A few data center proposals — including a downtown Atlanta project within one of the largest developments in the Southeast — will continue moving forward despite a recently adopted ban on such facilities near key transit points across the city.
The Atlanta City Council approved two pieces of legislation Tuesday to prohibit new data center development within a half-mile of the 22-mile Beltline loop and MARTA hubs, including heavy rail stations and bus-rapid transit stops. The legislation comes in response to metro Atlanta’s growing proliferation of computer storage farms, including multiple controversial projects in fast-changing urban areas.
Some pending projects, however, will be allowed to move forward.
These efforts include a proposal for a 300,000-square-foot data center at Centennial Yards, the $5 billion redevelopment of the Gulch near Mercedes-Benz Stadium and State Farm Arena. A special administrative permit application was filed last week by an affiliate of the project’s developer CIM Group, which aims to build the new server farm at 10 Forsyth St., effectively acting as an expansion to an existing data center by Digital Realty. The rest of the Centennial Yards plan consists of an entertainment district and new residential, hotel and office towers.
Credit: Courtesy rendering
Credit: Courtesy rendering
Keyetta Holmes, director of Atlanta’s department of city planning, office of zoning and development, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution all SAP applications filed before the City Council’s votes on Tuesday will not be impacted by the new legislation. Centennial Yards’ development team declined to comment about its data center plans.
Another data center proposal was filed shortly before the legislative cutoff date. New York developer Youngwoo & Associates filed a SAP application Aug. 30 to build a 400,000-square-foot data center within a mixed-use project at 1611 Ellsworth Industrial Blvd. NW, near Top Golf Midtown. The project is within a half-mile of the Beltline’s Westside trail and is near some of the area’s most notable developments, including The Interlock and The Works.
Youngwoo, which didn’t respond to a request for comment, has owned the 17-acre property since 1996, and prior development plans never came to fruition. The most recent proposal from 2019 was called Radio 1611, and project renderings feature buildings rising on stilts above the surrounding trees and other glassy block-shaped buildings.
“We tried to build so many times, and for one thing or another, we couldn’t build,” the company’s founder Young Woo told real estate publication Bisnow on Wednesday, adding he’s not sure what can be built on the site if the latest data center proposal is shot down.
The Atlanta area has emerged as one of the country’s fastest-growing data center markets, ending June with the most space under construction in the country, according to real estate services firm CBRE. The rapid expansion of the industry has been welcomed by many developers and economic development leaders, but it’s raised concerns about these facilities’ impacts on Georgia’s power grid and water supply.
Councilmembers Jason Dozier and Matt Westmoreland, who sponsored the data center legislation, said sites near MARTA and the Beltline are primed for residential and other transformational projects.
“Whether it’s a MARTA train station or the Beltline itself, what makes those two things successful is to have as many people around them as possible — whether it’s residences or jobs,” Westmoreland previously told the AJC. “Data centers don’t provide any housing and they provide very few jobs. So they are the opposite of the type of development that we want to see near our transit quarters.”
Mike Lash, first vice president of CBRE’s data center solution team in Atlanta, said he understands why city leaders may want to prohibit data centers in valuable areas focused on pedestrians and transit, but he called the new legislation shortsighted.
“Our internet backbone runs on data centers,” Lash said. “And now there is no mechanism to allow those critical developments to be built near key fiber optic networks in town.”
He added many urban data centers tend to be much smaller than the behemoths, called hyperscale data centers, that Georgia has quickly been amassing.
The most notable exception in the city is QTS Data Centers’ sprawling campus along Jefferson Street near the Beltline’s Westside trail. The campus, which is one of the largest currently operating in the state, is undergoing expansion that will also not be impacted by the city’s ban.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
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