GridSight Local Sentiment Index

Effingham County, GA: the Project Camellia data center

Project Camellia: OpenAI (Octans GA LLC)

Legal entity

Octans GA LLC (Delaware), an OpenAI affiliate

Developer / operator

OpenAI; recruited by Georgia Power's economic development arm

Location

Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub, near Rincon, Effingham County

Site size

1,400 acres inside a 2,600+ acre hub; ~4.4M sq ft across four buildings

Planned capacity

3.2 GW contracted, phased 2028-2032; up to 1 GW flexible demand response

Project status

Pre-construction. Power contract effective 8/26/2026; PSC safeguards added 8/27; DRI final report released 8/26; PILOT fixed at 32 mills for 15 years on 8/31. Preliminary site plan review anticipated 9/14/2026. Construction start early 2027.

Announced investment

$20B announced ($30B+ per one national report); MOU commits $4B per phase across five phases

Serving utility

Georgia Power / Southern Company: contract fully redacted, permanently

Key investors

OpenAI

Contracting entity is an OpenAI affiliate. No third-party project financing has been disclosed; parent-level capital arrangements are not tied to this campus and should not be represented as backing it.

Coordinates

Not established

Last updated 7 September 2026. Public record reviewed through this date; digital layer from the most recent pull. This market is on a periodic refresh cadence. Member markets are re-scored on a set schedule.

Sentiment

37/100

Mixed Approved, contested

Half of resamples fall between 36 and 38. Differences smaller than that are not meaningful.

Loudness: 68Loud · 77 normalized, 58 per 10,000 residents, the basis on which this market compares to another
Scope: Concern sits at county; the venue acting on it is state.
hyper-local›county›regional›state›national
Scope mismatch. The harm is felt more locally than the fight is being conducted. Local engagement cannot resolve this on its own, because the decision has moved above the level at which a community agreement would bind.
Veto point: None Camellia required no rezoning. The same board denied a 425-acre AR-1 to I-1 rezoning on Rahn Station Road 4-1 on 8/5/2025 after resident objection: proof the veto works when it exists, and that it did not exist here.

Local sentiment not published. Locality gates pass, but no per-category D_local was supplied. Code the local subset and re-run.

Where this market sits

Every market GridSight has scored, on sentiment against absolute loudness. A market can be quiet and negative, or loud and mixed. Those are different situations and they call for different responses. Loudness is scaled against fixed references rather than against the loudest market scored, so adding a market does not move anyone else's position.

Market	Sentiment	Loud	Norm	Scope	Veto	Outcome
Saline Township, MI	29	89	94	county › state	binding	Not approved ⚖
Nashville, TN	31	78	41	hyper-local › county	binding	Not approved ⚖
Hanover County, VA	35	65	83	county › county	binding	Not approved
Effingham County, GA	37	68	77	county › state	none	Approved, contested
New Albany / Licking County, OH	40	63	63	state › county	binding	Approved, contested
Charlotte, NC	41	72	75	hyper-local › county	binding	Delayed
Coweta County, GA	41	84	127	county › county	binding	Approved, contested ⚖
Box Elder County, UT	44	98	69	state › state	none	Delayed
Memphis metro, TN / MS	44	86	61	hyper-local › national	conditional	Approved, contested ⚖
Richland Parish, LA	51	76	12	state › state	none	Approved, contested

Three Georgia counties, three outcomes

State policy, state legislature and serving utility are identical across all three: every 2026 Georgia data center bill died, and Georgia Power serves each. What differs is whether the county held a veto point and whether it used it. This is the cleanest natural experiment in the index for separating state conditions from local ones.

