Project Tabby

A 100-megawatt data center on about 100 acres of the north end would become the largest taxpayer in Glynn County, use less water than the golf course it might replace, and could be supplied entirely by water without adding a single heavy truck to the island's roads. The hard parts are land and power, and this study says so.

• Voters are skeptical, and said so. On the May 2026 primary ballot, 56.6% of Glynn Republican voters said no to data centers even if they would significantly lower property taxes, and 98.3% of Democratic voters said no to higher electric bills for data center power. The conditions in this petition are the answer to the first question, and Condition 6 is the answer to the second.^{18, 19}
• The model exists. Effingham County's deal with OpenAI cut the school tax rate from 18.45 to 16.45 mills and is projected to send the school district about $39 million a year by 2032.^{20, 21}
• Schools gain the most. In the base case, the facility pays about $11.7 million a year in property tax: $7.2 million to Glynn County Schools and $4.4 million to the county. That is roughly one full school mill, with no new students. Its assessed value alone would roughly equal that of the county's ten largest taxpayers combined.²²
• Sales tax needs a condition. Georgia exempts data center equipment from state and local sales tax, so SPLOST and ESPLOST gain little on their own. A voluntary SPLOST-equivalent payment in the base case would be worth about $30.7 million, or 82% of a full year of county SPLOST collections.^{23, 22}
• The golf comparison holds. A closed-loop campus uses essentially no cooling water. The island's 117 holes of golf apply on the order of 846,000 gallons a day.^{24, 11}
• The land is the problem. Every north-end tract larger than 100 acres is under a conservation easement, owned by the federal government, or occupied by a private club or retreat. The best ground, the Frederica–Lawrence ridge at 17 to 27 feet and outside the 1% flood zone, is a golf course.^{25, 26}
• The roads are full. Since 2016, traffic grew 15% on the causeway, 26% on Spur 25 and 75% on Canal Road. Under this plan, heavy cargo bypasses all of it, and daily operations add about 100 trips, or 0.3% of causeway volume.¹²
• The grid needs new transmission. Two 115 kV lines from Brunswick serve the island, each sized to back up the other, and nothing larger comes within about nine miles. A 100 MW load is six to ten times the electricity used by every island household combined, so the developer must pay for new lines and a substation.^{27, 28, 29, 30}
• The battery idea is proven. Vermont's largest utility, Green Mountain Power, has leased Tesla batteries to homes since 2017 and now runs more than 10,000 of them as a 110 MW virtual power plant that saved its customers $11 million last year. The island version, a Powerwall 3 in each of 7,829 households, costs about $105.5 million.³¹
• Solar is a gesture; clean supply is real. Panels on every roof and canopy would cover about 1 to 2% of the campus's yearly use. The clean power that matters comes through Georgia Power's Customer Identified Resource program, with batteries and renewable diesel for backup.^{32, 33}
• Land for land is affordable. Protecting two acres for every acre used, with an endowment, costs about $12.5 to $19 million, less than two years of the facility's property tax.
• The resident package pencils at scale. Batteries and internet for 7,829 households cost about $160 million: 4.4% of a 100 MW project's capital cost, or 1.5% at 300 MW. Effingham's land proceeds and benefits pledge came to about 2.2% of its $20 billion project.

Effingham County is the nearest and largest example. OpenAI's affiliate bought about 1,400 acres near Rincon for a 3.2-gigawatt campus. The county's industrial development authority then used the roughly $350 million in land proceeds to fund tax relief: $90 million over three years, beginning with $21 million to the county and $9 million to the school district.^{3, 4} The school board cut its millage rate by two mills.²⁰ OpenAI separately pledged $80 million in community benefits, starting with free breakfast and lunch for every student in 2026–27.^{5, 6} Most of the tax revenue is still ahead: projected payments to the school district rise from about $3.5 million in 2027 to about $39 million a year at full build-out in 2032.²¹

The deal also drew two lawsuits after officials negotiated under nondisclosure agreements: a zoning challenge filed by residents in September, and a suit by the Southern Environmental Law Center for One Hundred Miles and five residents asking a judge to void the authority's agreements with OpenAI's affiliate.^{34, 35, 36} The county postponed its site plan review. Condition 12 of this petition exists because of all that.

