OpenAI Just Paid Georgia's Tax Base for 3.2 Gigawatts of Certainty

The Signal:

• The binding constraint on AI-era CRE is entitled land with firm power, not capital.
• Municipalities are financing that scarcity with their own tax base.
• This is a land-and-power play, not a lease; value sits in energization, not tenancy.

OpenAI's Project Camellia is a $20B, roughly 1,400-acre campus of four buildings at the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub near Rincon, Georgia, its first self-built campus in the state. The number that matters is the power: Georgia Power committed 3.2 GW, phased from 2028 to 2032.

The mechanism is grid scarcity. With interconnection queues running years in most hubs, powered land, acreage with firm generation and a delivery date, has become the commodity hyperscalers bid up, with behind-the-meter gas as the workaround when the grid cannot move fast enough.

The structural read is that power availability now sets the map. Site selection has inverted: developers no longer find land then chase power, they find power then assemble land. Every metro with spare generation is now a data-center land market.

Implications: For landowners near firm generation, entitled-and-powered acreage is repricing toward hyperscale economics. For developers, control of an interconnection slot is worth more than the dirt. For lenders, the question has moved from tenant credit to power-delivery certainty and abatement durability.