County	Sentiment	Outcome
Effingham CountyCamellia, OpenAI / Related Digital	37	Approved, contestedNo rezoning was required, so the board had nothing to withhold. The same board denied a separate 425-acre rezoning on Rahn Station Road 4-1 in August 2025: the veto works where it exists, and here it did not.
Coweta CountyProject Sail, Atlas Development / Prologis	41	Approved, contestedBinding veto, and exercised: the same board that approved Sail 3-2 in April 2026 denied Project Oak unanimously in August. The approval was a choice, not a constraint. Residents filed in Superior Court.
Douglas County700 acres / 6.2M sq ft near Villa Rica, south of I‑20	—	Not approvedTurned down by county leadership. The proposal drew a Change.org petition and one Reddit post at 330 upvotes in September 2025; the refusal itself generated no measurable online discussion at all. Not scored as a market: its digital layer is a single item.

Trend : 28 Aug 2026 to 3 Sep 2026

Movement between waves, by category concern. Concern runs 0-100 and higher is worse, so a rising figure means the category got hotter. The score is the inverse of the weighted mean, which is why a market can hold its number while the categories underneath it move a long way. The right-hand track shows where each category sits on the 0-100 scale and how far it traveled.

35 → 36

Sentiment score · up 1

Concern is migrating from the crowd to the record.

The score moved one point. Underneath it, the two channels moved in opposite directions and largely canceled. The public record got substantially hotter: health up 22 points on the air permit for the generation being built in the same county, anti-corporate up 15 on the $77,000 of public money spent on message management, water up 8, and the evidence corpus up from 126 items to 211. The digital channel cooled almost everywhere: fifteen local Reddit posts in July, four in the five weeks since. What is left is a market where the argument has moved out of the comment threads and into dockets, permits and elected officials, which is the more durable of the two places for it to be, and the harder one to reverse.

Category concern	28 Aug 2026	3 Sep 2026	Change
Health	39.5	59.4	+19.9
Electricity / Grid Rate Impact	76.5	65.3	-11.2
Water	57.8	66.8	+9.0
Location / Disaster Risk	19.8	26.3	+6.6
Anti-corporate sentiment	60.2	65.8	+5.5
Wildlife / Land	44.2	49.2	+4.9
NDAs / Secrecy	82.8	79.2	-3.5
Noise	41.5	44.9	+3.4
Property Values	38.5	39.9	+1.4
Zoning / Process	85.0	85.8	+0.8
Traffic	24.8	25.0	+0.2
Schools / Children	39.8	39.6	-0.1

How much of this is measured

Both channels are current in this wave. The public record was refreshed through 3 September; the Reddit pull was re-run and validated on 3 September, reproducing August's local corpus exactly and adding four posts. One gap is disclosed rather than papered over: Google Keyword Planner has not published August 2026 volume yet, so the search half is carried at region level only and the monthly search trend that informed several August reads could not be refreshed. Categories that rested mainly on search volume (Property Values above all) are marked down conservatively rather than held flat, and are where this wave is most likely to be wrong.

0 100

NegativeMixedPositive

Shaded band: where this market plausibly sits once Keyword Planner publishes August volume and the search half can be scored properly (34-39). Both bounds fall inside Mixed, which is the main thing the August interim read could not say.

Concern categories

Scored categories, highest concern first. Select any row to read the underlying evidence and how it was scored.

Data disclosure

Second wave, both channels current. The public record was refreshed through 3 September and carries 193 distinct evidence items, up from 126 in August. The digital channel was re-pulled on 3 September and validated before use: 13 Reddit search endpoints, of which 10 returned usable results, 2 returned valid empty listings and 1 ran but matched nothing: all three recorded as genuine nulls rather than quietly becoming 'no evidence'. The pull reproduces August's local corpus exactly (18 Effingham-specific posts through 7 August) and adds 4, for 22 local posts carrying 4,618 upvotes and 720 comments at a 0.92 mean upvote ratio. August's separation is preserved: 82 statewide Georgia posts carrying 26,929 upvotes are reported as a context flag, not scored. One gap is disclosed rather than papered over: Google Keyword Planner has not yet published August 2026 volume, so the search half of the digital channel is carried at region level only (Google Trends, Georgia, 3 September) and the monthly search trend that informed several August category reads could not be refreshed. Where a category rested mainly on search volume it has been marked down conservatively rather than held flat. Two documents were added after the initial wave-2 build: the county's official Project Camellia Resource Center (retrieved 3 September) and the Board of Commissioners minutes of 5 August 2025. Both are public record and both are folded into the categories below; neither changed a public-record intensity score, and the wave-over-wave movement shown here remains attributable to events, not to newly-found older evidence.

