OpenAI’s $20B Project Camellia: The CRE Read on an Unfiled Entitlement

On July 22, 2026, the Effingham County Industrial Development Authority, the Effingham County Board of Commissioners and the Effingham County School District jointly announced that OpenAI will establish a data center campus inside the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub, a 2,600 acre logistics campus developed by The Broe Group. The county put the capital investment at $20 billion and called it one of the largest private investments in the history of coastal Georgia. County Manager Tim Callanan said the project could become the catalyst for Project Zero, the county’s commitment to eliminate homestead property taxes, “as early as next year,” with current estimates of a 40 percent reduction for the average homeowner. Those are the county’s figures and the county’s projection, not PSV findings. OpenAI is contracting with Georgia Power for 3.2 gigawatts, expected to be delivered in phases between 2028 and 2032.

OpenAI’s own Project Camellia fact sheet, dated July 26, 2026, commits the company to paying 100 percent of the project’s infrastructure and electric-service costs, to closed loop cooling that it says keeps ongoing water use similar to an office building with the same headcount, to an $80 million community support commitment, to reporting through an annual independent audit, and to becoming the largest property taxpayer in Effingham County. Two published records disagree on employment: the county’s July 22 release says 400 long-term jobs, while OpenAI’s fact sheet says more than 1,000 permanent jobs once fully built out. Then, on July 27, the county published a separate statement. It said the only document submitted to the county at this time is the DRI Project Sheet Cover Page, that no completed Development of Regional Impact application has been submitted, and that images circulating on social media purporting to show the application are a blank state template that individuals filled in with information never submitted to or approved by the county. At $20 billion against 3.2 gigawatts, the announced investment computes to roughly $6.25 million per megawatt of contracted capacity.

For three years the binding constraint on a data center moved from land to power. This story is the marker that it has moved again, to the local approval record. OpenAI has the scarce thing: a utility contract for 3.2 gigawatts on a named schedule, at a site already zoned industrial, inside a hub built for exactly this. What it does not yet have is the document that lets the county act. Georgia’s Department of Community Affairs rewrote its DRI rules on November 20, 2025, effective December 15, 2025, and added category 16, Technological Facility (Including Data Centers), with a threshold of more than 500,000 gross square feet or more than 200 acres. Press accounts describe a campus of roughly 1,400 acres. On either measure this project clears the trigger by an order of magnitude, and the rule requires the Regional Commission review to be completed before local government action.

That is the repricing argument, and it cuts against the reflex. The announcement already moved land expectations around Rincon and Pooler, because that is what a $20 billion headline does. The entitlement docket is what will move schedules, and it is at page one with first power targeted for 2028. Every megaproject runs this sequence, and the press release leads the plat by quarters, not weeks. The tell here is the second statement. A county does not publicly disown a fake site plan five days after its own announcement unless the information vacuum is already being filled by something else, and in a vacuum the loudest document wins. An operator underwriting land, build-to-rent, or industrial supply near this site is currently pricing a project whose reviewable record is one cover page. The correct posture is not skepticism about whether it happens. It is precision about when, because the difference between 2028 and 2031 is the entire hold period on a land bank.

Treat the gap itself as the tracked object. Build an entitlement file from primary records only: the county’s DRI submissions as they post, the Coastal Regional Commission’s DRI docket and its review report, the Board of Commissioners and Planning Board agendas and minutes, the school district and IDA board packets that carry any abatement or bond structure, the Georgia Public Service Commission docket for the load and the tariff, and the county’s own newsflash channel, which is where the July 27 correction actually appeared. An AI assistant reads each new record on a schedule and returns a cited memo: what was filed, on what date, by whom, what it supersedes, what the next required step is, and what changed since the last check, with every claim traced to the document it came from and every unverified item marked as unverified rather than smoothed over.

The reviewer is the acquisitions or development lead working with land counsel, and the approval gate is explicit: no land bid, no option extension, no supply assumption, and no rezoning position moves on a summary. The same review produces the questions a human sends: to the Coastal Regional Commission on whether a complete DRI has been received and where it sits in the 30 day review, to the county on the difference between the 400 job figure and the 1,000 job figure and which one underpins the tax projection, to Georgia Power and the PSC on the phasing and the demand-response terms, and to counsel on what the county can and cannot approve before the review closes. The assistant assembles and dates the record. It does not decide what the record is worth.