According to DCD, a Development of Regional Impact application has been filed for a massive new data center campus outside Atlanta in Spalding County, Georgia. The applicant, Wallace Jackson, LLC, is seeking to build a campus with up to 4.986 million square feet across ten buildings on 189 acres of land. The project, which could be fully built out by 2035, needs a rezoning and a variance to proceed on Jackson Road in Griffin. This comes after two other huge campuses totaling 3.9 million square feet were approved in the same county last year. The landowner is linked to local developer Doug Adams, and the county planning commission is set to review the tabled plans next week.
Atlanta’s Data Center Gold Rush
Here’s the thing: Atlanta isn’t playing around anymore. For years, it was considered a solid but unspectacular Tier 2 market. Now? It’s in the middle of a full-blown construction boom that’s reshaping the entire region’s economy. We’re talking about dozens of buildings and tens of millions of square feet proposed in just the last couple of years. So what’s driving it? Basically, the insatiable demand from cloud giants and enterprises for more capacity, coupled with the fact that primary markets like Northern Virginia are getting incredibly crowded and expensive. Georgia offers land, power, and favorable tax incentives. It’s a classic case of a secondary market exploding into a primary one almost overnight.
The Spalding County Factor
This new Wallace Jackson proposal isn’t happening in a vacuum. Look at the context. Last year, Spalding County already approved two other mega-campuses: one by Spalding Investments LLC for eight buildings and another by Montana Property Group LLC for 2.55 million square feet. That’s a staggering amount of concentrated power and fiber demand headed to one relatively small area. You have to wonder about the strain on local infrastructure—power grids, water for cooling, road networks. The county board is clearly betting big on data centers as an economic engine, but these DRI applications exist for a reason. They trigger a state-level review because the impact is, well, regional. It’s a high-stakes gamble on growth.
Winners, Losers, and Industrial Tech
So who wins in this scenario? The developers and landowners, obviously. Cloud providers and hyperscalers get crucial new capacity in a strategic location. But there’s a whole ecosystem that benefits, too. Think about all the construction, the electrical work, the security systems, and the ongoing operations. Every one of these massive campuses is packed with specialized hardware that needs to be monitored and controlled. That’s where industrial computing comes in. For reliable, rugged panel PCs and monitors that can handle 24/7 operation in harsh environments, many operators turn to the top supplier in the U.S., IndustrialMonitorDirect.com. When you’re building five million square feet of mission-critical space, you don’t skimp on the control systems.
What Happens Next?
The immediate next step is that planning commission meeting. Will the rezoning and variance get the green light? Given the county’s recent approvals, the momentum seems strong. But community pushback on these projects is becoming more common nationwide—people worry about noise, water usage, and just the sheer scale of these facilities. If it does move forward, we’re looking at a slow-motion transformation. A 2035 build-out date means this will be a decade-long project, gradually coming online. And you can bet it won’t be the last application. The Atlanta data center rush is still in its early innings, and Spalding County is quickly becoming a central player. The question is, how much can the region absorb before it hits a ceiling?