The island's tax baseline

St. Simons Island is unincorporated Tax District 4. Its 2026 rate is 24.074 mills: 14.900 for the Board of Education and 9.174 for the county, which covers the general fund plus fire, police, EMS and capital projects districts.⁴⁸ Georgia assesses property at 40% of fair market value.⁴⁹ In 2025 the school levy raised $109.1 million, so one school mill is worth about $7.33 million.⁵⁰ The island holds 42.5% of the county's gross assessed value and pays 41.4% of the property tax billed.⁷

Glynn County Schools budgeted $190.7 million in revenue for FY2026⁵¹ and faced a preliminary $1.67 million gap for FY2027, driven by mandated pension and health costs, new positions and step raises.⁵² The district serves about 12,750 students.⁵³ On St. Simons, 37.8% of residents are 65 or older and 13.9% are under 18.⁸ A data center adds to the digest without adding a single student.

Method

Annual tax equals taxable fair market value × 40% × the millage rate. The uncertain input is taxable value per megawatt. Construction alone now runs about $11.3 million per MW, and AI equipment can add as much as $25 million per MW.⁵⁴ Servers, however, are taxed as business personal property on a one-to-four-year economic life, and software is effectively untaxed.⁵⁵ So this study uses deliberately lower taxable values taken from Georgia projects: $12.1 million per MW (Statesboro) for the conservative and base cases, and $18.9 million per MW (Project Sail) for the ambitious case.^{38, 37}

The base case assumes no abatement. That is not wishful: in August 2026 Microsoft moved to void its own abatements in metro Atlanta to "pay our full and fair share of local property taxes."⁵⁶

What the base case means

• For schools: $7.21 million a year is about the annual cost of educating 421 students at the district's $17,141 per-pupil spending,⁵³ which is close to the enrollment of St. Simons Elementary (462) or Oglethorpe Point Elementary (486). It would cover the preliminary FY2027 gap more than four times over.
• For homeowners: if the school board used it to cut the rate instead, the 0.98-mill reduction would save about $219 a year on a median-value island home ($555,600), before exemptions.⁸
• For the county: $4.44 million a year for the general fund and the island's fire, police, EMS and capital projects districts.
• For the digest: at $484 million assessed, the facility would be about 2.6 times the county's current largest taxpayer, Brunswick Cellulose ($187.2 million), and roughly equal to the ten largest taxpayers combined ($476.3 million).²²

The ambitious case sends Glynn County Schools about $33.8 million a year, comparable to the roughly $39 million Effingham's schools expect from OpenAI by 2032.²¹

SPLOST and ESPLOST

Glynn County's sales tax is 7%: the 4% state rate plus one cent each for LOST, ESPLOST and SPLOST.⁵⁷ The 2022 SPLOST is a $170 million program running from April 2023 to March 2029, and it collected $37.6 million in FY2025, ahead of projections.^{58, 22} Island projects on its list include $13.99 million for the St. Simons Gateway and Torras Causeway, $2.45 million for Demere Road, $2.7 million for island sidewalks and trails, $1.75 million for Sea Island Road traffic flow and $1.0 million for a county fiber connection on St. Simons.²² The county describes the Gateway's current layout as creating "congestion and safety concerns."⁵⁹

The petitioner's own analysis of county audits, state distributions and school board reports finds that revenue is not the constraint. Cost is: a highway construction cost index sits about 47% above its 2020 baseline. Under ESPLOST IV, the St. Simons Elementary addition grew from a $25.5 million budget to $33.7 million, and the Oglethorpe Point renovation from $6.5 million to $7.25 million.^{60, 61} ESPLOST collected about $36.6 million in FY2024.⁶⁰

Assumptions and sensitivities

• Taxable value per MW is the largest uncertainty. It could run higher with GPUs on the rolls or lower if servers depreciate faster than assumed.
• Any abatement would be negotiated through the Golden Isles Development Authority's bond-for-title process, which it describes as "weighted to give the most benefit in the beginning years."⁶⁶ The authority's policy also requires 25 new jobs,⁶⁷ and so does the state sales tax exemption in a county of Glynn's size.²³
• Revenue arrives late without a floor. Fayette County collected $1.2 million from QTS in 2025, years into construction.⁴³ Condition 2 addresses this.
• The school digest grew about 6.5% on reassessment in 2026, judging by the rollback rate of 13.99 mills,⁶⁸ and in 2025 Glynn voters capped annual assessment increases on homesteads for school taxes at inflation.⁶⁹ New commercial value is worth relatively more to the schools as a result.

