OpenAI's $20B Georgia campus: the power arrives in 2028

On July 22, OpenAI announced Project Camellia, a 3.2-gigawatt data center campus in Effingham County, Georgia, backed by at least $20 billion in private investment. The number that matters for your budget is not the $20 billion. It's the delivery schedule: Georgia Power is phasing that electricity in from 2028 through 2032. The capacity everyone is waiting on has a date, and it's not this year.

What actually happened

Per local reporting from The Current and the Effingham Herald, the campus sits on roughly 1,400 acres inside the 2,600-acre Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub, with four buildings planned. The terms:

• A 25-year power agreement with Georgia Power, 3.2GW phased 2028–2032, with OpenAI covering infrastructure and electric service costs and providing up to 1GW of flexible demand response.
• A 50% property tax abatement for 15 years, locked to the 2026 millage rate. Even abated, OpenAI is expected to become the county's largest taxpayer.
• ~400 permanent jobs initially, with the potential to reach 1,000, plus construction work across several years.
• $80 million toward a community benefits fund covering education, public safety, healthcare, and small business resources.
• Up to $71 million in Codex credits for eligible Georgia college and technical school students — roughly $100 per student.

OpenAI chief policy officer Chris Lehane, at a public open house in Rincon: "We have to earn the trust, we have to earn the right to build this."

Why it matters for your business

Two things, and the second one is the one nobody's talking about.

First: stop planning around cheap compute that hasn't been built. Every "prices will come down" argument leans on capacity like this coming online. This announcement puts a firm date on 3.2GW of it, and that date starts in 2028 and finishes in 2032. If your 2026 or 2027 AI budget assumes token prices fall out from under you, it doesn't. Build your automation so it works at today's prices and gets cheaper if the market cooperates — never the other way around. Measure cost per completed task, not cost per million tokens, and you'll know immediately whether a price cut actually reached you.

Second: $71 million in Codex credits is a distribution play, not charity. OpenAI is putting its coding agent in the hands of every eligible student in a state's college and technical school system at roughly $100 a head. Those students are your next junior developers, and they will arrive fluent in one vendor's tooling and indifferent to the alternatives. That is cheap at the price — for OpenAI.

We're not saying refuse the free tools. We're saying notice that your future hiring pool's default toolchain is being purchased right now, and make sure the systems you own don't quietly assume it. The code your team writes should run the same regardless of which agent helped write it.

Sources: The Current — $20 billion OpenAI data center to open in Effingham County, Effingham Herald — OpenAI plans $20B data center in Effingham County.