Jay Bookman, a long-time objective observer of Georgia politics, has published an in-depth analysis of the rush to build huge data centers in the state. Here are some key excerpts from the 9/3/26 Georgia Recorder:

• GA taxpayers are subsidizing and incentivizing projects that almost certainly would have been built in Georgia anyway. Also, public money is being used to subsidize something that the public does not seem to want.
• Data centers require huge quantities of water to cool servers (and) huge amounts of electricity, straining power plants and grids and potentially raising energy costs.
• They are noisy, and once operational they don’t generate many jobs. It is not irrational to wonder whether their drawbacks outweigh their benefit, particularly to communities forced to host them.
• Another problem: “In their headlong rush to cash in on the AI boom, data center proponents often have neither the time nor the patience for working with and reassuring communities about its impact. Instead, they attempt to get their way through brute force, deception, political power and money.”

Bookman uses as a case study recent events in Effingham County, where a huge new data center was announced in late July. The facility will cover 1,400 acres and require 3.2 gigawatts of electricity, enough to serve 3 million homes. He concludes: “That’s a project of immense public impact. Yet there had been no public input or even knowledge about the project before it was announced as a finalized deal.”

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