St. Simons Island has 117 holes of golf. Georgia's outdoor watering rules allow "irrigation of athletic fields, golf courses, or public turf grass recreational areas" at any hour of the day.¹⁰

The median golf facility in the Southeast applied 145.8 acre-feet of water in 2024, about 130,000 gallons a day across 90.9 irrigated acres.²⁴ Nationally, golf applied 1.63 million acre-feet (531.8 billion gallons) in 2024. All U.S. data centers consumed 17.4 billion gallons on site in 2023,⁷⁰ so golf used about 30 times as much. One analyst put it this way: "This is 3% of the water consumed by the American golf industry."⁷¹

The aquifer under the island

The Joint Water and Sewer Commission draws the island's drinking water from the Upper Floridan aquifer through wells 750 to 1,050 feet deep.⁷⁸ The U.S. Geological Survey reports that "the Upper Floridan aquifer is contaminated with saltwater in a 2-square-mile area of downtown Brunswick."⁷⁹ State rules for Glynn County bar new wells in a buffer around that plume and require conservation and reuse.⁸⁰ Golf courses have already helped: USGS credits part of the county's drop in Upper Floridan pumping to "reduced usage by golf courses in Glynn County, which have shifted withdrawals to wells completed in the Brunswick aquifer system."⁷⁹

Condition 4 asks for the design Microsoft introduced in 2024, where the cooling loop is filled once during construction and recirculates without evaporation. Microsoft estimates it avoids more than 125 million liters a year per data center.¹¹ For scale, the Brunswick pulp mill's draft permit allows 45 million gallons a day.⁸¹ In Memphis, xAI committed to an $80 million plant that would recycle 13 million gallons of wastewater a day for cooling. That project is paused until 2027.⁸²

How much land does this take? Roughly one acre per megawatt, and never less than 50 acres in Glynn County.

Glynn's 2026 ordinance sets a 50-acre minimum lot, a 75-foot height limit and 50-foot setbacks, with buffers of 200 to 500 feet generally recommended.¹ Large campuses vary widely. QTS Fayetteville spreads 16 buildings over 615 acres, while OpenAI's Stargate sites pack about 1.4 megawatts per acre in Abilene (1.2 GW on 875 acres) and 1.7 in Shackelford County.^{44, 83, 84} A 100 MW building needs roughly 490,000 square feet of floor area. The 75-foot limit allows two stories, which halves the footprint.

Screening the north end

North of the Frederica Road and Lawrence Road roundabout, the study screened every tract that is large, protected, or for sale. The north end is mostly marsh and is largely in FEMA's 1% flood zone. Its uplands, however, include the island's highest ground: the Frederica–Lawrence ridge at 17 to 27 feet, mostly in Zone X.²⁵ The north end is zoned Forest Agricultural. The only industrial zoning anywhere on the island is a 1.4-acre lot at a substation, so any site would need rezoning through the Islands Planning Commission and the Board of Commissioners.^{85, 86, 87}

Anyone who has sat at the Spur 25 light by Sam's Club and Panera knows the numbers before reading them.

From I-95, island-bound traffic takes Exit 38 onto Spur 25 (the Golden Isles Parkway), passes the Canal Road signal at the Canal Crossing shopping center, crosses US 17 at L Street and rides the F.J. Torras Causeway, the only road onto the island. Georgia DOT counts every link.¹²

What residents are saying

A review of the public Golden Isles News & Views Facebook group on October 4, 2026 found the same complaints again and again. They are summarized here without names.⁹³

• The causeway signals. One post described lights set to about 20 seconds per side and waits of 10 to 15 minutes, and argued that one causeway can't serve the island forever. It drew more than 220 comments.
• US 17 at L Street. Drivers report that the green toward the causeway passes about three cars before turning yellow.
• Altama Connector at Spur 25 (the Home Depot intersection). A post reported that GDOT's district engineer is studying a reconfiguration after years of complaints. A separate post described a signal outage there, with officers directing heavy traffic. The county already rebuilt part of the intersection in 2022 to add lanes across the Spur.⁹⁴
• Roundabouts. A new roundabout at Spur 25 and GA 99, which The Brunswick News described as one of the most dangerous intersections in Glynn County, would be the fifth between US 17 and US 341 by one resident's count.⁹⁵
• Canal Road. Crashes at Canal and Old Jesup back traffic up, and residents ask for a bike path because people walk in the grass beside heavy traffic.
• A causeway toll. A proposal to bring back a toll booth drew 140 comments.