▶Zoning / Process86

Intensified. The Current/GPB documented that the July 21 IDA vote was noticed 3 business days ahead where statute requires 7, emailed to 7 people, and posted nowhere. Aug 31: ECIDA prohibited public comment and turned residents away while approving the PILOT. Sept 1: first recorded dissent by an elected official (Helmly, 4-1). Commissioners are now openly drafting conditional-use language and discussing restructuring the development authority. Held below 95 because no binding adverse action has issued locally. DIGITAL: still the dominant local theme by share (42% of local upvotes) and the single largest post this market has produced landed inside the window: 'If they can stop this, we can stop the Rincon datacenter' (11 Aug, 1,042 upvotes, 0.99 ratio). But the flow stopped. Fifteen local process posts in July, none after 11 August. August scored 85 on the strength of twelve very recent threads; those threads are now six weeks old and nothing has replaced them, so the channel is marked down to 78 despite the peak. NEWLY SURFACED, PREDATES THIS WINDOW: on 5 August 2025 this same board denied an industrial rezoning 4-1: Kevin Forbes, agent for Kimberly and Rebecca Rahn, ~425 acres on Rahn Station Road (Map 412, Parcels 3 & 3A), AR-1 to I-1. Helmly, Deloach, Burdette and Kieffer voted to deny; Floyd opposed. Residents cited traffic, flooding, noise and light pollution, safety and water pollution. A separate parcel from the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub, and the earlier DRI on that tract (#4266, October 2024, 4.17M sq ft of warehousing) contained no traffic, water or power analysis at all. The significance is the contrast: when a data-adjacent industrial use in this county required a rezoning hearing, the public used the veto point and won. Project Camellia required no rezoning. Two of the four commissioners who voted to deny in 2025 (Helmly and Burdette) are the two who have since broken ranks on this project.

Public record 90 · Digital 78 · weight 18.5% · 39 evidence items

▶NDAs / Secrecy79

Already at the practical ceiling in August and stays there. New in the window: the Georgia Power contract is permanently redacted even post-execution; ECIDA paid a PR firm $77,000 of public money from April, including a 25,000-recipient text campaign and AI-assisted identification of likely opposition attendees; a sitting U.S. Senator characterized the deal as done 'in the dark.' Anchor 100 is reserved for a concern that blocks a project, which has not happened. DIGITAL: decayed. The two secrecy posts (30 Jul, 170 and 137 upvotes at 0.98 and 0.99) both predate this window, and the 24 Aug disclosure that ECIDA spent $77,000 of public money on message management, including AI-assisted identification of likely opposition attendees: produced no local Reddit post at all. The public record intensified sharply here and the digital channel did not follow. That is a finding about reach, not about whether the grievance is real. Partial counter-evidence, recorded: the county now runs an official Project Camellia Resource Center as a public document repository, with a subscribable news flash and a five-hour public work session on 29 August (10 a.m. to 3 p.m.). It does not publish the DRI report.

