OpenAI wants 3.2 gigawatts in one Georgia county — and says ratepayers won't pay for it

OpenAI is preparing to build a 3.2-gigawatt data center in Effingham County, Georgia, and the company has promised that the bill, for power, water, and grid upgrades, will not land on the county's existing ratepayers. The county of roughly 65,000 people on the coast near Savannah is the site of what the company has called Project Camellia, with the load contracted to Georgia Power and delivered in phases between 2028 and 2032. That is more peak electric demand than several mid-sized American cities combined, on a single site in a single rural county. The story is not whether OpenAI wants to build it; the company has said so, in writing, and Georgia Power has agreed to serve it. The story is what happens next, when the company's six specific commitments meet the public record.

The commitments, as OpenAI states them, are: no cost pass-through to existing ratepayers; payment by OpenAI of the full cost of required infrastructure and electric service; a closed-loop water system that recirculates rather than continuously withdrawing; $80 million in community benefits over the life of the project, separate from projected tax revenue; status as the largest taxpayer in the county; and local construction and operations jobs. The post also references a "Codex credits" arrangement that the hydrated source truncates before the substance is visible. That last item remains opaque.

The mechanism the rest of the package leans on is the Georgia Public Service Commission's January 23, 2025 data-center rule, which the commission adopted unanimously after roughly 39 hours of hearings, more than 1,200 pages of sworn testimony, and 35 expert witnesses. The rule lets Georgia Power charge new data centers above 100 megawatts under terms that go beyond what standard retail customers receive, with the explicit purpose of preventing cost-shifting to ratepayers. It is the only public, regulator-approved gate between a gigawatt-scale AI buildout in Georgia and the bills of the people who already live there.

Some of OpenAI's commitments are testable on paper. The "no rate impact" claim points directly at the January 2025 rule's cost-allocation language; "largest taxpayer in the county" can be checked against Effingham County's assessed-value rolls once construction begins. "OpenAI pays for required infrastructure and electric service" is a contract term that lives in the same Georgia Power press release and should be readable in any future PSC filing.

Others are not testable from the current public record. The closed-loop water claim is a design statement from OpenAI, not a withdrawal permit or a state water-rights filing. The $80 million community-benefits figure is a company commitment, not yet attached to a recipient list or a schedule in the available source. The job numbers are an OpenAI projection. And the "Codex credits" reference in the announcement sits behind a truncation in the hydrated text, so neither the value, the counterparty, nor the conditions are visible.

Georgia Power's projected demand growth has moved from 400 megawatts in 2022 to 6,600 megawatts in 2023 to 8,500 megawatts in 2025, against a current statewide deployment of about 22,000 megawatts. Effingham is not the only project on that curve; it is the largest single one publicly disclosed. The PSC docket 55378 and the 2025 rule will be tested on every one of them, against a backdrop of OpenAI's broader multi-hundred-billion-dollar infrastructure spend.

On paper, OpenAI's case is straightforward: the 2025 rule already exists, the contract already commits the company to pay for required infrastructure and electric service, and the public has a regulator to appeal to. The counterweight is that "pays for itself" is what every large utility customer says until the first cost reconciliation, and the 2025 rule is less than 18 months old. The Effingham build is the first place that rule has to work at gigawatt scale.

The next checkpoint is the first Georgia PSC filing in docket 55378 that names Project Camellia: that filing, when it lands, is where the company's commitment to pay the full cost of required infrastructure and electric service either gets a docket number of its own or remains a press-release line.