Here’s an analysis worth reading: Vesper: Public Intelligence, April 16, 2026, Project Arrowhead: Inside Irwin County, Georgia’s Data Center Fight.

https://vesperosint.substack.com/p/project-arrowhead-inside-irwin-county

This bit, which seems based on checkable history, is very relevant:

The Fayetteville pattern has a diagnostic shape: a locally-unfamiliar front entity files the first DRI and absorbs the political friction. A shell entity files the middle-stage DRI and captures the rezoning. The named operator surfaces only after entitlements are secured. The tenant surfaces only after construction is underway. At every stage, the community is making zoning decisions about an entity that is not the entity that will ultimately own and operate the facility.

The promise of $20 million a year in tax revenue (and all the other promises) is based on an assumption that it would be a hyper-scale datacenter for so-called AI.

Bad enough if it is: likely bubble pop, etc.

But what if it’s not? Nothing else is that big, so no $20 million a year, nor many of the other promises.

I know I wouldn’t want to rezone for some unknown entity to be revealed years later, not for a project of this scale.

See also this:

In December 2025 the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts published a statewide economic-impact analysis for data center development. In January 2026 the same office published a revision. The revision cut the headline construction-jobs number from 28,350 to 8,505. It cut operational jobs from 5,471 to 1,641. It cut value-added by roughly 70 percent. Georgia’s data center sales and use tax exemption, the policy mechanism that makes almost all of this development economically viable at the facility level, cost the state $296 million in FY25 and is projected to cost $327 million in FY26. A prior Vesper: Public Intelligence piece, The Digital Land Grab: Georgia’s Data Center Wars, cited the same Georgia Department of Audits finding that roughly 90 percent of Georgia’s existing data centers would not have been built without the exemption, meaning the state is foregoing a third of a billion dollars a year to subsidize facilities that would otherwise have located somewhere else.

And this:

The gap between announcement and operation is filled with stalled projects, delayed projects, and quietly dead projects. A community that is being asked to approve a zoning change today against a project that may not operate until 2030, if ever, is being asked to accept a transaction risk that even the developer’s own pro-forma does not try to quantify in public.

For more about datacenters, see:

https://wwals.net/issues/datacenters

Who is Project Arrowhead in Irwin County, GA? –Vesper: Public Intelligence, April 16, 2026

I’ll admit I never heard of Vesper: Public Intelligence. They don’t say much about themselves: Continue reading →