Analysis
OpenAI revealed Project Camellia on July 22, a data center campus in Effingham County near Savannah, Georgia, that the company says will exceed $30 billion in investment. Spanning roughly 1,400 acres inside the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub, the site will house four data center buildings totaling about 4.4 million square feet and draw 3.2 gigawatts from Georgia Power under a 25-year contract, delivered in phases between 2028 and 2032 -- enough electricity for roughly 2.4 million homes.
Camellia matters because it's the first campus OpenAI has designed and built itself, rather than leasing capacity from Microsoft Azure, Oracle, Amazon Web Services, or CoreWeave as it has for prior Stargate-branded sites. That shift gives OpenAI direct control over cooling, power procurement, and construction timelines, but also direct exposure to local backlash: residents have raised concerns about water use and grid strain, prompting OpenAI to pledge $80 million in community benefits, up to $71 million in Codex credits for Georgia college and technical students, and an annual independent audit of its commitments.
“The project lands amid a broader gigawatt-scale buildout race.”
The project lands amid a broader gigawatt-scale buildout race. Meta is guiding toward roughly $145 billion in AI spending, Google and Amazon continue expanding their own data center footprints, and xAI has pursued large Memphis facilities for Grok training. Just two days later, Samsung and SK Hynix separately moved to lock in their own multi-year HBM memory supply megadeals with U.S. tech firms -- underscoring that compute, power and memory are all being fought over as one interlocking supply chain right now, not three separate markets.
Watch for permitting fights in Effingham County, whether Georgia Power's rate case treatment of the deal draws further scrutiny, and whether OpenAI extends the self-build model to future sites rather than continuing to lean on cloud partners.
