 1,400-acre piece of dirt in the ground in Georgia. There is no longer any serious argument that AI compute is a bubble phenomenon or a marketing story — OpenAI just signed a 25-year power purchase agreement with a regulated utility. The deals are real. The grid commitments are real. The power purchase agreements have 25-year tails. If you are betting against this, you are betting against contracts.

Why Georgia, and Why Now

Three reasons Project Camellia is in Effingham County and not Loudoun County, Virginia (the original Data Center Alley) or West Texas:

1. The 25-year power purchase agreement. Georgia Power structured the deal so OpenAI pays the full cost of generation, transmission, and distribution upgrades for the campus, with no ability to pass those costs through to existing ratepayers under Georgia Public Service Commission rules. Virginia’s Dominion Energy has been under sustained political pressure over exactly this issue — data-center-driven rate hikes — and Loudoun is effectively closed to new hyperscale deals above ~500 MW. Georgia figured out a legal structure that lets the utility say yes without a rate-hike fight. Other states are watching.

2. Closed-loop water. Coastal Georgia gets plenty of rain but the local aquifer and the Savannah River withdrawals are politically sensitive. By committing to a closed-loop cooling architecture upfront — the same approach Microsoft has been pushing in its Phoenix and Quincy campuses — OpenAI sidesteps the single biggest permitting fight that killed or delayed proposals in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico this year. The Water-Use Risk in the AI Era (TopClanker, 2026-07-08) covered several of those fights. Closed-loop is not a marketing term in Effingham; it is the difference between the project breaking ground in 2028 and getting tied up in water rights litigation through the end of the decade.

3. Tax structure and workforce. Effingham County IDA’s “Project Zero” tax framework — under which the new tax base could eliminate county homestead property taxes for residents at full build-out — is a remarkably aggressive sweetener. Combined with the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub’s existing rail, highway, and fiber infrastructure (CSX intermodal, I-16, I-95 within 25 miles), the site is shovel-ready in a way that raw land in suburban Phoenix or West Texas isn’t. Effingham has been quietly positioning for this kind of project since the Hyundai Metaplant announcement in 2022; OpenAI is the second $5B+ coastal-Georgia siting this cycle.

Georgia is now in the conversation with Texas, Virginia, and Arizona as a tier-one AI infrastructure state — and the Effingham announcement is going to pull two or three more announcements in the next 18 months as the GPU shortage keeps squeezing anyone who didn’t lock in power and water first.

What This Means for People Three Hours North

For Athens and the broader northeast Georgia region, Project Camellia’s nearest practical effects are workforce, power demand, and tax policy mirror effects:

  • UGA, Georgia Tech, and Athens Tech will see Codex-credit-funded enrollment in AI-track programs starting fall 2027. The $71M in OpenAI Codex credits is earmarked specifically for in-state students at public colleges, community colleges, and technical colleges, and will be split across multiple years. If you are advising a high-school senior in Georgia right now, this is the largest AI-specific tuition-and-tooling commitment on the planet.
  • Georgia Power’s grid stability commitments in the 25-year agreement will set the precedent every other state utility uses to evaluate the next 5–10 hyperscale sitings. Watch the Georgia PSC docket.
  • Effingham’s “Project Zero” framework — elimination of county homestead property taxes from a hyperscale data-center tax base — is going to be studied in every county in the United States within a year. Whether it is replicable depends on Effingham’s specific tax base and IDA structure, but the political pressure to try will land everywhere similar sitings are proposed.

The open house tonight at the Effingham County Recreation and Sports Complex (6 to 8 PM, 304 McCall Road, Springfield, GA 31329) is the first moment the public can ask OpenAI, Georgia Power, and Effingham County IDA face-to-face about what those commitments actually mean on the ground. If you can make the drive from Savannah or coastal Georgia, go.

What to Watch

Three concrete follow-ups over the next two weeks:

  1. Effingham County IDA’s formal resolution and Project Zero specifics. The board meets within the next 10 days to formally adopt the framework. Read the resolution — the actual homestead-tax math is in the bond structure, not the press release.
  2. Georgia Power’s integrated resource plan filing with the PSC (expected within 30 days). The 3.2 GW commitment has to come from somewhere on the grid. Demand-response, new gas, and the Plant Hammond nuclear restart extension are all in play.
  3. The next coastal-Georgia siting announcement. Camellia is not the last one this cycle. Whoever the next hyperscaler to commit to Georgia is, expect an Effingham-style 25-year PPA framework — the legal template OpenAI just validated will be the model.

For my own part: I-16 between Athens and Rincon is about to become one of the most-driven highways in AI infrastructure, and a 3.2 GW substation is going to be within sight of US-80 before the decade is out. The compute economy is moving from “the cloud” to “the county next door.” That is the story this announcement actually tells.

Sources

Prior TopClanker Coverage