The zero-truck logistics plan

The Port of Brunswick handled 779,000 autos and more than 53,000 units of heavy machinery in 2025, the most of any U.S. port for the second year running.¹³ A private contractor there operates a barge-mounted crane rated at 500 short tons.⁹⁶ From the Brunswick waterfront, the Intracoastal Waterway runs about 17 statute miles down the Brunswick River, across St. Simons Sound and up the Mackay River to the north end, passing under the 65-foot Torras Causeway bridge.¹⁴

The alternative is the road. The Department of Energy describes how a large power transformer travels by highway: "The transport modular shown is 70 feet long with 12 axles and 192 wheels, and occupies two lanes of traffic."⁹⁷ Picture that at the Canal Road light on a Saturday in July.

People, not cargo. The construction workforce would park on the mainland and ride crew boats or shuttles. Once running, a facility of this kind employs about 50 people,²³ or roughly 100 trips a day, about 0.3% of causeway traffic.

Does the port help SpaceX?

Some have asked whether the Port of Brunswick also benefits SpaceX, which acquired xAI in February 2026.¹⁰⁶ It is a fair question. Brunswick has a 185-foot bridge, a 500-ton barge crane and the busiest ro-ro terminal in the country.^{98, 96, 13} Unfortunately, the FAA's environmental review says SpaceX will barge its Starship hardware from Brownsville, Texas, to Cape Canaveral,¹⁰⁷ and Brunswick sits 195 nautical miles past that stop.¹⁰⁸

Georgia offered SpaceX free land in Camden County in 2013, and SpaceX chose Texas.¹⁰⁹ Camden voters later stopped a county spaceport land deal by about 72%, a vote the Georgia Supreme Court upheld.¹¹⁰ SpaceX's Georgia footprint, as far as we can find, is a Starlink ground station in Appling County, licensed through 2039.¹¹¹ The petitioners therefore propose the north end not as a spaceport but as a second ground station, since the first one is only 60 miles inland.

The grid today

Georgia Power's regional transmission plans name two 115 kV lines serving the island from Brunswick, the Brunswick–St. Simons line and the Brunswick–East Beach line. Each is the backup for the other.^{27, 28} Public maps show them on a single corridor along the causeway, feeding four distribution substations on the island, one of them on the north end near Lawrence Road.^{112, 29} The nearest 230 kV line is about nine miles away on the mainland, and the nearest 500 kV substation about 17 miles.²⁹ By this study's estimate (7,121 households at about 1,000 kWh a month), island households draw about 10 to 15 megawatts on average. A 100 MW facility would draw six to ten times that.

The Public Service Commission's January 2025 rule lets Georgia Power bill customers above 100 MW on their own terms, with contracts up to 15 years, minimum bills and commission review. PSC Chairman Jason Shaw: "The amount of energy these new industries consume is staggering."³⁰ Georgia Power's projected need for new generation grew from 400 MW in 2022 to 8,500 MW by 2025.¹¹³ In approving the Effingham contract, PSC staff added safeguards that bar Georgia Power from recovering lost revenue from residential and small-business customers.^{114, 115}

In Memphis, xAI paid for the transmission upgrades and new substations that serve its Colossus supercomputer, and it backs the site with 150 MW of Tesla Megapack batteries.^{116, 117} The same project ran dozens of gas turbines without permits, which environmental groups challenged.¹¹⁸ Condition 6 adopts the first part of that record and rules out the second.

The Vermont model

The home battery idea comes from Vermont. Green Mountain Power, the state's largest utility, began putting Tesla Powerwalls in customers' homes in 2017.³¹ Today it owns the batteries, leases two to a household for $55 a month over ten years (or $5,500 up front) and uses them at peak hours.¹⁶ State regulators found that the program benefits all customers, while noting that it carries financial risk.¹²⁹ By July 2026 more than 5,000 customers had over 10,000 batteries, part of a 110 MW virtual power plant. GMP says the fleet saved customers $6 million in a single heat-wave hour that month and $11 million the year before.³¹ In a 2018 storm, 438 Powerwalls switched on and averaged 13 hours of backup.¹³⁰

Others have followed. In Austin, the city utility pays Base Power only for battery capacity, while customers pay $695 to install and $19 a month.¹³¹ In California, Google is paying for a PG&E program that enrolls existing home batteries and thermostats.¹³² Georgia Power's own solar-plus-storage pilot, approved in 2025 at 50 MW, proposed paying $750 per kilowatt to customers who give it control of their battery.¹³³ Condition 7 asks for the same thing at island scale, with the data center paying the household's share.

