Project Splice data center, Cordele, Georgia

Residents near the Project Splice data center site outside Cordele, in Crisp County, Georgia, are organizing again more than a year after the county rezoned the land, and the site has changed hands on paper: Premier Data Center Development is now the developer of the site Red Wolf DCD Properties first proposed. Carla Baker, who helped organize an August 2026 meeting of concerned residents at Midway Church, said: "Our next steps are to see if anyone's willing to get organized and possibly try to get this on the ballot for a vote for Crisp County."

Crisp County commissioners voted unanimously on June 10, 2025 to rezone 583.62 acres off Cemetery Road and Ninth Street, outside Cordele in Georgia, for a data center campus. Red Wolf DCD Properties had filed for it in March that year as Project Splice: seven buildings of 300,000 square feet each, 2.1 million square feet in all, with a substation, valued in the filing at $6 billion and phased to finish in 2029, 2031 and 2033.

Residents living near the site had spoken against it at a public hearing on May 13, and the ordinance the commission passed is largely a list of answers to them. "If it does decrease in value by you rezoning it and you putting it there, do you plan on compensating us for the devaluation of our property," Baker, who lives on a four-generation farm on Cemetery Road, asked commissioners at that hearing. "This is going to be a 24/7 noise factor in our life and it is going to affect us," her neighbor Rhona Bernecker told them. The first phase must sit 325 feet back from Old Nesbitt Road; the main way in during construction is from Ninth Avenue; fast growing evergreens must screen the noise and the view; noise must stay inside the county code; the outside lighting is to be inspected so it does not spill onto neighboring homes; daily construction is limited to 6:30 a.m. to 8 p.m., with exceptions for concrete work and interior build-out; the agricultural wells are to be sealed; a fire plan has to be agreed with county fire and rescue; and the site managers must give out 24 hour contact numbers.

Interim county administrator Mickey Dunnavant took the commission through the eight standards the state requires for a rezoning. "The west and south sides of the property are surrounded by commercial and industrial zoning," he said, and "Exit 102 is experiencing a burst with commercial growth." "Water usage is estimated at .3 million gallons a day," he told them.

The campus is put at 180 to 200 jobs averaging about $80,000 a year, with roughly 270 more in the wider community. Cordele, which bills itself as the watermelon capital of the world, is about 140 miles south of Atlanta.

The worries have not gone away. "I have concerns that it's going to be so loud that there's no way we're going to be able to live there," said Lynn Hayslip, who lives across from the site. Inside Cordele, the city's Planning and Zoning Commission scheduled a meeting on a data center ordinance for September 17, 2026; the city manager said on August 18 that the city had neither entered into an agreement with a data center nor been approached by one.