SOCIAL CIRCLE, Ga. — Less than two weeks after casting a series of votes to help clear the way for a data center planned for 151 acres at Hawkins Academy Road and Roy Malcom Road, the Social Circle City Council cast a single vote at its Nov. 18 meeting to approve a special-use permit request to clear the way for another proposed data center on 96 acres along East Hightower Trail.

Data centers are massive facilities housing networked computer servers that store, process and distribute large amounts of digital data. They can be resource-intensive, requiring significant electrical power, along with water usage for cooling.

Georgia recently has become a hot spot for development of data centers. But even before the recent boom, the massive Stanton Springs industrial and mixed-use development in the edge of Social Circle was hosting Meta (formerly Facebook) data centers.

Ongoing interest in Social Circle and the immediately surrounding area prompted the city council in September to enact a 90-day moratorium on rezoning and related requests for data centers, to allow the city to work through the data center requests it already had in hand.

The proposal for establishing a data center on the 96-acre East Hightower Trail site is being pursued by Dermody PL Acquisition, a nationwide industrial real estate development firm. Dermody’s plan calls for construction of four 250,000-square-foot buildings, with a 100,000-square-foot electrical substation in addition to an existing electrical substation.

According to information from the Nov. 18 council meeting, a first building should be built on the site within two to three years, with full build-out coming within five years.

The site is zoned for light-industrial use, for which a special-use permit is required for data center operations. Prior to the council’s Tuesday vote on the special-use permit, Rich Modliszewski, a Dermody vice president, contended a data center would be a less intensive use of the property than a warehousing operation, unrelated to Dermody, that had been previously planned for the site. Warehousing would produce significant truck traffic, Modliszewski noted, along with a significant number of workers coming to and from work.

Data centers have relatively few workers, but Modliszewski noted at the Nov. 18 meeting that they offer “high-quality, high-paying jobs” and would also produce significant property tax revenue and other benefits to the city. Modliszewski called data centers a “generational opportunity in terms of revenue.”

The special-use permit request got only token public opposition, with one man speaking briefly about power and water use, and wondering about what “end user” would occupy the data center.

Having an end user identified, providing some assurance that a proposed data center will be a viable project, has become a particular issue for the Social Circle Planning Commission. The planning commission serves the city council in an advisory capacity, making non-binding recommendations on zoning-related issues.

Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon Web Services, whose massive data operations qualify them as “hyperscalers,” are among the top end users of data centers, but are not the only end users of such facilities.  

Modliszewski addressed the end user issue at a late October meeting of the planning commission, saying then that there is an entity interested in the facility, but a non-disclosure agreement is in place.

While the council did unanimously approve the special-use request at its Nov. 18 meeting, some conditions were attached to that vote. Among those conditions are a requirement that noise-dampening measures be installed on data center equipment, that there be no hidden utility costs to the city, and that if there are any issues with wells in the area around the facility, they must be addressed by the developer.