Amazon said Tuesday it plans to spend at least $11 billion on new data center capacity in metro Atlanta to respond to the huge demand in computing power from the rise of generative artificial intelligence.
Amazon Web Services, a division of the e-commerce giant, said it will make the investments in facilities in Butts and Douglas counties, south and west of Atlanta respectively. The pair of projects combined would likely rank as the largest corporate investment in state history by dollar amount and exceed the capital expenditure of the state’s largest economic development project, the $7.6 billion Hyundai Motor Group electric vehicle factory near Savannah.
Amazon said the projects will also employ at least 550 workers. Precise locations of the centers were not immediately announced.
Data centers have become big business across the U.S., with metro Atlanta emerging as a hotbed for the fast-growing industry, and Georgia and many county and municipal governments have offered lucrative tax breaks to build here. The high-tech projects are effectively gigantic warehouses that store computer servers that power the internet, cloud services and artificial intelligence.
But the projects are not without controversy, demanding huge amounts of power and water to keep them running. Data center opponents say the facilities typically create few full-time jobs relative to their enormous physical and resource footprints.
Some local governments and state lawmakers have begun to push back on their proliferation around the metro Atlanta area. Though some projects are still moving forward, last year the Atlanta City Council approved a ban on new data centers within a half-mile of the 22-mile Beltline loop and MARTA hubs, including heavy rail stations and bus-rapid transit stops.
Credit: TNS
Credit: TNS
Still, leaders in Butts and Douglas counties cheered Amazon’s announcement and the economic jolt they say it will bring to their communities.
“This is a historic day for Douglas County,” Dr. Romona Jackson Jones, Douglas County commission chairwoman, said in a news release. “We are pleased to welcome AWS to bring the most secure, resilient, and advanced cloud computing technology to the county, and with it hundreds of high-paying, high-tech jobs that will benefit our community and our citizens for the long term.”
Last year, the Georgia General Assembly also passed legislation that would have revoked a lucrative tax break for data centers. But after aggressive industry lobbying efforts, Gov. Brian Kemp vetoed the bill to keep the incentives in place.
Utilities, including Georgia Power — the state’s largest electric utility — are already building new power plants, largely to meet the energy demands of data centers. The utility has said its approved plans to serve the facilities will actually drive down electricity rates for other customers, but critics have questioned their claims.
Georgia Power is set to file its next long-range energy roadmap at the end of this month, which will shed more light on how it will serve the region’s data center industry. It was not immediately clear whether Georgia Power or one of the state’s electric membership cooperatives would provide electricity for Amazon’s facilities.
In recent years, developers of server farms have targeted undeveloped land in metro Atlanta to build massive data centers. By midyear, data center construction had increased 76% in the Atlanta market compared to the same time last year, the most among North America’s eight data center primary markets, according to real estate services firm CBRE.
“We are pleased and proud that Amazon Web Services, a world technology leader, has chosen to locate new data centers in Butts County,” Butts Commission Chairman Russ Crumbley said in the release. “Their investment will be the most significant in Butts County history, and represents a truly collaborative effort for more than a year by the Butts County Board of Commissioners, the Development Authority of Butts County, the Butts County Water and Sewer Authority, and the Butts County School System.”
Crumbley said Amazon’s investment would “enable significant infrastructure improvements throughout our community” to benefit citizens, but it was not immediately clear what projects the company’s investment will help fund.
— Staff writer Zachary Hansen contributed to this report.
— This is a breaking news story. Return to AJC.com for updates.
