Because metro Atlanta has established itself as the country’s hottest data center market, it’s getting harder for project pitches to stand out among an ever-increasing field.
But a new data center proposal west of Atlanta has accomplished that through sheer size alone.
Preliminary plans were filed Friday for an 11-building data center campus near I-20 in Douglas County that would encompass more than 6.2 million square feet of computer storage space, ranking among the largest proposals across the state. The Mall of Georgia has a footprint of about 1.7 million square feet — meaning this proposal is for a data center more than three times larger than the state’s largest shopping mall.
The project, called “Hickman Property,” was first disclosed in a Development of Regional Impact filing, which triggers an early-stage infrastructure review for large developments that impact multiple jurisdictions. The DRI did not include an estimated build-out value of the campus, but metro Atlanta’s largest data center proposals are estimated to be multimillion-dollar investments.
The project’s developer is listed as East Village Dothan LLC, an entity registered in 2022 by James Hickman, according to state business records. Hickman does not own the 701-acre project site property off Clinton Road, which is partially in the city of Villa Rica.
Hickman did not immediately respond to requests for comment. There isn’t any indication that a major data center operator is tied to the project.
The project plans also include three single-docked warehouses that comprise 66,000 square feet. The land would need to be rezoned from residential and agricultural to allow for the data center proposal to move forward. A project timeline was not disclosed in the DRI.
The anticipated power capacity of the project was not included in the DRI, but it would likely require several hundred megawatts of electricity capacity to operate at this scale. Last week, a DRI was filed for a 1.5 million-square-foot data center campus proposal in Troup County that would use up to 600 megawatts of electricity — enough electricity to power about 450,000 homes.
The projects join a litany of similar large-scale data center projects that have been proposed in metro Atlanta over the last year to build more computer server storage space to power the internet, cloud services and artificial intelligence.
The Atlanta region emerged as the country’s top data center market for leasing activity in 2024, dethroning Northern Virginia for the first time, according to new data from real estate services firm CBRE. The net amount of leased data center space in Atlanta increased by 706 megawatts in 2024, 56% more than Northern Virginia during the same year.
Nearly 2,160 megawatts worth of data center development is under construction across metro Atlanta, more than double the size of data centers currently operating in the area. That’s roughly equal to the maximum electricity output of both of Plant Vogtle’s two new nuclear reactors. No other major market in the U.S. comes close to matching that projected wave of computer server farms.
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