On Wednesday July 22, 2026, OpenAI announced Project Camellia, a 3.2-gigawatt data-centre campus on 1,400 acres inside the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub in Effingham County, Georgia, about 45 minutes from downtown Savannah. The company put the initial capital commitment at $20 billion, with Georgia Power delivering electricity in phases from 2028 through 2032. It is the first data centre OpenAI has said it will design and build itself, rather than lease from Oracle, Microsoft, or CoreWeave. Same day, the company raised its 2030 compute spending forecast to $750 billion, a number the corporate-affairs team is treating as background context and everyone else is treating as the story.

The Loop last covered OpenAI's infrastructure story on July 9 in the Alaska pitch piece, when Sam Altman was in Washington offering the federal government a five per cent equity stake worth $42.6 billion. Two weeks later Chris Lehane is in Effingham County offering the same shape of deal to a Georgia school district: $80 million in cash and $71 million in Codex credits. The audience has changed. The playbook has not.

What the campus actually is

The build sits on 1,400 acres of the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub, a 2,600-acre master-planned logistics park 12 miles from the Port of Savannah, rail-served by OmniTRAX and connected to I-95 and I-16. OpenAI is not moving into a repurposed warehouse. It is greenfielding.

The published numbers, triangulated across Data Center Dynamics, Quartz, Crypto Briefing, and the local reporting in The Current:

• 3.2 gigawatts total electrical capacity, delivered by Georgia Power in phases.
• $20 billion initial capital commitment. Some reporting, including Construction Review Online, puts total build cost above $30 billion at full scale.
• 400 long-term jobs when the first phase opens in 2028, growing to 1,000 employees by 2032.
• $80 million in community investment across schools, healthcare, workforce training, and public safety.
• Up to $71 million in Codex credits for eligible Georgia students — a community benefit denominated in the product OpenAI is asking permission to build.
• A closed-loop cooling system that OpenAI claims will keep water withdrawals "minimal."
• Georgia families will not be charged the infrastructure upgrade costs, because Georgia PSC rules bar that pass-through and OpenAI will pay them directly.

That last item is doing a lot of work in the company's messaging. It also happens to be true: Public Service Commission rules in Georgia already prohibit residential ratepayers from subsidising the transmission and substation builds that hyperscaler campuses require. Framing this as generosity is a bit like framing obedience to the speed limit as philanthropy.

The bit the press release skipped

For that you go to The Current, the Savannah nonprofit newsroom that dug up the terms of the deal the press release left out. OpenAI is receiving a 50 per cent property tax abatement for 15 years. Despite the abatement, the company is expected to become the county's largest single taxpayer — which tells you the size of the underlying bill even at half strength.

The county has floated the resulting revenue into "Project Zero," a plan to cut average homeowner property rates by 40 per cent by early 2027. That is the trade offered to residents: half of what OpenAI would otherwise owe on the largest building in the county's history, in exchange for a partial reduction on everybody else's houses. It may be a defensible deal. It is not the deal the press release described.

Frank Durton, a 50-year resident, told The Current the county "kept it under wraps for so long, denied anything about it and then all of a sudden announced it." Environmental advocate Jeff Beauvais put the process failure most cleanly: "a lot of these details and decisions have already been made, and we're playing catch up."

Governor Brian Kemp met with OpenAI representatives in May 2026, per The Current's public records. The data-centre plans did not appear in the briefing materials for that meeting.

The Red Zone is real, and the closed loop is a promise

The 1,400-acre parcel sits inside what Georgia's Environmental Protection Division designates the "Red Zone" — a coastal region where withdrawals from the Upper Floridan aquifer are restricted because sustained pumping draws saltwater in from the coast. Depleting the aquifer here is not a distant hypothetical. It is why the restriction exists.

OpenAI's answer is a closed-loop cooling system that recycles process water and, per the company blog, reduces demand on local supplies. The word "reduces" is doing work. Closed-loop systems still need make-up water, still lose water to evaporation, and still tap the local table when the loop is being filled or serviced. OpenAI has not published a projected annual withdrawal figure. It has published a system description.

Between 2025 and 2026 the neighbouring communities of Garden City and Camden County enacted data-centre moratoriums for exactly this reason. Camden's is the one Lehane's diplomatic tour is designed to avoid a repeat of.

Chris Lehane learns to do local politics

The public face of the announcement is Chris Lehane, OpenAI's Chief Global Affairs Officer, a former Clinton lawyer who ran opposition research for Al Gore's 2000 campaign. He is not a data-centre engineer. He is a political operative, and the fact that he is the one doing the tour is the reveal.

Lehane told Quartz: "At the end of the day, you're only going to get approvals to be able to build these projects if you're actually doing right by these communities." And in a separate line: "We have to earn the trust, we have to earn the right to build this. Part of earning that right and earning that trust is to actually hear back from people."

At face value, that is the correct thing for someone in his role to say. The trouble is that Kemp met with OpenAI in May, the plans did not appear in the briefing, and the residents of the affected county found out via a Wednesday press release with $151 million in cash-and-credits and a 15-year tax abatement already negotiated. Earning trust and hearing back from people is not the same as announcing a fully-baked deal on a Wednesday.

The $750B backdrop

Project Camellia is not a one-off. The same July 22 disclosure raised OpenAI's projected 2030 compute infrastructure spend to $750 billion. Some of that is Stargate. Some is the Alaska pitch. Some, now, is Effingham County. Read the announcements sequentially — Alaska equity swap, Effingham community package, $750B forecast — and the pattern is a company trying to solve for approvals at the scale of an electric grid, on a schedule where the model roadmap is fixed and the buildings are the constraint.

That is a reasonable thing to want. It is also the thing that produced the last two decades of pipeline fights, port expansions, and cell-tower moratoriums, none of which turned on the applicant being unlikeable. They turned on the applicant needing something the neighbours had a legal right to slow down. OpenAI is not the first company to discover this. It is the first AI lab to.

What this means

1. The build is a first. OpenAI has been a compute customer, not a data-centre operator, for its entire existence. Project Camellia is a shift to a different kind of company — one with 1,400 acres, a construction schedule, an environmental permitting risk, and 1,000 eventual employees whose HR jurisdiction is Georgia. That is not the corporate machine that shipped the API.
2. The community package is a template. $80M in cash plus $71M in the company's own product, in exchange for a 15-year 50 per cent abatement, is the deal OpenAI will try to reproduce in every state where it wants a campus. Local newsrooms, not the national trade press, will publish the terms first — as they did here.
3. The Red Zone is the actual risk. Not the money, not the tax structure, not the charm offensive. If the closed-loop cooling numbers do not survive contact with the aquifer restriction, the moratorium neighbours to the south get their case made for them.

What to watch

• Whether the state Development of Regional Impact review flags the aquifer siting. That determination is what turns "planned" into "permitted."
• Whether Camden County or Garden City modifies its data-centre moratorium in response to the terms of the Effingham deal, either to relax it (money is money) or to harden it (Effingham conceded too much).
• Whether the $71 million Codex credit commitment survives contact with a Georgia legislature that may or may not want the state's higher-ed procurement anchored to a single vendor's product.
• Whether OpenAI publishes a projected annual water withdrawal figure at any point before the 2028 Phase 1 energisation. So far the number the company has published is zero.
• Whether the $750 billion 2030 forecast survives its first quarterly board revision. Forecasts of that scale, from a private company with a single customer for its own build, have a way of moving.

Chris Lehane said OpenAI has to earn the right to build this. The neighbours of the earlier data centres that stopped listening are the ones who will decide whether he did.