South Fulton Let Its Data Center Pause Expire

South Fulton’s pause on new data center filings ended on September 9, 2026, after nine months. The city had been staring at at least 20 planned sites across majority-Black southern Fulton County.

By then Georgia’s utility regulators had already certified 9,985 megawatts of new generation, about 80 percent of it for data centers. The neighbor fight was never the whole bill.

A Nine-Month Pause That Ended in September

Yvonne Cole Boone bought her house in Oakley Township in 2018 and talked about a quiet retirement and a front-yard garden. She lives about 6 miles from a proposed 1.9 million-square-foot campus, and she has been blunt about what she hears coming.

“They’re noisy … they use a tremendous amount of water and electricity,” Boone said. “We don’t want our tree canopy to be knocked down. We want to think greener.”

South Fulton did try to get ahead of the filings. The council approved a data center ordinance in 2024 that forced a special use permit in industrial zones and set noise, height, and buffer rules. In July 2025, the planning commission backed that 1.9 million-square-foot campus along Mason Road and Stonewall Tell Road. The applicant told commissioners the project would send more than $3 million a year to the city and about $6.5 million a year across the city, the county, and the school system.

Residents still said they were finding out too late. On September 22, 2025, people from South Fulton and Union City packed the Etris Community Center to ask how so many sites had moved with so little notice. Wanda Mosley, deputy policy director at the Black Voters Matter Fund, has been walking neighbors through zoning packets because, she said, “By the time we find out about a data center, it’s often a done deal.”

On December 9, 2025, the city halted new applications. On May 12, 2026, the council extended the pause until September 9, 2026. No later extension showed up in the city’s public record after that date, so the window closed while the state-level power plan kept moving.

THE SOUTH FULTON CLOCK

1. September 2024: The city writes data center rules, including a 100-foot residential buffer and night noise capped at 55 decibels.
2. July 16, 2025: The planning commission backs a 1.9 million-square-foot campus on Mason Road and Stonewall Tell Road.
3. September 22, 2025: Residents pack the Etris Community Center to question the approvals.
4. December 9, 2025: A six-month moratorium on new data center applications takes effect.
5. May 12, 2026: The council extends that halt to September 9, 2026.
6. September 9, 2026: The halt ends.

A pause on new paper is not a pause on projects already in the pipeline, and it is not a pause on the power plants those projects need. That is the split the rest of Georgia is now living with.

Georgia Power Already Sold the New Megawatts

Georgia Power’s January 31, 2025 resource plan projected about 8,200 megawatts of load growth over six years. That number is already history. On December 19, 2025, the Georgia Public Service Commission certified 9,985 megawatts of new generation, about 80 percent of it expected to power data centers.

HOW THE NEED FIGURE MOVED

The commission froze Georgia Power base rates through 2028 and required the company to backstop costs through 2031 if the data center contracts fall short. In an August 26, 2026 letter tied to a 3,200-megawatt contract, the utility also agreed to raise the planned downward pressure on a typical residential bill from $8.50 a month to at least $15 a month in 2029, 2030, and 2031, and it said the full 9,985-megawatt block was then under contract, four months ahead of the original one-year target.

Those paper protections matter, and they do not cool a server hall in Union City or restore a well in Newton County. Large-load customers now sign longer deals, with 15-year terms on the books, but the plants still have to be built, and most of that new steel is being poured for one class of customer.

Wells Went Dry Across the Road From Meta

Science for Georgia, a nonprofit that has been tallying sites, estimated in February 2025 that in-use centers in the state could take 27 billion gallons a year on the high end, enough, the group said, to cover Athens for five years. The same model put in-use and planned load near 8,700 megawatts, or the power for about 3.9 million homes, using Georgia Power’s 450-homes-per-megawatt yardstick. The group counted 97 centers in use and 10 more in progress at the time.

Chris Manganiello, water policy director at Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, said the draw is not a rounding error. “These facilities can use millions of gallons of water a day, and a lot of that water evaporates into the air,” he said. He has pointed to Project Sail in Coweta County, which could take up to 6 million gallons a day at full build-out, with only about a third returning as wastewater.

Newton County is the place southern Fulton residents keep naming, because the harm there is already in the kitchen. After Meta built its Stanton Springs campus, neighbors on well water reported dry taps and silt. Mike Hopkins, executive director of the Newton County Water and Sewerage Authority, has said a center like Meta’s uses about 500,000 gallons a day, roughly 10 percent of the county’s daily use. Nine more companies have asked to build there, some seeking as much as 6 million gallons a day.

In late August 2026, families sued Meta and the local development authority, saying clearing, blasting, and digging pushed silt into the aquifer. Beverly and Jeff Morris, whose house sits about 1,000 feet from the campus, have said they haul about 55 gallons a day for their horses and about 50 gallons a month for the house. Meta’s position is that the campus does not use groundwater in operations, that it buys from the county authority, and that a company study found groundwater flowing away from the plaintiffs’ land. Hopkins has said Meta has stayed inside its allocation.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The draw: Meta’s Newton County campus uses about 500,000 gallons a day, about 10 percent of county use, according to Hopkins.
• The suit: Neighbor families filed in late August 2026, alleging silt from construction wrecked private wells.
• The company line: Meta says it buys city water, not well water, and that its study shows flow away from those homes.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The cause: Whether blasting and grading at Stanton Springs are what filled the wells is still a live dispute in court.
• The next draw: How many of the nine additional Newton County applicants will be allowed to take millions of gallons a day is not settled.

