OpenAI's Georgia data center will draw 3.2 gigawatts — enough to power 2.5 million homes

OpenAI just inked a deal with Georgia Power that puts the scale of AI infrastructure in stark relief. Project Camellia, a data center planned for Effingham County, will eventually pull 3.2 gigawatts of electricity. That’s not a typo. To put it in perspective, that’s roughly the output of three nuclear reactors, or enough juice for about 2.5 million households. Power will be delivered in phases between 2028 and 2032, and OpenAI is footing the entire bill — the company insists local ratepayers won’t see their bills creep up to subsidize the buildout.

The water situation is more ambiguous. OpenAI says it will use a closed-loop cooling system to keep ongoing consumption low, but the company has been cagey about releasing actual water usage figures for its existing facilities. Given that a single ChatGPT query already guzzles roughly a bottle’s worth of water, the aggregate consumption of a campus this size is a legitimate question. The vague promises don’t exactly inspire confidence, and data center water use has become a flashpoint in communities from Arizona to Ireland.

OpenAI is doing what big tech always does when it rolls into town: opening the checkbook. The company has pledged $80 million for local schools, healthcare, and housing, plus up to $71 million in Codex credits for Georgia students. That last bit is clever — it looks like philanthropy but functions as an on-ramp to lock in the next generation of developers on OpenAI’s platform. Anthropic and others run similar programs. It’s the new playbook: build the infrastructure, seed the ecosystem, and hope the goodwill offsets the backlash.

The backlash is real. Across the U.S., data center proposals are running into furious local opposition. Residents see the tradeoff clearly: massive resource consumption and construction noise in exchange for a handful of permanent jobs. These aren’t factories employing thousands of people. Once the build is done, a skeleton crew keeps the servers humming. Whether $80 million in community investment quiets the critics in Effingham County remains an open question — but the national pattern suggests the honeymoon period for AI infrastructure is over.