~1,000 Effingham County GA Residents Confront OpenAI Over $20B, 3.2GW Project Camellia Data Center

OpenAI announced a 3.2 gigawatt, $20 billion data center campus in Effingham County, Georgia on July 22, 2026. Nearly 1,000 residents confronted OpenAI officials at a packed open house the next day and again at the August 5 Board of Commissioners meeting, where commissioners nonetheless voted to approve a zoning ordinance establishing a unified industrial district for the project’s Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub site. Commissioners denied signing NDAs and said they had limited authority over the state-level review process, formally advancing the land-use framework despite the community pressure. A dedicated public forum is planned for late August.

This is one of the largest single-site energy demands in Georgia history, and the pattern — public backlash contained by commissioners citing limited local authority while state-level approval mechanisms move ahead unchecked — mirrors the county-level land-use fights this corpus tracks nationally, from Florida’s rejected and moratorium-held rezonings (2026-06-18–citrus-county-fl-data-center-moratorium-holder-rezoning-denied, 2026-07-15–palm-beach-county-rejects-project-tango-data-center) to Maryland’s zoning reversal (2026-07-21–charles-county-md-scraps-data-center-zoning). At 3.2 GW, Project Camellia’s grid interconnection will require new transmission infrastructure whose ratepayer cost allocation is not yet public — the same Channel-B cost-shift question driving Texas’s grid freeze the same week (2026-08-03–abbott-freezes-texas-data-center-grid-connections-ercot-audit).