HAMPTON — Kendra Sutherland was instantly charmed when first touring a vacant Victorian house about 30 miles south of Atlanta.
She didn’t take much convincing to buy the century-old home in 2021, envisioning it as a bed-and-breakfast burrowed in bucolic Hampton. She wasn’t dissuaded two years later — and mid-renovation — when a $475 million Target distribution center was announced for the small city, creating an industrial foothold in a mostly agrarian area.
“I was like, ‘Hmm, that seems to break with sort of what I knew the town to be,’” Sutherland said. “But I thought, ‘Well every town’s got to get money somehow.’”
It was a harbinger for Hampton.
Data center developers seeking appealing sites near Atlanta discovered the city, perhaps best known as the home of EchoPark Speedway, scooping up swaths of land and pitching several plans to local leaders. One data center campus is now partially built, another has been approved and a third was proposed earlier this year.
It’s an unprecedented development rush for the city of about 9,200 residents, prompting moratoriums last month to pause new annexations and data center requests. Sutherland and others fear Hampton will lose its rural character.
“The flood gates have opened,” Sutherland said. “It was never a question of whether developers wanted to develop Hampton. It was just a question of would we allow it.”
Credit: Abbey Cutrer/AJC
Credit: Abbey Cutrer/AJC
‘They can pay’
The metro Atlanta area has the most data center space under construction in the U.S., emerging as one of the country’s hottest markets for computing campuses, which fuel the artificial intelligence race and store our ever-increasing digital needs.
Besides Hampton, communities in nearby Coweta County and in southern Fulton County have also been inundated with data center projects.
Some are larger than regional malls like Lenox Square and many represent the most expensive projects ever proposed in outlying parts of the metro area.
Metro Atlanta set a record for the amount of capacity being built during 2025, according to real estate services firm CBRE. The rate of expansion, however, has started to wane as construction-related challenges, including delays prompted by moratoriums and local opposition groups, take their toll.
In last year’s second quarter, an estimated $98 billion of data center projects were either blocked or delayed across the country, according to the most recent report by Data Center Watch, a research effort backed by AI security company 10a Labs. Its list includes Project Sail in Coweta County, a $17 billion proposal by developer Prologis that has been locked in purgatory amid local zoning debates and a moratorium.
Data centers have become a political football in Georgia, especially as their electricity, water and land demands draw scrutiny from voters, regulators and lawmakers.
Peter Hubbard is one of two Democrats elected last year to the Public Service Commission, which regulates Georgia Power. During a Feb. 21 town hall meeting in Henry County, Hubbard urged areas like Hampton to seek concessions from Big Tech. He mentioned community benefit agreements, which can include public greenways or internship programs for nearby schools.
“If they are going to come, at least get as much as you can out of them because these are deep-pocketed people like Amazon, Meta and Google,” he told the crowd at a Conserve Henry meeting. “They can pay. So I think that it’s an opportunity to get some investment.”
Credit: Abbey Cutrer/AJC
Credit: Abbey Cutrer/AJC
The data center industry and its lobbyists say they want to be good neighbors, highlighting the massive amounts of investment and tax revenue they’re bringing to the table. Equinix, which is developing a campus in Hampton, said it takes local concerns seriously, adding it will share details on its “local investment and community partnership plans as the project progresses.”
“Georgia has been a strong partner to Equinix and the industry, and we’re hopeful that continued collaborative conversations will lead to frameworks that balance growth with community needs,” a company spokesperson said in a statement.
Access to electricity is the top qualifier for a potential data center site, which leads to areas near existing power plants, substations and transmission corridors becoming the industry’s first option. Brian Núñez, a Hampton resident, said lax regulations seem to be just as important, especially as the backlash to data centers increases.
“To their benefit, they’re going to want to go where they don’t have any obstacles,” Núñez said. “And I think unfortunately, Hampton has presented itself as that.”
Welcoming industry
Despite its proximity to Atlanta, Hampton had not experienced the region’s development boom until recently.
Its larger neighbor in McDonough has become a warehousing juggernaut as I-75 between Atlanta and Macon experienced an industrial frenzy, which was further juiced by the COVID-19 pandemic’s elevation of e-commerce.
World War II was when Hampton’s last large employer came to town, which was utility company Southern States. Its other claim to fame is Atlanta Motor Speedway, renamed EchoPark Speedway last year.
In 2023, Southern States and the Federal Aviation Administration were the city’s top employers, Councilman Marty Meeks told the AJC at the time. Wooing a 1.4 million-square-foot fulfillment center by Target was touted as a major victory, promising to employ at least 750 workers and potentially attract other corporate investment.
Credit: Abbey Cutrer/AJC
Credit: Abbey Cutrer/AJC
“We don’t have a grocery store here,” said Jeff Baker, who became Hampton’s city manager last month. “That’s one of the things that would be nice to have and some other retail opportunities close to our citizenry.”
But it was data centers that answered the call.
Equinix was first, paying more than $118 million to acquire 262 acres of forestland, according to county property records. It was already zoned for an industrial use, including as a potential data center campus, which allowed Equinix to proceed with a four-building campus.
Norma Thomas lives adjacent to Equinix’s property, effectively the last home on her street outside Hampton’s city limits. She said construction, noise and light are already disrupting her daily life, and she worries that won’t go away once the buildings are finished.
