Savannah City Council voted unanimously Aug. 27 to freeze new data centers of 10 megawatts or more, or conversions of buildings over 200,000 square feet, for 155 days while it studies water, power-grid and noise impacts and drafts permanent zoning rules.
Savannah joins roughly 40 other Georgia cities and counties that have passed similar pauses, including Chatham County's own unincorporated-area moratorium from February. The freeze landed the same week Georgia's Public Service Commission cleared Georgia Power's contract to supply OpenAI's Project Camellia, a 3.2-gigawatt, $20 billion data center campus on 1,400 acres in Effingham County, about 30-45 minutes from Savannah.
Effingham's Industrial Development Authority separately approved routing up to $90 million of Project Camellia payments into a 6-mill combined property tax cut and $9 million for local schools, and U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock visited the site Aug. 28 to call for a statewide data center moratorium.
Why it matters
Two neighboring governments are pulling in opposite directions on the same technology at the same time: Savannah is pausing to write rules before it says yes to anything, while Effingham has already said yes to one of the largest data center deals in the country and is now dividing up the proceeds.
Sources and documents8 sources
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