OpenAI is building a $30B Georgia data center — but compute scarcity won't ease until 2028

OpenAI has unveiled Project Camellia — a 3.2GW data center campus in Effingham County, Georgia, costing over $30 billion — and simultaneously launched Presence, its enterprise AI agent platform. Details are confirmed by Interesting Engineering and OpenAI's own Newsroom account.

What's being built

The four-building, 1,400-acre campus within the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub will receive power under a 25-year Georgia Power agreement, delivered in phases from 2028 through 2032. OpenAI has committed to not passing infrastructure costs to local ratepayers and to using closed-loop cooling to limit water use. The company is also putting in $80 million for schools, health care, and workforce training, plus $71 million in Codex credits for Georgia college students.

Why the compute shortage won't just disappear

OpenAI's own CFO, Sarah Friar, was candid that even this scale of investment won't fix things quickly.

“Compute is a very scarce resource at the moment. We're going up that kind of vertical wall of demand right now and there's just not enough tokens available.”

— Sarah Friar, CFO of OpenAI

Quote source: BigGo Finance.

According to Friar, a gigawatt-scale data center costs around $50 billion fully loaded and takes about three years to build — meaning decisions made today won't relieve the shortage before 2028. Project Camellia is just one piece of a much bigger plan: OpenAI recently raised its projected infrastructure spend to $750 billion through 2030, backed also by deals with Oracle (roughly 6 gigawatts of data-center capacity) and Amazon ($138 billion over eight years, including access to Trainium chips). Infrastructure buildouts at this scale have already caused local friction: we recently covered New York becoming the first US state to pause AI data center construction.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.