SOCIAL CIRCLE, Ga. — The Social Circle Planning Commission is recommending the city council approve annexation, rezoning, special-use permitting and future land use map change requests that could help create a complex of data center facilities along more than 450 acres on the southeast side of Fairplay Drive and Roy Malcom Road from Social Circle Parkway to Hawkins Academy Road.
Data centers are massive facilities that collect, distribute and store digital data. They can be problematic for host communities due to significant needs for electrical power and water, and they don’t often employ large numbers of people.
At a called Monday meeting, the four planning commission members present for the session -- Curtis Mullins, Signora Jackson, Glenda Brown and Planning Commission Chairman John Gardner – voted unanimously to recommend city council approval of the four requests for the last piece of the planned development, a 123-acre parcel at 1402 Roy Malcom Road, the middle acreage of the three tracts being assembled for the planned data centers. Planning commission members Travis Parr, Adolphus Gaither and Michael Davis were not in attendance Monday.
The city council, which makes the final decision on municipal zoning and related issues, got a preview of the requests for the 1402 Roy Malcom Road tract at a non-voting April 2 work session.
The council, which is not bound by any planning commission recommendation, could vote on those requests at its April 21 meeting, set for 6:30 p.m. in the City Community Room at 138 E. Hightower Trail. There will be multiple opportunities for public comment at that meeting, as public hearings are required for each of the four requests regarding the tract.
According to a concept plan submitted for the 1402 Roy Malcom Road tract, that site is slated to include two buildings, each comprising 248,600 square feet, for a total of 497,200 square feet.
Planning commissioners had little comment at Monday’s meeting, and had few questions for Scott Greene of Thomas & Hutton, an engineering and design consulting firm with offices in Atlanta that offers comprehensive data center design and planning services.
Thomas & Hutton is representing the current owner of the property as the city’s consideration of the annexation, zoning and related issues moves forward.
The primary concerns from the planning commission centered on how workers and other vehicular traffic would get into and out of the facility, focused on whether Roy Malcom Road, where current plans show two entrances into the 1402 Roy Malcom Road tract, could handle any increased traffic.
Greene told the planning commissioners that if there eventually is access to the acreage off Roy Malcom Road, improvements would be made to the roadway to handle increased traffic. Greene also told the planning commissioners that there would only rarely be tractor-trailer traffic into and out of the facility, mostly when equipment is being replaced. There could, however, be some significant truck traffic into and out of the site during construction, the planning commission learned Monday.
Prior data center action
One of the other pieces of the acreage planned for the data center development, comprising a little more than 150 acres off Roy Malcom Road near Hawkins Academy Road, was cleared for use as a data center location – plans show several buildings on the tract, totaling nearly 1.5 million square feet – with a November city council vote.
In a meeting that attracted dozens of people – both proponents from the family that owns the tract and their supporters, and opponents of the plan – the council arrived at a series of 2-1 affirmative votes on requests for rezoning, annexation, special-use permitting and a future land use map change for that tract.
Councilwoman Traysa Price and Councilman Steve Shelton provided the affirmative votes, with Councilman Tyson Jackson voting against the requests. Councilman Nathan Boyd, who did not seek reelection in last year’s balloting, did not attend the November meeting.
At that November meeting, Greene told the council that the family that owns the tract had considered numerous possible uses for the acreage before settling on pursuing a data center.
“I know there are a lot of people that don’t like change,” a family member who spoke at the November meeting told the crowd, “… but there’s a lot of good that could come from this.”
A council vote on the other one of the three tracts now contemplated as part of the proposed massive data center complex came at the council’s Sept. 16, 2025 meeting. At that meeting, a special-use permit allowing for a data center was approved for a 181-acre tract along Fairplay Drive at Social Circle Parkway.
That vote ended in a council deadlock, with Price and Shelton in favor of the move as Jackson and Boyd opposed it. Mayor David Keener, who votes only in the event of a tie among councilmembers, voted in favor of the special-use permit.
Moratorium influence
At that same September meeting, the council voted to institute a moratorium on consideration of data center requests coming to the city. But since both the requests considered by the council in September and in November had been filed prior to institution of the moratorium, they got votes from the council.
The moratorium ended on Jan. 27, when the council approved a set of comprehensive new regulations for data centers. The annexation, rezoning, special-use and land-use map change requests for the 1402 Roy Malcom Road tract were filed on Feb. 9, and thus are being considered under terms of the new data center regulations.
Representatives of the massive data center project now stretching across the three tracts say they do have an “end user” for the project, meaning that there is some entity already in line to use the facilities. The end user has not yet been identified, but that announcement could be imminent, because representatives of the initiative have indicated that facility construction could begin this fall if the last of the requested annexation and related actions are approved later this month by the city council.
