Building the Data Centers Without Breaking the Community

Artificial intelligence is not going to stop expanding, and this report does not ask it to. The computing power behind AI has to live somewhere physical — in buildings full of servers that draw enormous amounts of electricity and water. Georgia has become one of the country's hottest destinations for those buildings. That can be a real opportunity for rural counties that have watched jobs and revenue drain away for a generation.

But an opportunity handled carelessly becomes a liability that outlives everyone who voted for it. A data center is a twenty-to-forty-year footprint on a community's land, water, power grid, and tax base. The question this project asks is simple: can we welcome this technology without letting it hollow out the places that host it? We believe the answer is yes — and that the way Georgia is currently doing it is not the only option, only the one no one has been offered an alternative to.

To make that concrete, we studied a single proposed project in detail: the Pine Ridge Technology Park in Twiggs County. We chose it because the public record is unusually complete, because the site has been approved but not yet built — so alternatives are still actionable — and because nearly every problem in Georgia's data center boom shows up in it at once.

Every factual claim below is labeled, so you can see the evidence behind each one:

I. What actually happened in Twiggs County

The vote. On September 18, 2025, the Twiggs County Commission voted unanimously to rezone a 291.5-acre parcel of timberland off Adams Park Road, near the Ocmulgee River, from agricultural to industrial use for a data center. VERIFIED¹² The land is owned by Weyerhaeuser; the applicant is Eagle Rock Partners, a North Carolina project-management firm working with the engineering company Thomas & Hutton. VERIFIED

The scale. The developer describes a project of up to $5 billion that would draw as much electricity as the cities of Macon and Augusta combined. VERIFIED The developer's own filed site plan confirms it: nine buildings at 100 megawatts each — 900 MW total — on a 291-acre site with about 206 acres of development, 36 acres of preserved wetlands, and three on-site electrical substations of roughly 10 acres apiece. VERIFIED — filed site plan³ The serving utility, Oconee EMC, cannot deliver power to the site until 2028 at the earliest. VERIFIED¹

The developer has no customer. As of the latest reporting, Eagle Rock Partners has no anchor tenant — no Google, Microsoft, or Intel has signed on. They are developers, not data center operators; the business model is to rezone the land and market the entitled site to someone else. VERIFIED¹⁴ This is the single most important fact in the file. Twiggs County did not approve a data center. It approved the option to build one, for a company that does not yet have anyone to build it for.

The numbers don't agree with themselves.

At the approval meeting, the pitch was that the project would double the county's tax revenue, adding about $15 million a year. In its own application materials, the developer elsewhere describes roughly $6 million in tax revenue. VERIFIED — both figures¹⁴ That is not a rounding error; it is a 2.5-times spread in the developer's own case. A dedicated search of county development-authority and bond-validation records turned up no tax-abatement agreement, no PILOT deal, no independent fiscal analysis, and no binding investment commitment anywhere in the public record. CONFIRMED ABSENCE⁵ The county's cost-benefit case — a $5 billion project meant to reshape its budget for a generation — rests on two conflicting numbers and not a single supporting document.

The water story is a promise, not a permit. The developer's representative told residents the facility would use closed-loop, non-evaporative cooling — he illustrated the daily water need with a plastic water bottle. DEVELOPER CLAIM⁶ A stronger version — that water would come from a single one-time draw from the Ocmulgee River — failed verification outright, because no source establishes the Ocmulgee as the source and the project still faces state permitting. No water-withdrawal permit or EPD filing exists in the public record — and we checked the state's own system, not just the news. Georgia EPD's water-permit public-notice channel shows no data center water permit or application for Twiggs County; "Pine Ridge" and "Eagle Rock" don't appear at all. CONFIRMED ABSENCE — state source⁷ That absence is meaningful because the system demonstrably works: a separate Twiggs County solar project went through the very same process. And the document the county published as the project's "Environmental Study Package" — which we obtained and read — contains no cooling-system specification, no water-usage figure, and no water source at all. It is a site-layout drawing. So for a 900-megawatt facility, there is no water figure anywhere in the public record — not in the permit system, not in the county's own environmental filing.

