Gregory Road Data Center (Project Lighthouse), Covington, Georgia

John B. Williams is proposing the Gregory Road Data Center on Gregory Road and Flat Rock Road outside Covington, in Newton County, Georgia: 1,410,000 square feet of data center buildings and 307 acres of housing on a 520 acre site, with a power capacity of 360 megawatts, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported when the plans were filed in March 2025. Universal Planning and Development, the development arm of John B. Williams, is behind the plan; his other Covington projects include the Amazon data center campus next to this site.

The plan is five data center buildings, two maintenance buildings, an electrical substation, a switch yard, a wastewater treatment plant and 27 houses on lots of two and a half to four acres, built in three phases to 2036, on ground that is now woodland and farmland with eight houses and a barn on it.

The developer wants the land annexed into Covington and rezoned from agricultural to heavy industrial and residential, which triggered a regional review that put the finished value at $5.7 billion and the annual local tax at about $19.17 million.

The site sits beside Lake Roy Varner, a drinking water reservoir, inside both the Cornish Creek and Alcovy River watersheds. Daily demand is 1.08 million gallons of water, which existing capacity covers only for phase one, and 0.36 million gallons of sewage, for which the county has no designated treatment provider. Some of the buildings would sit on top of critical water lines, and the project would require moving a 30 inch transmission main that feeds northern and western Newton County and links to Walton County.

Newton County's development services director, Shena Applewhaite, told the review she could not recommend the plan as proposed: heavy industrial is the county's most intensive use and could hurt the protected watersheds and drinking reservoir, and there is no end user identified for the data center. She recommended zoning the whole project residential at a ten acre minimum until a user is identified, then rezoning the industrial part with conditions on buffers and stormwater.

The county's transportation office said closing Gregory Road would turn a half mile trip into a five mile detour one way, nine the other, and the developer has no power to buy the right of way it would need to fix that.

Granite outcrops on the site would have to be blasted out, and the regional review recommended a survey for rare lichens and mosses growing on them.

The site still needs to be annexed into Covington and rezoned before it can move forward. Those decisions rest with the city of Covington, and no decision on the annexation has been reported since the plans were filed in spring 2025.