A county in rural Georgia is due to hold a crucial vote on a proposal to build one of the world’s largest and most power-hungry data centers on Thursday, just a few weeks after the plans were made public.

The five commissioners in Twiggs County will meet to consider an application submitted last month by Savannah-based engineering firm Thomas & Hutton on behalf of Eagle Rock Partners, a developer based in North Carolina, to rezone about 292 acres of wooded land for industrial use. Rezoning would be a vital step in the permitting process required for the data center to go ahead.

The application posted on the county website contains scant discussion of the likely environmental impact of the project — which would cover an area roughly the size of 200 football fields. Twiggs County — located in the middle of Georgia about 100 miles southeast of Atlanta — is one of the state’s least populous counties, with about 7,700 residents.

“I don’t understand how you can make an informed decision at this time,” said Fletcher Sams, executive director of regional conservation nonprofit Altamaha Riverkeeper. “Approving these things without the proper planning is a terrible idea.”

With a projected power demand of 900 megawatts (MW), Eagle Rock Partners’ proposed “Pine Ridge Technology Park” would consume about 14 times more electricity than the airport in Georgia’s capital Atlanta, the busiest in the world.

Eagle Rock Partners and Thomas & Hutton did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Twiggs County was due to hold various public question and answer sessions on September 16-17 at the request of Eagle Rock Partners, according to the county website.

The proposed “hyperscale” data center is the latest in a list of dozens of energy-hungry data center developments announced in Georgia over the past year, making the state the nation’s fastest-growing data center market.

In Coweta County, about 40 miles southwest of Atlanta, another 900-megawatt data center development called Project Sail has sparked local pushback and led to calls for stricter local laws around data centers — a pattern seen in many other communities hastily organising to oppose projects in many parts of the U.S. 

Closer by, in Monroe County, county commissioners rejected a proposed 1,200-megawatt data center project last month, Thomas & Hutton also represented.

Surging power demand from the data centers is requiring costly upgrades to the state’s grid and delaying the phase-out of polluting coal and gas-fired power plants.

Despite the world-leading energy demand of the Pine Ridge Technology Park project (no 900-megawatt data center has yet been built worldwide, although many are planned), the Twiggs County rezoning application yielded little information about the potential local impacts.

“Would there be an ecological or pollution impact from the proposed zoning if it is granted?” reads one of the questions in the rezoning application, to which the data center developers replied only, “No.”

‘Putting Our County at Risk’

The rezoning application also does not feature a study on local traffic impacts, a typical step for hyperscale data center projects, which often have 10-year construction timelines.

In July, Georgia temporarily suspended its Developments of Regional Impact (DRI) planning process for data center proposals — which requires a traffic study and additional details about the resource usage of planned developments — and now plans to revamp requirements for data centers under the process.

The developers of Pine Ridge Technology Park have not filed a DRI application during the temporary pause. Some Twiggs County residents say that the company has not been transparent about its plans and are calling for more information.

On September 5, local resident Nancy Lubeck and the Concerned Citizens of Twiggs County Georgia wrote to Twiggs County commissioners to ask them to pause the rezoning process for the Pine Ridge Technology Park until more information about the resource impacts of the project had been presented and the DRI process is followed.

“You may be putting our county at risk,” reads the letter, which adds, “it is understandable that most of the citizens in this county are concerned due to the secrecy, lack of legal documentation, & lack of DRI process.”

Twiggs County referred DeSmog to a link on the county website which included the rezoning request and email conversations between county staff and developers, which were initially obtained through an open records request by a resident.

Sams, the executive director of Altamaha Riverkeeper, says he is particularly concerned about the potential strain on Middle Georgia’s water resources, which he said are already facing a deficit in coming years because of rising demand in the Altamaha River basin, including from data centers.

“They’re going to be sucking 17.2 million gallons a day upstream a day to provide power,” Sams says of the Pine Ridge Technology Park’s water footprint — due to the massive amount of water needed to produce power at coal-fired Plant Scherer, just north of Macon, about 40 miles northwest of the Twiggs County site.

Plant Scherer was originally slated for retirement in 2030, but utility Georgia Power now plans to continue operating the plant due to rising power demand, largely driven by data centers, according to reporting by the Energy & Policy Institute think tank. 

At full capacity, Plant Scherer is one of the most polluting power plants in the nation in terms of climate-heating carbon dioxide and particulate matter harmful to human health, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency.

Georgia Power said in an emailed statement that “we are proud of operations at our plants” and “take our responsibility as a trusted neighbor to operate safely and in compliance very seriously.”

Meanwhile, residents in Twiggs County are focusing on the rezoning hearing — which takes place at 6 p.m. September 18 at the County Courthouse.

This story was updated with responses from Twiggs County and Georgia Power at 5:59 p.m. EDT on September 17, 2025.

The reporting for this story was supported by The Fund for Investigative Journalism.