OpenAI's Project Camellia locks in 3.2GW of Georgia power
OpenAI confirms its first self-built data center: a 3.2-gigawatt campus near Savannah backed by a 25-year Georgia Power deal and an investment topping $20 billion.
OpenAI on July 22 detailed Project Camellia, a data-center campus in Effingham County near Savannah, Georgia, that will be the first facility the company designs and builds itself rather than leasing from partners like Oracle or Microsoft. The investment is reported at more than $20 billion, with some accounts putting the eventual figure closer to $30 billion.
A 25-year power contract with demand-response strings
The anchor of the announcement is energy: Georgia Power signed a 25-year agreement to deliver 3.2 gigawatts to the site in phases between 2028 and 2032. Unusually, OpenAI committed up to 1,000 megawatts of flexible demand response, letting the utility curtail the facility's draw during grid stress — a concession aimed squarely at fears that AI data centers destabilize regional grids and inflate household bills. OpenAI says it will pay the full cost of required electrical infrastructure so that expenses are not passed to existing ratepayers, and expects to become the county's largest taxpayer. The package includes $80 million in community benefits and $71 million in Codex credits for Georgia college and technical students.
The project lands amid scrutiny of OpenAI's escalating capital commitments, which TechCrunch tallied this week at roughly $750 billion across its infrastructure deals — and a day after The Decoder highlighted the power agreement as among the largest single-site AI energy contracts to date.
Why it matters
Camellia marks OpenAI's shift from renting compute to owning it, following the vertical-integration path Google and Meta walked a decade ago — a structural change in how the company controls its costs and its destiny. Just as significant is the deal's political engineering: demand-response guarantees, ratepayer protections, and local benefit packages are becoming the standard toolkit for getting gigawatt-scale AI projects approved as utility bills become an election issue. Expect the Camellia template — power flexibility traded for grid access — to be copied in every jurisdiction where AI load growth is contested.