OpenAI is planting its flag in rural Georgia with Project Camellia, a $20 billion data center campus sprawling across 1,400 acres in Effingham County. It’s the company’s first ground-up facility in the state, and one of the largest single-site AI infrastructure investments ever announced in the US.
The campus will require a staggering 3.2 gigawatts of power capacity, secured from Georgia Power and set to come online over a four-year period. The project comes with a hefty local sweetener. OpenAI has committed $80 million to a community investment fund aimed at supporting Effingham County residents. The company expects to create up to 1,000 permanent jobs, starting with around 400 positions, plus thousands of construction roles during the build-out phase.
There’s also $71 million in Codex credits earmarked for Georgia students, giving them access to OpenAI’s AI-powered coding tool.
In return, Effingham County has approved a 15-year property tax abatement that cuts OpenAI’s tax bill by 50% at the 2026 millage rate. Even with that discount, OpenAI is expected to become the largest taxpayer in the county. The deal followed extensive discussions with state and local officials, including a meeting with Georgia Governor Brian Kemp.
Georgia’s data center gold rush
OpenAI didn’t pick Georgia randomly. The state already hosts between 150 and 200 data centers, and in December 2025, Georgia approved a massive power capacity increase targeting nearly 10 gigawatts, with the bulk of that expansion dedicated to data center operations.
Why crypto investors should care
Projects like Render Network, Akash, and io.net have pitched themselves as decentralized alternatives to exactly this kind of mega-facility. Their argument: instead of spending billions on a single campus that consumes a small city’s worth of electricity, distribute computation across underutilized hardware worldwide.
When Georgia approves nearly 10 GW of new power capacity and most of it goes to AI, that’s capacity that won’t be available for proof-of-work mining operations looking to set up shop in the state.
OpenAI is spending $20 billion on a single facility. The entire decentralized compute sector has a combined market cap that’s a fraction of that figure.