Project Preserve (Ellenwood) data center, Ellenwood, Georgia

The DeKalb County Board of Commissioners unanimously denied the $1.6 billion data center that PCC-DeKalb LLC proposed for 95 acres at 4280 and 4358 Loveless Place and 2281 Pineview Trail in Ellenwood, south DeKalb County, Georgia, on August 13, 2026. The vote capped nearly a year of deferrals, and the room erupted into applause. The denial means the site keeps its existing zoning; PCC-DeKalb cannot immediately revise and resubmit the application, but could challenge the vote in court.

The plan, filed as "Project Preserve" on June 16, 2025, called for a 1 million square foot campus of three two-story buildings and an electric substation, in a majority Black community surrounded by homes. Brett Embry of E-Data Company told commissioners in 2025 the site was chosen because a Georgia Power transmission line runs beside it: "That's the driving force behind all data centers: it's the energy and the power."

He promised sound-dampening fencing, 40 acres left undeveloped, cooling with treated gray water and dark-sky lighting, and said the project would add about $28 million a year to the county's tax roll, roughly $14 million of it for schools. Opponents said the application understated its size: "This application has been misrepresented by the SLUP application for a 1 million square-foot [data center], when in fact it's a 2 million square-foot data center," said Jan Dunaway, DeKalb's soil and water conservation supervisor.

DeKalb's code has no data center category, so PCC-DeKalb applied under "utility structure," and county planners recommended denial: the land is zoned for about 300 homes and sits in Tier 5 of the Bouldercrest Overlay District, which protects established subdivisions. "[S]taff doesn't believe this is your typical utility structure," Senior Planner John Reid said.

Residents came for months to oppose it, raising water, power bills, air pollution, noise and property values. "We are surrounded by a lot of things that are not compatible to our neighborhood," said Pat Culp, president of the Cedar Grove Neighborhood Association, whose community already lives with odors from the Seminole Road Landfill and noise from Hartsfield-Jackson airport traffic. "We are dealing with too much," said Jackie Malcom, an organizer with the DeKalb Citizens Coalition who lives less than a quarter mile from the site.

Her fellow organizer Gina Mangham pointed to DeKalb's water system: "We have both capacity issues as well as we have a lot of sewage overspills. We've had a lot of water main breaks." The county still has no data center rules: commissioners voted down a draft ordinance in June 2026 after residents asked for stronger protections, and have extended the moratorium on new data center applications, in place since July 2025, to March 30, 2027.

The Ellenwood application went forward only because it was filed three weeks before the moratorium began. Elsewhere in south DeKalb, Shadowbox Studios sued the county in August 2026 to overturn the moratorium so it can build a data center on nearly 200 acres at 3600 International Park Drive, saying county planners had told it the zoning would allow it. On September 9, 2026, the DeKalb Zoning Board of Appeals affirmed the county's denial of Shadowbox's permit request, leaving the dispute to DeKalb County Superior Court.

What happens next turns on two things: whether PCC-DeKalb challenges the Ellenwood denial in court, and whether the Board of Commissioners writes data center rules before the moratorium expires on March 30, 2027. "If the BOC and the administration are truly committed to DeKalb residents, they need to defend the Shadowbox lawsuit," Mangham said.