“If you don’t live in the city, they don’t care what you have to say even though the property line is right across from my property,” Thomas said.
Credit: Abbey Cutrer/AJC
Credit: Abbey Cutrer/AJC
Adaire Fox-Martin, CEO of Equinix, told investors in a Feb. 11 earnings call that tenants are already lined up and ready to lease space in the Hampton complex.
“The signing of the lease for half of this facility to a hyperscale customer is expected in Q1,” she told investors. “And we expect the site to be fully leased later this year.”
Electric attraction
A second data center project soon followed Equinix’s footsteps, but it has more hoops to clear.
A 900-acre mixed-use project called Henderson Farms had been in the works since 2008, but was stifled by the Great Recession. It resurfaced last year with data centers at its core. It includes about 550,000 square feet of data centers and a substation along with plans for a grocer, shops, restaurants, assisted living housing and multifamily residential, according to a site map.
The project is proposed by Southeast Property Holdings LLC and received unanimous approval from the Hampton City Council a year ago.
In February, a 4 million-square-foot data center called Hampton Technology Park joined the pipeline. The 604-acre project, which would need to be annexed and rezoned by city leaders, prompted the recent moratoriums.
“Everybody came at one,” Baker said. “It’s just luck of the draw in how they position themselves, and one led to another and another. … And I do believe that will be the maximum amount we would want to have in the city, is at top four of them.”
Baker said both projects are connected to the same developer, Jeff Grant, who has been active across Atlanta’s Southside. Neither Grant nor the LLCs affiliated with Henderson Farms and Hampton Technology Park responded to requests for comment.
Credit: Abbey Cutrer/AJC
Credit: Abbey Cutrer/AJC
Leroy McKelvey, who lives a few miles from the Henderson Farms site, is concerned how each data center proposal continues to get larger.
“It’s like there’s a competition to see who is going to build the biggest one,” he said. “But we don’t have the infrastructure for it in Henry County.”
He also questions who will want to live nearby or in the housing that’s poised to join Henderson Farms. Data center generators and cooling fans — if not installed to mitigate noise — can be loud. Elon Musk’s xAI project in Mississippi, which is served by a makeshift power plant of 27 gas turbines, has made headlines in recent weeks for disrupting its neighbors with noise.
“You have no idea how it is when a veteran is trying to get some sleep at night and all they can do is pace up and down the house because they have ringing in their ears,” said McKelvey, a veteran who now works in information technology.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
The Mississippi project, and a similar one by xAI in Memphis, highlight the temporary measures data center developers will take if they can’t quickly connect into a state’s power grid. Hubbard, the PSC commissioner, said that leads to projects clustering in corridors with easy connections.
“You don’t want to pay a couple million dollars per mile for the big electrical cord to plug in,” he said. “ … You’re looking for an open electrical outlet basically.”
Equinix echoed that point, adding that proximity to other data centers allows for the seamless flow of digital information with minimal lag. For some uses, such as autonomous vehicles and payment processing, milliseconds can matter.
“Exchange of data is the main driver of why data centers seem to cluster together,” the Equinix spokesperson said. “Transfer of data is still bound by the laws of physics, so the closer you are physically to where that data resides, the faster and more secure it can potentially travel.”
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
‘Not selling the farm’
Some communities have welcomed data center projects with open arms, seeking tax revenue and the handful of high-paying jobs each complex typically employs. Some have thrown millions in tax breaks at Big Tech.
Invest Clayton, Clayton County’s development authority, approved a likely eight-figure tax break for a $1 billion data center project by TA Realty last year. On Feb. 26, Invest Clayton started to consider whether to approve a different tax break to a tenant looking to occupy part of the data center.
CoreWeave, a New Jersey-based company that specializes in AI-related infrastructure, is requesting an undisclosed tax break in exchange for making a $3.5 billion investment in the data center, employing between 12 and 31 workers. According to estimates calculated by the AJC, CoreWeave could receive more than $60 million in savings over 10 years. Put another way, that’s an incentive of about $2 million to $5 million per job.
“For projects of this scale, it is customary to explore financing structures that support long-term infrastructure investment, job creation, tax savings and predictable revenue for the local tax base,” a CoreWeave spokesperson said in a statement.
C.H. Braddy, the authority’s chairman, pointed to nearly $89 million in tax revenue expected from the project even after the incentives. No deal has been finalized, and the board will continue to consider it at future meetings.
The Hampton Development Authority did not respond to questions about whether it considered similar incentives for the city’s data center projects.
Baker said he sees the potential benefits of recruiting data centers to the right places.
Credit: Abbey Cutrer/AJC
Credit: Abbey Cutrer/AJC
But he said the rush has caught Hampton residents off-guard, and the moratoriums provide the time to absorb the proposals and “let them know it’s not turning into data center central.”
“We’re not selling the farm out to these things,” he said, adding that the prospect of lowering residential property taxes by landing a few projects is tantalizing.
For Sutherland, the Victorian home renovator, she isn’t charmed by data center promises. She said the rush says less about Hampton and more about the developers pitching the projects.
“They will go anywhere and everywhere that will have them,” she said.
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