A Tesla Powerwall 3 stores 13.5 kWh, delivers 11.5 kW continuously, and costs about $13,473 installed.¹³⁴ The 30% federal tax credit for home batteries ended for systems installed after 2025.¹³⁵ The island has 7,829 households.¹³⁶

Together the batteries would hold about 106 MWh and could deliver 90 MW, about 80% of Vermont's entire virtual power plant. At its full 11.5 kW output, one battery lasts about 1.2 hours, so real outage endurance depends on keeping loads modest and on rooftop solar. A Megapack 3 holds 5 MWh,¹³⁸ so a campus battery yard of a few dozen units could carry the north end through the first hours of an outage, if Georgia Power agrees to the arrangement.¹³⁹

Solar on every roof

Condition 6 puts panels on every roof and parking canopy. The honest result is small. The federal PVWatts model gives a low-slope roof on St. Simons about 1,467 kWh per kilowatt of panels each year.³² The largest rooftop array on any U.S. data center, Iron Mountain's in New Jersey, is 7.2 MW.¹⁴⁰

Cleaner supply and backup

The options that matter are less photogenic. In April 2026 the Public Service Commission approved Georgia Power's Customer Identified Resource program, which lets large customers bring up to 3 gigawatts of their own clean resources through 2035.³³ Plant Vogtle's Units 3 and 4, in service since 2023 and 2024, add about 2,234 megawatts of carbon-free power to the same grid.¹⁴² For backup, Microsoft has set a goal of ending its reliance on diesel by 2030, and Digital Realty already runs generators on renewable diesel at three U.S. sites.^{143, 144} Offshore wind is not an option, because there are no lease areas off Georgia.¹⁴⁵ A floating nuclear plant in St. Simons Sound remains available to anyone willing to be the first to propose one in U.S. waters.¹⁴⁶

Access is not the problem. The FCC's broadband map counts 10,525 homes and businesses on St. Simons and shows fiber reported available at essentially all of them, cable at nearly 99%, and wired service of at least 100 Mbps everywhere. Those are providers' claims of availability, not subscriptions.¹⁴⁷ Condition 8 is about the bill: ten years of home service for every household costs about $54.4 million at Starlink's 100 Mbps price.¹³⁷

There is a convenient corporate fact here. SpaceX, which operates Starlink, acquired xAI in February 2026.¹⁰⁶ xAI built its first Colossus cluster, with 100,000 GPUs, in 122 days.¹⁴⁸ A single company could in principle build the data center, run the internet service and launch the satellites. We have not asked it.

Precedents are smaller. Microsoft paid $125,000 for free public Wi-Fi in downtown Clarksville, Virginia, near its data centers.¹⁴⁹ Meta has given more than $5.6 million to schools and nonprofits around Stanton Springs.⁴² In Memphis, xAI donated upgrades at four schools, and the city proposed reinvesting a quarter of xAI's city property tax within five miles of the site.^{150, 151} This study found no example of a developer providing free home internet to every household in a host community. St. Simons would be the first.

SPLOST 2022 already budgets $1.0 million for a county fiber connection on St. Simons.²²

Keeping the Golden Isles beautiful is a line item, and a small one.

The St. Simons Land Trust has protected about 1,400 acres since 2000, roughly 14% of the island, and holds easements on about 137 more.¹⁵² It reported $2.2 million in revenue and $1.2 million in expenses in 2024.¹⁵³ Its Canopy Campaign raised money to protect the Sinclair and Oatland tracts along Lawrence Road.¹⁵⁴ The campus in this study would use about 100 acres.

Condition 10 asks the developer to fund permanent protection of two acres for every acre it disturbs, plus an endowment to care for them. Microsoft says it already protects about 1.4 acres for every acre it uses.¹⁵⁵ In Georgia, QTS is funding a 132-acre forest restoration at Towaliga Preserve,¹⁵⁶ and Google paid $1 million to protect 35 acres of wetlands in the Flint River watershed.¹⁵⁷