AWS Covington Georgia data center, Covington, Georgia

Contractors for Amazon Web Services are building a data center near Highway 142 and Alcovy Road, inside Covington city limits in Newton County, Georgia. Amazon Data Services paid $36 million for about 430 acres along Interstate 20 in three deals that closed December 22, 2023.

On December 15, 2025, the Covington City Council approved agreements under which Amazon will build a $100 million water reuse plant and hand it to the city, which will sell the reclaimed water back to Amazon for cooling; the data center's projected demand is 1.9 million gallons of water a day. "We will never issue a contract until that money is in the bank," city attorney Frank Turner Jr. said of Amazon's payments.

Local governments expect more than half a billion dollars over 16 years from payments Amazon makes in place of property taxes through the county's industrial development authority. Construction stopped for several weeks this summer after a city inspector found the site was not following erosion-control rules; the stop-work order was lifted in August, subject to conditions, with no fines set.

The council adopted a 180-day moratorium on new data center requests on January 20, 2026, and voted the same night to deny an annexation that would have brought more than 1,500 acres off Elks Club Road into the city for another data center. The moratorium, originally set to expire October 20, 2026, was lifted early on August 31 after the council adopted a new ordinance that sorts data centers by size and raises the required buffer from residential zoning to at least 250 feet.