The tract is still pine forest: 1,400 acres inside the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub outside Rincon, Georgia, zoned years ago for warehouses nobody ever built. On the evening of July 21, the Effingham County Industrial Development Authority voted unanimously to hand it to Octans GA LLC, a Delaware affiliate of OpenAI, for a $20 billion data center campus the company calls Project Camellia. Three OpenAI delegates attended. Not one member of the public did.
Two days later, roughly 1,000 residents packed the Effingham College & Career Academy to tell OpenAI what they thought. About 300 stayed in the parking lot with handmade signs.
“It stinks,” Larry Holloway, a retired paper mill worker who has lived in the county for 50 years, told The Current GA. “That’s not how democracy is supposed to work.”
OpenAI Vice President for Communications Aaron McLear, working the same room, was blunter. “It’s a done deal,” he said. “It was the right fit for everyone.”
A month later that turns out not to be quite true — not because Effingham County changed its mind, but because the Georgia Public Service Commission has not signed off on the electricity.
The Deal on Paper
The verified scale is large but smaller than early coverage suggested. Four buildings, about 4.4 million square feet, drawing 3.2 gigawatts contracted from Georgia Power in phases between 2028 and 2032 — roughly three times Atlanta’s load. The 26-page memorandum of understanding commits OpenAI to $4 billion and 80 jobs in each of five construction phases from 2028 through 2034: $20 billion and 400 permanent positions, not the 1,000 jobs floated in some national write-ups.
The tax structure is what local officials sold hardest. Instead of a conventional abatement schedule, negotiators settled on a flat formula: OpenAI pays a bill equal to a 50% discounted property tax rate on buildings and equipment, locked at 2026 millage rates for 15 years, across every taxing body in the county. IDA chief executive Brandt Herndon puts the yield at roughly $870 million over 15 years, enough, county leaders say, to eliminate residential property taxes. It would make OpenAI the county’s largest taxpayer, displacing Georgia Power, which paid about $7 million in 2025.
The formula has a second function: because the campus never lands on the official taxable property list, Effingham keeps a state equalization grant reserved for school systems with small tax bases, a detail that won over Superintendent Yancy Ford. Separately, OpenAI has pledged $80 million in community benefits — quadrupled from $20 million in the final days of negotiation, and not written into the MOU — plus up to $71 million in Codex credits for Georgia students.
The Part That Isn’t Settled
Georgia Power brokered the match, pitching data centers at the commissioners’ October 2025 retreat and arranging the first OpenAI meeting on Oct. 30. Herndon spent the following months under an NDA while telling an April town hall the authority had no concrete data center proposals in hand.
Now the regulator is the holdup. Under a rule the PSC adopted in April 2025, Georgia Power must file any data center contract above 100 megawatts 30 days before execution. It filed a 100-page contract on July 15; the public version was redacted in its entirety. On Aug. 13, with the clock about to expire, utilities director Tom Bond told commissioners staff was ready to move: “Right now, unless the company agrees to certain changes, staff would file an objection.” Georgia Power responded by resetting its own filing date to July 27, pushing the deadline to Aug. 26.
Commissioner Peter Hubbard, one of two Democrats elected last fall on a wave of anger over rising bills, wants the commission itself to weigh in. “I’m not comfortable with just allowing staff to review this on their own,” he said, adding that he had asked staff to object “until we have sufficient financial guardrails in place.” Afterward he told The Current the extension looked thin: “There are some protections but they should be greater. It’s a big, risky bet.” Commissioner Alicia Johnson put it plainly: “Any customer who is requiring this amount of energy should expect an equal amount of rigor and scrutiny.”
Why It Matters
Capital is no longer the scarce input. Four days before Georgia Power bought itself more time, Nvidia disclosed in an Aug. 17 SEC filing that it would provide up to $105 billion in residual-value guarantees for OpenAI’s Pike County, Ohio campus at SB Energy’s PORTS-Pike site — a 20-year lease covering an initial 4.25 gigawatts, with an option for 3.75 more. Read it carefully: that is credit support tied to leased hardware, triggered by OpenAI default, not $105 billion of cash, and far narrower than the up-to-$250 billion backstop reported in late July. Nvidia’s actual equity check into SB Energy is $1.5 billion.
Money, in other words, can be restructured in three weeks. Interconnection queues, redacted tariffs and commissioners facing angry voters cannot. Camden County has passed a data center moratorium; Bulloch and Port Wentworth are weighing theirs. A petition to cancel Project Camellia has cleared 7,000 signatures in a county of 75,000.
Commissioner Roger Burdette, who flew to OpenAI’s Abilene campus on a company-funded trip and came back a convert, offered residents the argument siting fights now turn on: “I changed my mind. You should trust us on this.”
What to Watch
The Aug. 26 PSC staff deadline is the near-term hinge. If staff objects, the contract is still approved automatically should the full commission take no action within 30 days — putting the burden on Hubbard and Johnson to force a vote on a board that just lost commissioner Fitz Pridemore to an Aug. 21 resignation. Watch also for the promised Georgia Community Compact, meant to convert OpenAI’s $80 million pledge into enforceable terms, and the independent annual audit the company says it will publish. Neither exists yet. And watch November, in a heavily Republican county where residents spent July telling their commissioners they would remember.
“There are some protections but they should be greater. It's a big, risky bet.”— Peter Hubbard, Commissioner, Georgia Public Service Commission