OpenAI on Wednesday announced Project Camellia, a 3.2-gigawatt data center campus in Effingham County, Georgia, that the company said will represent at least $20 billion in private investment and could exceed $30 billion at full build-out — one of the largest single-site AI computing commitments ever disclosed.
Four buildings on 1,400 acres in the Savannah Gateway Hub
The campus will consist of four buildings covering roughly 101 acres inside the pre-zoned 2,600-acre Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub near Rincon, about 25 miles northwest of Savannah. It is OpenAI's first data center that the company is designing and building itself, and it sits inside the broader Stargate infrastructure program launched last year. OpenAI has not yet named a finance and development partner for the Georgia site.
25-year Georgia Power contract, 1 GW of demand response
OpenAI signed a 25-year power supply agreement with Georgia Power, a subsidiary of Southern Company, with electricity delivered in phases between 2028 and 2032. OpenAI will pay the full cost of the electric infrastructure and service, shielding existing Georgia Power customers from rate impact under Georgia Public Service Commission rules updated in 2025. The contract also includes up to 1 gigawatt of flexible demand response — what Georgia Power called "among the largest single-facility demand response commitments in the country."
$80M community fund, $71M Codex credits and closed-loop cooling
OpenAI pledged $80 million in community benefits over the life of the project — targeting schools, public safety, healthcare, workforce training and small business support — plus up to $71 million in Codex credits for Georgia college, community college and technical school students. Effingham County approved a 50% property tax abatement for 15 years, but OpenAI is still expected to become the county's largest taxpayer, generating revenue that could underwrite the county's "Project Zero" initiative to cut homeowner property taxes 40%. The facility will use a closed-loop water system similar to a car radiator to keep ongoing withdrawals near office-building levels.
Scaling Stargate after Abilene
Project Camellia is expected to create around 400 permanent operations jobs at launch, scaling to 1,000, plus thousands of construction jobs during build-out. It builds on OpenAI's first Stargate campus in Abilene, Texas, and lands alongside Meta and Anthropic's $10 billion compute lease talks and OpenAI's Mistral-Azure sovereign AI push — signals that hyperscale AI compute is now being contracted a decade forward.
Reporting based on coverage from OpenAI, Bloomberg, Data Center Dynamics, The Current Georgia and Georgia Virtue.