Project Sail data center, Newnan, Georgia

Coweta County commissioners voted in April 2026 to rezone 832 acres near Newnan, Georgia, for Project Sail, a data center campus first put forward by Atlas Development, and residents have gone to court to undo it. On Tuesday, May 5, 2026 they filed a petition in Coweta County Superior Court against the county and Atlas Development LLC, asking a judge to void the rezoning. Seventeen residents, farmers, longtime landowners and neighbors are asking the court to throw out the decision and block the project entirely.

The land matters because of what is under it. The site, near Welcome Sargent and Wagers Mill roads inside the Middle Chattahoochee River basin, is designated by the state as a Most Significant Groundwater Recharge Area, one of Georgia's highest environmental protection designations, and the rezoning took it from rural conservation to industrial use. The petition says the original regional review stated the property was not in a significant groundwater recharge area, and that Atlas's amended application in January 2026, which changed the request from light industrial to full industrial zoning, should have triggered a new regional review. It cites a peer reviewed study projecting a $118 million fall in residential property values across about 1,215 parcels within 1.25 miles of the site, and notes construction could last up to 10 years by the developer's own estimates. "This is not how rezoning should take place in Coweta County," said plaintiff Steve Swope, one of the organizers of Citizens for a Rural Coweta. Commissioners Al Smith, Jeff Fisher and John Reidelbach, who voted for the rezoning, declined to comment because of the pending litigation, and the county said it does not comment on pending litigation.

The version the commissioners approved is a nine-building campus of 4.34 million square feet on 832 acres, about 900 megawatts, 45 miles south of Atlanta. Prologis, the industrial real estate trust, is lined up to buy the site from Atlas, though DCD reported in April 2026 that it had not yet closed on the purchase. The first plan, revealed in a Development of Regional Impact filing on December 31, 2024, was bigger: 13 buildings of 378,000 square feet each, more than 4.9 million square feet in all, which is more than twice the floor space of the Mall of Georgia, at a cost of $17 billion. The tax estimates in the first filing were questioned and later revised in new filings with the Three Rivers Regional Commission.

Citizens for a Rural Coweta organized the opposition through months of hearings and has formed a political action committee to campaign against the commissioners who voted for the project. The case now sits with the Coweta County Superior Court, filed under Georgia's zoning procedures law, and the county's legal costs in defending it will be paid by taxpayers.