Effingham County commissioners removed the site plan review for the OpenAI hyperscale data center from the agenda of their regularly scheduled Tuesday meeting, delaying a decision on a project that was negotiated privately and announced in late July 2026.
An OpenAI spokesperson told The Current by email that the county asked for additional review time and the company agreed to a short postponement, adding that the delay should not affect the project timeline. A county Facebook post attributed the request to Octans Georgia, the local affiliate carrying the project. A county spokesperson said that request was a formality the county itself had asked for so the item could come off the agenda in advance.
The county development authority spent 77,000 dollars on a public relations firm between mid April and July to field questions about the project. County projections put the facility as the largest taxpayer in Effingham at capacity, an estimated 870 million dollars in property tax revenue over 15 years even after the tax discount granted to the developer. OpenAI has committed more than 4.8 million dollars to the school district to cover public school meals for one year.
The same evening, Georgia Conservation Voters and One Hundred Miles hosted a town hall in Springfield. Panelists included Alicia Johnson and Peter Hubbard, both members of Georgia utility regulation board. Residents raised questions about design, water usage, and environmental effects, and pointed to what they described as differences between earlier site sketches and the current plan.
The report was written by Maggie Lee, data reporter for The Current.
Source: The Current - https://thecurrentga.org/2026/09/14/effingham-county-postpones-openai-data-center-site-plan-review/