OpenAI Lifts Its 2030 Compute Budget to $750 Billion and Breaks Ground on a $20 Billion Georgia Data Center

OpenAI Lifts Its 2030 Compute Budget to $750 Billion and Breaks Ground on a $20 Billion Georgia Data Center

OpenAI has raised its projected spending on computing power through the end of the decade to roughly $750 billion, a quarter more than the figure it was working with just months ago, and it is putting a piece of that money into the ground itself. On July 22, the company behind ChatGPT unveiled Project Camellia, a data center campus near Savannah, Georgia, that will cost at least $20 billion and mark the first time OpenAI designs and builds a facility of its own rather than leasing capacity from partners such as Oracle, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft.

The two announcements, landing on the same day, capture the scale and the risk of OpenAI's ambitions. The Wall Street Journal reported July 22 that the internal compute forecast had climbed to about $750 billion through 2030, up from roughly $600 billion earlier in 2026. That number reflects projected spending on chips and cloud capacity, and it sits beneath the even larger $1.4 trillion in total infrastructure commitments that Chief Executive Sam Altman has described. It is, by most measures, one of the largest capital plans any private company has ever put on paper.

A 3.2-gigawatt campus outside Savannah

Project Camellia will rise on a 1,400-acre footprint within the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub, a roughly 2,600-acre industrially zoned site just outside Rincon in Effingham County, about 45 minutes from downtown Savannah. OpenAI plans four data center buildings, with an initial development described in state filings as spanning about 101 acres. The company has said the project would be entirely privately funded.

The power requirement is the headline number. OpenAI is contracting with Georgia Power for 3.2 gigawatts of electricity, enough to supply more than two million homes, delivered in phases between 2028 and 2032 under a 25-year agreement. OpenAI has pledged to cover the full cost of the infrastructure and electric service, and under Georgia Public Service Commission rules those costs cannot be passed to existing ratepayers. The company also committed to provide up to a gigawatt of what Georgia Power calls flexible demand response, allowing the utility to dial back power to the site to protect grid stability during periods of peak demand.

"Economic development is about attracting companies that create lasting value for the Community," Brandt Herndon, chief executive of the Effingham County Industrial Development Authority, said in a county press release. "This project represents a major private investment that will generate substantial new tax revenue, bring hundreds of high-paying jobs, and create new opportunities for local businesses, contractors, suppliers, and our future workforce."

OpenAI has framed Camellia as a good neighbor, promising $80 million in community benefits over the life of the project for schools, public safety, health care, and small businesses, plus up to $71 million in credits for its Codex coding tool for Georgia students. It says the facility will use a closed-loop cooling system, likened to a car radiator, to keep ongoing water use low. The county approved a 50% property tax abatement for 15 years, yet officials still expect OpenAI to become Effingham's largest taxpayer.

Why it matters in the infrastructure race

The strategic shift is the story beneath the story. Until now, OpenAI has been a tenant, renting compute from a web of partners that includes Oracle, AWS, Microsoft, and CoreWeave. Building Camellia signals a move to become an infrastructure developer in its own right, controlling the pipeline of power and silicon that determines how fast its models can improve. OpenAI's flagship $500 billion Stargate campus in Abilene, Texas, is already training frontier models at scale, and Camellia extends that blueprint eastward.

Owning capacity offers OpenAI leverage in a market where power, not chips alone, has become the binding constraint. Utilities across the country are fielding requests measured in gigawatts, and securing a 25-year supply deal locks in a resource rivals are also chasing. The bet is that demand for AI will keep compounding fast enough to fill the buildings the moment they come online.

That is also where the risk lives. Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar has privately warned company leadership that OpenAI may not be able to honor its contracts if revenue growth does not accelerate, according to the Journal. Spending $750 billion presumes a business trajectory that has yet to fully materialize, and analysts have openly debated whether the plan is visionary or financially reckless.

Locally, the reception has been mixed. Some Effingham residents complained they learned of the project only after key decisions had been made. "Obviously a lot of these details and decisions have already been made, and we're playing catch up," said Jeff Beauvais of the environmental group One Hundred Miles. "That's not a particularly good and open and transparent and neighborly way of going about this process." He noted that a zoning change adding data centers to approved uses was buried within a 771-page document. Others questioned the water assurances and the tax abatement, echoing fights that have flared from Michigan to coastal Georgia, where Garden City and Camden County have imposed data center moratoriums.

What to watch next

Camellia must still clear Georgia's Development of Regional Impact review before construction can begin; the DRI form was filed July 22, one of three data center applications submitted in the state that day. OpenAI planned a public open house on July 23 at the Effingham College and Career Academy, feedback from which is meant to shape a Georgia Community Compact codifying its commitments, backed by an annual independent audit.

The bigger questions are financial. Watch whether OpenAI's revenue growth catches up to a compute budget that keeps climbing, whether Georgia Power can deliver 3.2 gigawatts on schedule between 2028 and 2032, and whether the company's pivot from tenant to builder is repeated at other sites. Georgia Power spokesman Joshua Peacock offered a note of caution on timing: "The specific plans and routing for serving this site in particular are still under development." For a project measured in gigawatts and tens of billions of dollars, that is a reminder that the hardest work is only beginning.