What’s $3.7B and larger than 3 malls? Georgia’s next potential data center.
It took less than a week, but metro Atlanta has its first mammoth data center campus proposal of 2026.
A $3.7 billion project in Spalding County called Wallace Jackson Data Center Campus was outlined Tuesday in a state infrastructure filing. The project is slated to include 10 data center buildings spanning nearly 5 million square feet, which is more floor space than three Lenox Square malls.
The nearly 190-acre project located an hour south of Atlanta along I-75 joins a stuffed pipeline of potential data centers that have flooded Georgia as companies rush to build more computer storage space to feed the artificial intelligence race. The frenzy, which isn’t expected to slow down this year, has made the Atlanta area the world’s second-largest data center market, although local pushback has grown as these types of facilities become larger, more prevalent and energy hungry.
The Spalding County project is being pitched by Wallace Jackson LLC, an entity formed in Henry County in 2024, according to state business records. Neither the company nor its listed legal agent, real estate attorney Steven Jones, responded to a request for comment Wednesday.
The project site is along Jackson and Wallace roads, roughly 1.5 miles from exit 205 along I-75. It’s within an industrial corridor dominated by massive warehouse parks and potential data center sites that spans Butts, Lamar and Spalding counties.
“The property has no real use as a future residential subdivision or an agricultural property due its proximity to warehouse buildings and Interstate 75,” Jones wrote in a rezoning application to Spalding County’s planning commission. “The developed property could achieve higher tax revenues and potentially more employment for county citizens.”
The land seller is Henry County developer Doug Adams, who has led much of the industrial development in the area. Adams did not respond to a request for comment.
Adams’ High Falls and Legacy Park industrial parks include multiple potential data center projects, including a nearly 1,000-acre site that Amazon Web Services bought last year for $270 million. A controversial hospital-centered project by Lt. Gov. Burt Jones’ father along the corridor also includes plans for 11 million square feet of data centers, or twice the size of the proposed Wallace Jackson Data Center Campus.
Spalding County already has two approved data center projects, totaling nearly 4 million square feet of space. That means the Wallace Jackson Data Center Campus is projected to more than double the county’s amount of computer storage space, if approved.
The latest project was first disclosed in November in county meeting agendas, according to reports by the Griffin Daily News. But the developer took a major step Tuesday by completing a Development of Regional Impact filing, triggering a required state infrastructure review for large projects.
The Georgia Department of Community Affairs, which oversees the DRI process, last summer paused acceptance of new data centers from entering the review process to reevaluate its procedures. It passed new rules and resumed allowing data centers to enter the DRI review pipeline in November.
“By right, there could be any number of manufacturing uses worse than a data center campus on the property,” Steven Jones wrote in the project’s application. He listed several potential uses, including “building material yard, repair garage, textile manufacturing plant, truck terminal, petroleum plant, concrete manufacture and foundry.”
The project will need to be rezoned and receive a variance in order to proceed. It is scheduled for discussion Jan. 12 at a Spalding County Planning Commission meeting.
About the Author
Zachary Hansen, a Georgia native, covers economic development and commercial real estate for the AJC. He's been with the newspaper since 2018 and enjoys diving into complex stories that affect people's lives.
