OpenAI's Georgia data center has ballooned to $30 billion, making it one of the largest private construction projects in US history

When OpenAI Becomes Your County's Largest Taxpayer

The cost of OpenAI's planned data center in Effingham County, Georgia, has jumped from $20 billion to over $30 billion, according to Bloomberg. 1 But the dollar figure, staggering as it is, is not what makes this project worth watching.

The real story is the deal underneath the number.

OpenAI is building a 1,400-acre data center campus in a mostly rural county roughly 30 minutes from Savannah, and the company is treating community buy-in as critical infrastructure in its own right. 2 3 Internally called "Project Camellia," the campus would be OpenAI's first ground-up data center in the state. 3

The community-facing pitch is specific. The project promises 400 six-figure jobs when the first phase opens in 2028, scaling to 1,000 employees by 2032. 2 OpenAI negotiated a 50% property tax abatement for 15 years, with its assessment locked at the 2026 millage rate so the company will not benefit from future rate rollbacks its own investment might trigger. 3 Even at half price, the company is projected to become Effingham County's single largest taxpayer. 2

The tax revenue could reshape local government. Effingham County Manager Tim Callanan said the influx could accelerate "Project Zero," the county's initiative to eliminate homestead property taxes for residents, potentially as soon as next year. 3

That is the bargain: OpenAI brings the jobs, the tax base, and the infrastructure upgrades. In return, a county lets it build the most expensive private facility most Americans have ever heard of next door.

The infrastructure concessions are unusually detailed. OpenAI has committed to a closed-loop water cooling system that recirculates water to cool servers, which the company says will bring water usage in line with a comparably sized office building. 2 The campus needs 3.2 gigawatts of power, enough to electrify roughly 2.25 million homes, but OpenAI has agreed to reduce its draw by up to 1 gigawatt during peak demand hours to prevent rate spikes for other Georgia Power customers. 2 The company will also fully fund the energy infrastructure improvements tied to the facility. 2

These are not routine promises. They are OpenAI's answer to a problem that is becoming the defining constraint on AI infrastructure: communities do not want data centers near them.

Only 24% of Americans say they support a data center within three miles of where they live, down from 37% in January, according to a Politico/Public First poll. 2 Neighboring Bulloch County is now weighing an outright ban on new data center development. 3

The industry can raise capital and secure chips. What it has not yet figured out is how to win local consent at the pace the build-out demands. OpenAI chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane framed the Effingham County strategy in terms that sound more like a campaign stump than a corporate announcement: "We have to earn the trust, we have to earn the right to build this." 3

OpenAI is running the same playbook elsewhere, with facilities launched or under construction in Abilene, Texas; Saline Township, Michigan; and Port Washington, Wisconsin, plus a partnership with Oracle on additional sites in Texas and New Mexico. 2 OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC last year that "no one in the history of man built data centers this fast." 2

Georgia has positioned itself to absorb that pace. Georgia Power received approval in December 2025 for a nearly 10-gigawatt expansion of its generating capacity, with roughly 80% of the additional output earmarked for current and future data center demand. 3

The question is whether Effingham County is a one-off or a template. If OpenAI's package of abatements, six-figure jobs, closed-loop water, and peak-hour power curtailment becomes the going rate for community consent, then every AI site costs more and takes longer than the raw construction budget suggests. If the package proves insufficient, if residents decide that even the elimination of their homestead taxes is not worth sharing a county with the largest private construction project most of them have ever seen, then the AI industry's bottleneck shifts from a solvable engineering problem to something far less tractable.

Effingham County is the test case. The rest of the industry is watching.