Public record 95 · Digital 50 · weight 14.2% · 30 evidence items

▶Water67

Intensified. The Sept 1 analysis moved the argument off the closed-loop frame: ~25 million gallons for a one-time fill, but 11-22 million gal/day of indirect consumption at the generating plants (Sanders, USC), against an Effingham permit of 335,000 gal/day and a Floridan aquifer already in a designated red zone closed to new withdrawals. Savannah Riverkeeper separately flagged periodic drainage of closed-loop chemistry and stormwater. Two expert estimates of indirect use differ by roughly 5x and both are reported. DIGITAL: the most interesting move in the channel, and it is about agreement rather than volume. In August water was the only contested category in this market: two threads, 53 upvotes, a 0.585 mean upvote ratio, meaning locals pushed back when it was raised. The 2 Sep post carrying the indirect-consumption analysis drew 51 upvotes at a 0.95 ratio. Volume barely moved; the contestation disappeared. Held to 46 because two posts is still two posts. The county's published commitments are specific and testable and are recorded as such: closed-loop cooling filled once and recirculated; 'treated surface water only, not groundwater or the Floridan aquifer'; water quantities, conditions and protections to be set in the county water and sewer agreement; and actual water-use data to be made public once operating, inside an annual independent audit. P is nonetheless held at 78, because every one of those commitments addresses on-site consumption, and the 1 September analysis established that the volume at issue is indirect consumption at the generating plants, which none of them touch.

Public record 78 · Digital 46 · weight 10.9% · 23 evidence items

▶Anti-corporate sentiment66

Sharply intensified by the Aug 24 disclosure that a public authority spent $77,000 of public money on message management before the public knew the project existed, including social sentiment monitoring to identify likely opposition attendees. Resident testimony hardened accordingly: 'We would rather pay taxes than sell our souls and sell our lives to OpenAI'; 'This is Effingham County, not OpenAI County.'. DIGITAL: decayed. The tax-break and NDA posts of late July carried this category and nothing has been added since. The county's own resource center now projects more than $43 million in annual local sales tax revenue by 2032 ($10.2M SPLOST, $10.2M TSPLOST, $9.9M LOST, $13.6M ESPLOST), separate from property tax and the $80M community investment.

Public record 70 · Digital 58 · weight 9.0% · 19 evidence items

▶Electricity / Grid Rate Impact65

The one category that eased. On Aug 27 the PSC imposed binding conditions: no recovery of lost revenues from residential or small-business customers, a public contract summary within 10 days, semiannual public reporting, and a $15/month minimum residential reduction 2029-2031, up from $8.50. Georgia Power raised its residential savings claim from $102/yr to $180/yr. That is anchor 60 behavior, a governing body formally acting through conditions of approval. Held above 60 because Sierra Club and SACE formally objected that approval came from staff without a commission vote and the cost-to-serve method remains undisclosed. Taking the lower of the two anchors per the rubric. DIGITAL: sustained but modest locally. One new post on 13 Aug (114 upvotes, 0.96 ratio, 24 comments) walked through the contract mechanics ('here's where the exploitation hides in this contract') ahead of the PSC decision. Statewide volume is enormous and is deliberately excluded from the score. The county published a 'Power Without the Price' release and infographic answering the bill question directly.

Public record 65 · Digital 66 · weight 13.3% · 28 evidence items

▶Health59

Newly and sharply live. Generation to serve this load is being permitted in the same county: Georgia EPD held an Aug 14 hearing on air permit 4911-103-0014-V-06-3 for two new combined-cycle units at Plant McIntosh, already Georgia's 4th-largest CO2 emitter. SELC filed with 17 co-signing community groups; One Hundred Miles argues the air monitoring data relied on is a decade old and from stations 100+ miles away. Residents added EMF and battery-fire concerns on Aug 29. A formal permit comment period with organized technical intervention is the strongest procedural signal in this category to date. DIGITAL: newly live and evidenced rather than inferred. A resident posted the Plant McIntosh permit's own emission deltas on 4 Aug: +5,571,760 tons CO2e, +233.6 tons PM2.5, +110.5 tons sulfuric acid mist, with the comment deadline attached, drawing 40 upvotes at a 0.94 ratio. Scored at 36 rather than higher on two grounds: it is one post, and the search side actively fails to corroborate. Google Trends puts 'plant mcintosh' at 78 in the Atlanta metro against 13 in Savannah, so that term is statewide energy-sector search, not local concern.

