Athena Studios Data Center, Athens, Georgia

Joel Harber, whose Athena Studios film campus sits in northeast Athens in Clarke County, Georgia, has submitted plans to turn it and surrounding land into a data center, as film production in the state has slumped. The 185,000-square-foot site already has power and air conditioning in place, and Georgia film and television spending in the year to June 2025 was down by nearly half from 2022, according to the Georgia Film Office. Harber said the studio has "an oversupply of space and an undersupply of demand," and estimates about three-quarters of Georgia's soundstages are now empty, compared with none when construction began in late 2021.

Any data center there needs a rezoning: the parcel is zoned E-I, and County Manager Bob Cowell said staff determined a data center requires industrial zoning, which county rules have allowed in heavy industrial zones since the commission replaced its moratorium with new regulations in April 2026. The Athens-Clarke County Commission had passed that moratorium unanimously in December 2025, worried that data centers use excessive water and electricity and lower neighbors' quality of life, before replacing it with rules requiring closed-loop cooling.

Commissioner Tiffany Taylor pointed to Pittard Road, where residents found in 2024 that a former industrial project had contaminated their well water, saying "we don't want a repeat of what happened with pollutants in communities, especially marginalized communities." Any project at Athena Studios must first go through that rezoning process, starting with a pre-application conference with county planning staff before the application reaches the Athens-Clarke County Planning Commission and then the Mayor and Commission for a vote.