SOCIAL CIRCLE, Ga. — With a unanimous Wednesday vote in favor of a special-use permit, the Social Circle City Council cleared the way for a second proposed data center to come into the city, on 338 acres of a 453-acre tract between Social Circle Road and Georgia Highway 11 along Interstate 20.

In January, the council approved annexation, rezoning and special-use permit requests for Florida-based Sailfish Investors, which plans a 1.8 million square-foot data center on more than 300 acres off Amber Stapp Studdard Road at Social Circle Parkway.

The latest proposed data center, described as a $5 billion investment, is slated to comprise 2.5 million square feet in nine buildings, and is projected eventually to employ 200 people.

According to information presented to the city, the data center is projected to be fully built out by 2031.

The proposed data center has a commitment from Georgia Power to provide its electricity, via an on-site substation, and representatives of the project are in discussions with the Newton County Water & Sewerage Authority regarding the needed water supply. 

Wednesday’s city council vote came just one day after the Social Circle Planning Commission, which serves the city council in an advisory capacity, recommended that a special-use permit allowing a data center to be built on the tract -— recently rezoned for light industrial use — be approved for Atlanta-based SC Infrastructure LLC.

Also involved in the project is TPA Group, an Atlanta-based real estate investment and development firm. The tract is owned by Cumming Investments, a Duluth-based enterprise.

None of the entities involved in getting the proposed data center up and running will operate the facility, but a search for an operator appears to be underway. At Wednesday’s council meeting, Brad Kaaber, a member of the development management team at TPA Group, said a potential operator has been in touch in connection with the proposed data center.

“You would know their name if I said it,” Kaaber told the council and a group of about a dozen people who attended the Wednesday meeting. None of those people spoke, either in support of, or opposition to, the proposed data center during the public hearing portion of the council meeting.  

The council, again acting on a planning commission recommendation, approved the rezoning of the tract from its former agricultural classification to the light industrial classification just days ago, at a regularly scheduled May 20 meeting.

The planning commission had recommended the rezoning at its April 22 meeting, but had delayed a decision on the special-use permit until its Tuesday meeting, to have time to consider the issue in more depth.

The recommendation from the planning commission in favor of the special-use permit came to the city council Wednesday with some recommended conditions, including elimination of two of the nine buildings proposed for the tract to leave its frontage along Georgia Highway 11 — a gateway into Social Circle — undisturbed.

Under a compromise affirmed Wednesday, the tract’s developer is allowed to keep the two buildings, but they must be located 500 feet from the highway, behind a vegetative buffer.

Prior to the Wednesday vote, Sellers told the council that eliminating the two buildings would not fit the business plan for the site.

In other departures from the conditions forwarded to the city council from the planning commission, the proposed data center will not have to strictly adhere to maintaining a 100-foot vegetative buffer between its buildings and the I-20 right of way.

Instead, the conditions applied to the special-use permit will reduce that required buffer to 30 feet, the standard contained in the city’s development code.

A 100-foot buffer will, however, be required along the tract’s Social Circle Road frontage.

Similarly, restrictions on lighting heights and directions proposed in the planning commission’s conditions will remain in place, as will restrictions on the number of parking spaces.

In a departure Wednesday from zoning and related regulations on the site, Councilwoman Traysa Price, referencing the 200 jobs currently projected to come to the planned data center, expressed concern that those jobs might not be accessible to local residents.

In that light, she asked Sellers and Kaaber if the eventual operator of the data center could work with local schools to get young people trained for jobs at the facility.

Kaaber wouldn’t commit to such an effort, but contended that the potential operator is interested in working with host communities, and said he would mention Price’s concerns to that organization.