Drew de Man, a South Fulton resident whose neighbors still live on farmland wells, called the Newton reports alarming because a similar failure would hit his whole section at once. Fairburn, Palmetto, and Union City rely on a regional water and sewer authority that Manganiello has described as short on partners and money, even as more 24-hour cooling loads are planned on that same map.

Why the Sales Tax Exemption Is Still on the Books

Georgia has let data center operators skip sales tax on equipment since 2018, and lawmakers later stretched that break through 2031. In 2024 the General Assembly passed House Bill 1192, which would have stopped new exemption certificates from July 1, 2024, through June 30, 2026, and stood up a study panel on grid impacts. Governor Brian Kemp vetoed the bill on May 7, 2024.

The bill’s language would prevent the issuance of exemption certificates after an abrupt July 1, 2024 deadline for many customers of projects that are already in development, undermining the investments made by high-technology data center operators, customers, and other stakeholders in reliance on the recent extension, and inhibiting important infrastructure and job development.

Governor Brian Kemp, veto statement on House Bill 1192

A 2022 review by the University of Georgia’s Carl Vinson Institute of Government projected the state would give up $307 million more from 2024 through 2030 than it would take in from sales taxes on data center building and operations. Carter Chapman, then press secretary for Kemp’s office, said local elected bodies decide whether projects move, with state tax credits available to any competitive project.

A later House bill that would have frozen new construction from July 1, 2026, through the end of 2028 did not become law. Disclosure bills and plans to make giant power users fund grid expansion also stalled. The exemption that survived in 2024 is still the deal on the table.

Southern Fulton Still Draws the Industrial Map

The southern part of Fulton County, including South Fulton, Union City, and Fairburn, has long taken warehouses and heavy industry that northern cities have had more room to refuse. Data centers now land on that same industrial map, often next to homes that were never laid out for 24-hour mechanical plants. Union City already hosts a Microsoft campus on 136 acres, developed by EdgeConnex, with a price tag described as nearly $2 billion.

Andrea Young Jones, an environmental policy advocate who lives in South Fulton, has been cutting through the jobs pitch. “They say they’re going to bring jobs, but the jobs that they bring are not the jobs that are actually needed because they’re not sustainable,” she said. “The construction that comes with building the data center is short lived.”

Boone put the siting in older terms. “The city needs to think about the history of environmental racism, because it plays a role here,” she said. “All of this stuff is coming to frontline communities. We’re the ones who are taking the brunt of this. It’s not just Black: it’s poor, it’s marginalized people, it’s people that they believe to be voiceless.”

Mosley has watched who lives with the trucks and who does not.

We’re being used as a dumping ground. The people who approve these projects don’t live near them. They don’t hear the trucks, or see the damage to sidewalks, or deal with the traffic. We do.

Wanda Mosley, deputy policy director, Black Voters Matter Fund

The south-side corridor people keep naming now runs East Point, College Park, and South Fulton as one strip. That is a zoning pattern, and it is also a revenue pattern. City halls are the last desks that can still say no, and they are the desks that book the property-tax estimate. Resident concerns from the 2025 meetings were already about notice, water, and who pays when the cooling load shows up on a residential bill. Those questions did not expire with the moratorium.

The Ordinance Caps Noise at Conversation Level

South Fulton’s 2024 text amendment did not ban the use. It named data centers, pulled them into a special use permit in M-1 and M-2 districts, and wrote numeric limits so a campus could not arrive dressed as a warehouse. The applicant on Mason Road walked commissioners through those caps and compared 65 decibels to a normal conversation.

WHAT THE 2024 RULES REQUIRE

• Minimum lot: 20 acres before a data center can be sited.
• Height: 40 feet, well below a typical warehouse stack.
• Green edge: a 50-foot landscape strip around the campus.
• Homes: a 100-foot buffer from any adjacent residential development.
• Sound: 65 decibels by day and 55 at night.
• Parking math: spaces counted off office floor area, not server halls.

Those rules can blunt a bad neighbor. They cannot invent spare water in the Middle Chattahoochee system, and they cannot add megawatts the commission has not already assigned. Adair Park residents did block a 2024 zoning change that would have opened the door to a center, and Monroe County saw more than 900 people turn out against a rezoning. South Fulton’s path was different: write the rulebook, take a project, then pause new filings, then let the pause run out.

Lovejoy Closed the Door After a 1.25-Gigawatt Plan

On September 29, 2026, Lovejoy, a small Clayton County city just down the map from Riverdale, banned data center construction inside city limits. Stillwater Development had filed in December 2025 for a 3.5 million-square-foot campus at 11760 Panhandle Road, 15 buildings and 1.25 gigawatts at full build-out, on land that had first been pitched as housing. Neighbors fought it, the company withdrew, and the council closed the use.

Kanesha Clemons, who lives nearby, said, “This is a place to have families grow, not data centers.” Mayor Marci Fluellyn called the fight a closed chapter and said the city’s work on what gets built next was not finished. Lovejoy is not covered by Clayton County’s broader halt, so the ban is the city’s own line.

Other Georgia counties have used time-limited stops while they write lasting rules. South Fulton’s stop had a date certain, and that date has passed. Boone’s last word on the record was not a plea for a shutdown of computing. It was a demand that the people who already live on the south side get a say before the next campus is poured. “We deserve better,” she said. “We’re going to demand better.”