And even a genuinely closed-loop building doesn't make water use vanish. The electricity it needs is generated at power plants that themselves consume water, and Georgia Power has won permission to postpone closing its coal-fired Plants Scherer and Bowen to meet exactly this kind of demand. VERIFIED¹ The water doesn't disappear. It moves upstream, to the coal plant.

The process skipped a step — during private conversations. The rezoning was approved without a Development of Regional Impact review, the standard regional look at a project this size. VERIFIED And records obtained by 13WMAZ show months of private coordination between the developer's team and county staff before the public ever saw a notice — including a June email asking about the timing of the legal advertisement so company officials could speak to a commissioner "before it hits the paper if possible." VERIFIED⁸ Fourteen citizens spoke against the rezoning; the commission approved it anyway; ten residents sued within a week. VERIFIED²

And the residents have not stopped. The suit — filed September 25, 2025 by Nancy Lubeck and neighboring landowners — challenges the approval on layered procedural grounds: that the county violated its own rezoning-notice procedures, skipped the regional impact review, approved access to State Highway 96 without permission from the Georgia Department of Transportation, and committed an abuse of its zoning powers. VERIFIED⁹ Weyerhaeuser, the landowner, joined as a defendant and fought to be dismissed on sovereign-immunity grounds at a February 2026 hearing. VERIFIED¹⁰ By mid-2026, having lost at the trial level, the residents were appealing — even as the developer publicly insisted the litigation "will not delay the data center's projected development timeline." REPORTED — 13WMAZ¹¹ The fight is live.

That is the anchor case: a multi-billion-dollar, coal-extending, city-sized power draw, approved in one evening, with no customer, no completed review, no water permit, no fiscal analysis, and a revenue pitch that contradicts itself — after private conversations the public wasn't party to.

II. This is a pattern, not an accident

Twiggs is not an outlier; it is a symptom. The statewide numbers, all verified against primary regulatory and audit sources, show a system moving faster than its guardrails.

In December 2025, the Georgia Public Service Commission certified 9,985 megawatts of new electricity generation — about 80% of it expected to serve data centers — leaning heavily on new natural-gas plants and the postponed coal closures. VERIFIED¹²¹³

Georgia's data center sales-tax exemption cost the state an estimated $474.2 million in forgone revenue in FY2025. VERIFIED — state audit And here is the number every official should sit with: the same state analysis found only about 30% of Georgia's data centers can be attributed to the exemption — roughly 70% would have located here anyway. VERIFIED¹⁴ Georgia is paying nearly half a billion dollars a year to attract an industry that is mostly already coming.

The comparison case sharpens the point. In neighboring Monroe County, Google quietly bought 948 acres for roughly $42 million and has announced no timeline, no investment figure, and no jobs number — buying an entitled site to hold as an option. VERIFIED¹⁵ Monroe County had, weeks earlier, rejected a different speculative data center under citizen pressure. VERIFIED¹⁶ The lesson isn't that Google is the villain and Eagle Rock the hero, or vice versa — it's that counties that hold the line get to set terms, and counties that rush don't.

The through-line across all of it is not fraud. It is officials repeatedly choosing speed and the promise of revenue over the margin of safety — approving before the diligence, mandating before the funding, welcoming before the terms.

III. The better way

Here is the core argument of this project: almost none of what went wrong in Twiggs County was necessary to attract the data center. The industry needs land, power, and water. It does not need secrecy, skipped reviews, unenforceable promises, or a coal extension. A county can offer everything a legitimate operator actually requires while protecting itself on every point where Twiggs left itself exposed. What follows is that alternative — written to be usable by a commissioner tonight and understandable by a voter at the meeting.

The vision, plainly stated

This is not an anti-technology argument, and it should never be mistaken for one. AI is going to keep growing, and Georgia can be part of building it. The choice in front of every commission is not data center or no data center. It is data center on the community's terms or on the developer's.

A better project looks like this: a signed operator with a real tenant, powered by new clean generation it brings with it, using water within a permitted and published budget, paying a guaranteed floor of revenue into the county, monitored transparently, bonded for its own eventual removal, approved in the open after a completed review. That project is entirely possible. Operators build to those standards elsewhere already. The only thing standing between Twiggs County and that version of the project was the willingness to ask for it before the vote instead of suing for it after.

We can do this better. This report is the evidence that we have to.