Where they stand: Jackson, Bottoms on data centers
Members of the Georgia General Assembly adjourned this past session without delivering on an early push to regulate one of the state’s fastest-growing industries: data centers.
Lawmakers from both parties seemed eager at the beginning of the session to institute changes ranging from moratoriums on new developments to rolling back the lucrative tax breaks the state offers to lure facilities to Georgia in the first place.
But ultimately no proposal made it across the finish line, even after a state report estimated Georgia would miss out on $2.5 billion in tax revenue in 2026 because of the breaks.
Meanwhile, metro Atlanta surpassed the rest of the country in the first half of 2026 for the most data center space under construction based on energy use.
Whether or not to put guardrails around the industry has become a top issue for campaigns up and down the ballot ahead of the November election. Here’s where the candidates for governor, Keisha Lance Bottoms and Rick Jackson, stand on data centers.
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Jackson
The Republican nominee for governor supports erecting guardrails on the data center industry, with residents having the final say whether such projects are built in their communities.
“Data centers must have local support, provide a clear local benefit, pay their own way and meet strong environmental standards,” Jackson wrote in an op-ed for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published in August.
Jackson pointed to the strain data centers can put on land, roads, water and the power grid.
Under his proposal, projects would have to meet five conditions to move forward: local support; an analysis of their financial benefits; full coverage of costs associated with utility use; a transparency agreement governing operations; and strict environmental standards.
Jackson is an investor in a major Texas data center project, and his state financial disclosure lists him as the head of Datahub Developers LLC. Records tie the company to a rural northeast Texas site where a massive hyperscale data center campus is under development.
Bottoms
Bottoms has called for a statewide pause on development and construction of new data centers while officials assess the projects’ economic and community impacts.
During a recent interview on the AJC’s “Politically Georgia” podcast, the Democratic nominee for governor called a moratorium an “opportunity to reassess.”
“What I’m proposing is not out of line with what a cross-section of leaders are proposing across the country,” she said. “We are deeply concerned in Georgia about data centers. There are too many unknowns. And as far as I know, the state has not been forthright in what the impact may be.”
During her tenure as Atlanta mayor, Bottoms’ administration helped advance a smaller version of the projects. But her campaign argues the facility she backed years ago was much different from the massive data center campuses now proposed across Georgia.