Editor’s note: This story has been updated with information from Coweta County and additional information about the project site. It was updated again Friday with more detailed property tax calculations after questions were raised by government officials about estimated property tax revenues.
Metro Atlanta faced an onslaught of data center development projects in 2024, but it seems the busy year for high-tech computer storage facilities saved its largest proposal for last.
Preliminary plans for “Project Sail” were revealed on Tuesday — New Year’s Eve — for a 13-building data center campus in Coweta County, according to a Development of Regional Impact filing. Each computer storage warehouse is envisioned to span 378,000 square feet, meaning the entire project’s footprint would encompass more than 4.9 million square feet — more than twice the floor space of the Mall of Georgia.
Proposed by a company called Atlas Development LLC, the project’s eye-popping numbers don’t stop there.
The filing estimates the campus will be worth $17 billion when completed by the end of 2036 and will generate nearly $1.6 billion in annual tax revenues for Coweta County. An Atlas Development official in an email confirmed the proposed price tag of the overall project and said county officials estimated the potential tax revenue figure.
“The development is a very large development,” Atlas executive Jonathon Ward said, declining to comment further. Atlas Development, Georgia Secretary of State’s Office records show, was founded in 2017 and has an address is Whitesburg.
Credit: Courtesy Coweta County
Credit: Courtesy Coweta County
The estimated tax figure is 14 times greater than Coweta’s current annual tax collections. A county spokesperson Thursday confirmed the $1.6 billion estimate is accurate and provided a site plan for the project.
But it is unclear how the county determined that figure, and multiple state and local government officials contacted The Atlanta Journal-Constitution questioning the county’s projection after initial publication of this figure. The figure appears to be 10 times larger than typical tax collection estimates and should be closer to $163 million.
In Georgia, property taxes are calculated by taking 40% of the value of the property, which would be $6.8 billion for a property appraised at $17 billion. Then, county tax officials would multiply that by the local millage rate, which is 0.024 for 24 mills in Coweta, which would produce an estimate of $163.2 million.
Neither Coweta’s spokesperson nor the county’s development authority immediately responded Friday when asked again how the $1.6 billion calculation was made.
The site plan also reveals each of the 13 buildings will have a power capacity of 72 megawatts, meaning the entire project’s capacity is 936 megawatts.
Few other details were made public on Project Sail, such as whether an end user has been selected for the proposed data center. The project site is along U.S. 27 near Newnan between Welcome Sargent and Wagers Mill roads, about 45 miles southwest of downtown Atlanta. According to county property records and the project map, the site is about 831 acres and is split among five parcels controlled by three ownership groups.
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.
In recent years, server farms have become one of the most desired uses for undeveloped land in metro Atlanta. 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.
Proponents say the rapid increase in data center development is a needed investment in critical tech infrastructure, which powers more aspects of daily life with each passing year. These facilities, which can house hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment, can also generate additional tax revenues.
But they’re also water and electricity hogs.
The mammoth size of these facilities and their strain on utility grids have sparked concern in communities that feel overwhelmed by encroaching server farms. Nearby south Fulton County amassed seven gigantic data center proposals during 2024.
In neighboring Fayette County, QTS Data Centers is building one of the largest data center campuses in the world on a 615-acre site. The project will require enough electricity to power more than 1 million homes and prompted a recent protest over the impact overhead power lines would have on its neighbors, which was documented in a December article by Bloomberg.
The Project Sail site will need to be rezoned following the state’s infrastructure review, the document said.
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