Public record 72 · Digital 36 · weight 7.6% · 16 evidence items

▶Wildlife / Land49

Intensified on specificity rather than on official action. A Cornell-trained ornithologist and Rincon native documented ~1,600 acres of wet pine flatwoods with roughly 1,000 acres of wetlands potentially converted to impervious surface, 11 retention ponds, 120 bird species and gopher tortoise habitat. Wetlands and land-disturbance review is still ahead, so no body has acted. DIGITAL: still near-absent. Appears only inside general project threads, never as its own post.

Public record 66 · Digital 18 · weight 5.7% · 12 evidence items

▶Noise45

Intensified. Low-frequency noise was among the most-raised concerns at the Aug 29 work session, and Protect Effingham Alliance is now formally demanding public release of noise study results. The county ordinance caps 50 dB at the property line and remains untested; OpenAI has cited 'existing buffers' without a decibel figure. DIGITAL: decayed. August leaned on the national term 'are data centers loud' running about 1,000 a month; nothing local attached to it in the five weeks since, and no local post raised noise. The county published a 'Quiet By Design' release and a dedicated noise infographic in this window. Still no decibel figure and no released study.

Public record 55 · Digital 26 · weight 5.2% · 11 evidence items

▶Property Values40

Slightly intensified and still thin. Explicit for the first time on Aug 27: 'This is not the quality of life that I signed up for when I moved,' citing lower home values. Still no appraisal study, no market data, no realtor commentary. DIGITAL: decayed, and now under-measured. August's 45 rested largely on search interest in 'do data centers lower property taxes'. No local post raised property values in this window and the search half cannot be refreshed: Keyword Planner has not published August. Marked down conservatively rather than held flat, and flagged as the category most likely to be wrong in this wave. The county states homeowners will see approximately 30% lower 2026 property tax bills.

Public record 42 · Digital 36 · weight 5.2% · 11 evidence items

▶Schools / Children40

Two-sided and barely moved. Blandford Elementary proximity is a standing Protect Effingham demand, and the superintendent sat in the February confidential briefing group. Against that, the school board took $9 million on Aug 31 and cut its millage 2 mills, making the district a visible financial beneficiary. DIGITAL: decayed. The school board taking $9M and cutting its millage two mills produced no local discussion in either direction.

Public record 48 · Digital 24 · weight 5.2% · 11 evidence items

▶Location / Disaster Risk26

Newly live but thin. Residents raised hurricane-driven power outages and emergency-response capacity at the Aug 29 work session, and separately raised fire hazard from large battery backup systems sited over aquifer recharge areas. DIGITAL: effectively nothing. Hurricane and battery-fire concerns appear in the public record only.

Public record 34 · Digital 12 · weight 2.8% · 6 evidence items

▶Traffic25

Essentially unchanged. The DRI report analyzes traffic and recommends mitigation, but no trip-generation figures or counts have been published. Pull the DRI report itself before the next wave. DIGITAL: no local threads and no search signal. Marked down from 15 to 12 only because a further five weeks produced nothing. Checked and still absent: the county's official Project Camellia Resource Center publishes six infographics, multiple releases and the work-session deck, and does not publish the DRI report or any traffic figure. The gap is now a confirmed non-publication rather than an unchecked one.

Public record 32 · Digital 12 · weight 2.4% · 5 evidence items

Context flag : Cross-market spillover

NOW BIDIRECTIONAL: the clearest change in the digital channel, and a reversal of the August reading. In August this was purely inbound. In this window the largest local post in the market's history was 'If they can stop this, we can stop the Rincon datacenter' (11 Aug, 1,042 upvotes, 0.99 ratio): Effingham residents importing another community's win as a template. Running the other way, Effingham is now generating statewide conversation: r/Georgia's two biggest posts of the window are Sen. Warnock's moratorium call (29 Aug, 1,399 upvotes) and Rep. McCormick's dismissal of data center opposition (28 Aug, 661 upvotes), both triggered by this project. Neither names Effingham in its title, so under the naming rule used in both waves they score as statewide and stay out of the local number. Counting posts caused by this project rather than posts naming it would raise the local digital signal by roughly 2,000 upvotes. The rule is held constant across waves so the trend stays honest; the boundary is disclosed here rather than resolved silently.

