Data centers in Hall County, Georgia: 1 project mapped

Imagery: Esri, Maxar

Hall County's one data center proposal, Project Turbo, was withdrawn in the face of neighbors' objections, and the county has since paused data centers while it writes rules. Williams Brothers Development presented Project Turbo to the Hall County Planning Commission in 2025 as three buildings of about 300,000 square feet each on O'Kelly Road outside Gainesville, with about 150 jobs; WSB-TV put it at $1.2 billion on 119 acres. Residents were alarmed that it would use about 225,000 gallons of water a day for cooling. The developer said it had arranged its own power supply through Georgia Power and would only use spare municipal water capacity, but acknowledged that the City of Gainesville, the water supplier, had said it would not have enough if the data center reached the high end of its estimated use.

"It wasn't that long ago we had a drought, and we were thirty feet down [at Lake Lanier] and we here in Hall County were in desperate shape where water is concerned so what's going to happen then?" resident Mandy Harris asked the planning commission. Planning commission member Shannon Davidson moved to table the vote, noting there were no letters of intent. Residents also questioned the role of the commission's chair, Chris Braswell, whose employer, Norton Commercial, was selling the land; he recused himself from the item. At a county commission meeting in December 2025 the developer withdrew its special use permit for the data center and said it would seek light industrial zoning instead; its representative blamed insufficient "fact-finding and education about modern data centers" among commissioners and staff. "I'm very happy they pulled the plug," neighbor Kerri McCoy told WSB.

On February 26, 2026 the county commission adopted a 180-day moratorium on data centers and detention centers, and on August 27 it voted 5-0 to extend the data center and detention center pause by another 180 days, to February 23, 2027. The extension came after an August 14 public hearing on a draft data center ordinance turned heated, with many residents saying the draft did not go far enough and some wanting an outright ban. "I would say [the opposition] did [drive the decision], but it's not the only reason. It's so we can go and do our due diligence and our homework," Commissioner Gregg Poole said.

Every project above is drawn from public records, filings and local reporting. Each row links to what it is based on. Statuses change, so check the source date before you rely on one. Found something wrong? Write to [email protected] and it gets fixed.