OpenAI's Project Camellia brings a 3.2 gigawatt data center campus to Georgia

Meet Project Camellia: a 3.2 gigawatt AI campus coming to Georgia.

The project

Announced July 22, 2026, OpenAI will build a four-building, 3.2 GW data center campus inside the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub in Effingham County, Georgia. The investment comes to at least $20 billion, and over $30 billion at full build-out according to OpenAI VP of compute strategy Sachin Katti. Power arrives in phases between 2028 and 2032.

For scale: 3.2 gigawatts is roughly three nuclear reactors’ worth of demand landing in one Georgia county.

The local package

Data center announcements increasingly come wrapped in community terms, and Camellia’s are specific. The campus will use a closed-loop cooling system that OpenAI says will not drain community water, addressing the most common local objection to hyperscale builds.

The rest of the package: an $80 million community benefits fund, up to $71 million in Codex credits for Georgia colleges, and roughly 400 permanent jobs at the start, scaling toward 1,000. The Codex credits are a notable touch, seeding the local talent pipeline with the company’s own tools rather than just writing checks.

Electricity is the bottleneck

Camellia is one data point in a much larger pattern. Alphabet just raised its 2026 capex forecast to $205 billion, and the whole industry keeps repeating one line: electricity, not silicon, is the real bottleneck of AI.

That is why the announcement leads with gigawatts rather than GPUs. Chips can be bought as fast as TSMC can make them, but grid interconnects, generation capacity, and cooling are measured in years and municipal approvals. The 2028 to 2032 power phasing is an honest admission of that: OpenAI is booking electricity half a decade out because that is the actual constraint on its growth.

For Effingham County, the question is what it means to host three reactors’ worth of AI demand. For everyone else, the takeaway is simpler: the buildout era is just starting, and it is coming to counties, grids, and zoning boards near you.