Context flag : Anti-AI sentiment

CORRECTION TO THE AUGUST RECORD. Anti-AI sentiment was published in August under No Evidence Found. It is no longer absent: at the 8/30 protest residents said 'we don't see AI being used to benefit the people' and 'it's the biggest case of plagiarism that's ever not been cared about', and a 7/23 open-house speaker made the same argument. It remains a minority strand: process and utility bills dominate, and it is carried here as a flag rather than a scored bar because its digital intensity has never been measured. It enters the composite at the next full wave. The wave-2 pull does not change this. Keyword coding appeared to show anti-AI volume, but the hits were an artifact of posts spelling the developer 'Open AI'; on reading, no local post argues against the technology itself. It stays a flag.

No evidence found

Unknown, not absent. These concerns were searched for in this market and no supporting evidence was located.

E-Waste

The economic case

Stated for this project

Investment

$20B announced; $4B per phase across five phases in the MOU

Jobs (marketing)

'Thousands' of construction jobs; 'over a thousand' roles at full buildout

Jobs (contract)

At least 400 permanent: 80 per phase across five phases

Community benefit

$80M over project life, raised from $20M shortly before the vote

Tax revenue (ECIDA)

~$870M over 15 years

Ratepayer claim

$180/yr saving for the typical residential customer from 2029: revised up from $102/yr on 8/26/2026

County tax relief

$21M to the county and $9M to the school district within 30 days; up to $90M over three years (8/31/2026)

Millage outcome

County cut to 4.976 mills (4-1, 9/1), schools to 16.45 (unanimous, 8/31), ECIDA waives its 2 mills: combined relief estimated above $1,000/yr per homeowner

Local sales tax

More than $43M projected annual local sales tax by 2032: $10.2M SPLOST, $10.2M TSPLOST, $9.9M LOST, $13.6M ESPLOST (county projection)

PILOT timing

Revenue begins 2027 and grows as the campus is built, rather than waiting for full buildout (county)

Homeowner impact

County states homeowners will see approximately 30% lower 2026 property tax bills

Comparable reference points : not specific to this project

Abatement

PILOT fixed at 32 mills for 15 years at 2026 millage; property kept off the taxable list to preserve the state education funding formula

PSC safeguards

No recovery of lost revenues from residential or small-business customers; public contract summary within 10 days; semiannual public reporting; $15/month minimum residential reduction 2029-2031

Opposition reading

Protect Effingham reads the contract as allowing compliance with as few as 240 permanent jobs; Protect Effingham Alliance incorporated as a 501(c)(4) on 8/17/2026 with 100+ members

Land sale proceeds

$350M held in the ECIDA account

Testable water commitment

Treated surface water only, not groundwater or the Floridan aquifer; quantities and protections to be set in the county water and sewer agreement; actual water-use data published annually inside an independent audit

County precedent

On 5 Aug 2025 this board denied a 425-acre AR-1 to I-1 industrial rezoning on Rahn Station Road 4-1 after resident objection on traffic, flooding, noise and water, a separate parcel, and the clearest evidence that the veto point works when it exists

Not disclosed

Georgia Power supply contract: permanently redacted even post-executionGeorgia Power's cost-to-serve calculation for large loadsPSC docket number for the OpenAI contract filingWater volume: DRI filed with the field blankEnergy figures: DRI filed with the field blankNoise study: results not releasedVerifiable basis for the $15/month savings claimParcel identifier and street addressTraffic counts and trip generation. The DRI report is not published on the county's own resource center