OpenAI is planning to spend tens of billions of dollars — ultimately exceeding $30 billion — on a massive new AI data center campus near Savannah, Georgia, in what would be the ChatGPT maker's single largest infrastructure investment to date.
The Scale
The startup has contracted with Georgia Power Co. and secured 3.2 gigawatts of energy for the data center complex in Effingham County. Several hundred megawatts are expected to come online starting in 2028, with full development extending through 2032. For context, a single gigawatt is enough to power approximately 750,000 US homes.
A New Approach to Infrastructure
What makes this project distinctive is OpenAI's hands-on approach. Rather than relying entirely on partners — as it did with the earlier Stargate projects — OpenAI has designed the data center itself and secured the power contract directly.
Sachin Katti, OpenAI's head of compute, told Bloomberg that the company has refined its data center design over multiple projects and now knows exactly what it needs. Strikingly, OpenAI plans to eventually standardize the design and open-source it — similar to Meta's Open Compute Project from 2011 — believing that standardization benefits both the company and the broader AI industry.
Breaking Down the Investment
OpenAI committed $20 billion locally to secure incentives, with total costs expected to exceed $30 billion at full capacity. The massive buildout comes as OpenAI races to expand compute capacity to meet surging demand for its AI models — including GPT-5 and its successors — and to support its ambitious roadmap toward artificial general intelligence.
Broader Infrastructure Context
OpenAI's Georgia mega-project is part of a wave of hyperscale AI data center investments sweeping the United States. The company already operates Stargate-branded facilities in Abilene, Texas, and is part of a broader trend where AI frontier labs are increasingly taking infrastructure matters into their own hands — designing facilities, securing power, and building supply chains directly rather than relying solely on cloud provider partners.
The Georgia data center announcement came the same week as Wistron's $700 million AI factory opening in Texas and AMD's $5 billion Anthropic deal, underscoring the breakneck pace of AI infrastructure buildout in 2026.
