Project West data center, LaGrange, Georgia

Project West, a $9.7 billion data center campus proposed on 513 acres south of Interstate 85 near LaGrange in Troup County, Georgia, has stalled since March 2025, when the LaGrange City Council declined to take up the developer's request to annex the land into the city. The applicant, Project West WHP - GA LLC, had filed plans for six 252,000-square-foot industrial buildings, 1.5 million square feet in all, with their own electrical substation. The buildings were estimated to need up to 600 megawatts of power.

The land lies between Hamilton Road and Whitesville Road, bordered also by Bartley Road and GA-403, and a transmission line crosses it. The filing with the state's Development of Regional Impact program set out three phases, finishing in 2028, 2030 and 2033. The developer and property owner, LaGrange entrepreneur Joshua Harrelson, lives on the property. "My farm is really big. Nobody will see it," Harrelson told the LaGrange Daily News. "It's a huge place. The size of these structures, while they might seem big, we're setting them back a very long way away from anybody else. Nobody will even know that they're there." He estimated about 580 jobs at an average salary of $80,000, and the regional impact documents projected about $60 million a year in tax revenue for the county. A study by the Economic Impact Group LLC, released by the developers, put the net economic benefit to the city and county at $762 million. The developers did not say which companies might be involved.

Power was the sticking point. The whole city of LaGrange uses about 100 megawatts, so the campus would have needed roughly six times the city's load. City Planner Mark Kostial said at the outset that the developer still had to complete a water study and a study of whether upwards of 600 megawatts could actually be provided. Asked by Councilman Tom Gore whether the data center would drive up the cost of electricity, City Manager Patrick Bowie answered: "Yes." "There's going to be pressure on the power markets. There's going to be pressure on the natural gas markets, regardless of where these things are located in LaGrange or South Carolina," Bowie said. When Mayor Jim Arrington asked for a motion to notify the county of the annexation request, Councilman Nathan Gaskin made it and no other member seconded, so it died. By January 2026 the LaGrange Daily News described the project as "effectively nixed" by that vote, which blocked the route the developer had chosen.

Public concern over data centers only appeared after Project West was proposed in rural Troup County, the LaGrange Daily News reported, even though the city had long known about Project Pegasus, the data center at the former Jindal Films site that turned out to be Google's. At a standing-room-only town hall in September 2025, the Sierra Club, Science for Georgia and Chattahoochee Riverkeeper warned about the power and water such campuses use, and Science for Georgia's Amy Sharma urged residents to push for a moratorium: "If they show up, make them pay." LaGrange, Troup County and the other cities then passed moratoriums while they wrote rules, and county commission chairman Patrick Crews said he, like many others, had been caught unaware by Project West. In April 2026 he told residents no data center application was on file in unincorporated Troup County, "and particularly down on Bartley Road."

On May 5, 2026, the Troup County Board of Commissioners unanimously adopted a data center ordinance and lifted its moratorium. Every data center in unincorporated Troup now needs a special-use permit from the commissioners; average-size and hyperscale centers are limited to heavy industrial zoning, must use closed-loop cooling and public water and sewer, must keep buildings, substations and parking lots 1,500 feet from the property lines of homes, schools, daycares, hospitals, places of worship and parks, may be no taller than 40 feet, must use "four-tier" backup generators to cut noise and emissions, and must run noise studies once operating. Because the Project West site is in unincorporated Troup County, a data center there would now fall under the county's rules, unless a city annexed the land, in which case, Crews has warned, the county has very little say. While the city was drafting its rules, LaGrange planned to limit hyperscale data centers to heavy industrial zoning, and Mayor Jim Arrington said that if a developer asked to rezone land "over here on Hamilton Road" for heavy industry, "we're going to be like, 'No, that's not a spot for heavy industry.'" LaGrange has since adopted an ordinance that requires a special-use permit, and so a public hearing, for every data center.

Other data center plans in the area are moving. Google's Project Pegasus in LaGrange had broken ground by September 2025, and Sharma said it was getting a 50 percent tax abatement for 20 years. In August 2026 the LaGrange City Council voted 5-1 to call a September 8 public hearing on a special-use permit for a data center at the Lafayette Logistics Center off Old Hutchinson Mill Road, proposed by Grandview Partners and Farpoint with no end user named, stressing that calling the hearing did not signal support. In Hogansville, the city council voted 4-1 on August 17 to reject its draft data center ordinance after members said it was not strong enough, and extended its moratorium on applications.

If Project West comes back, the deciding body depends on the route: the Troup County Board of Commissioners, chaired by Patrick Crews, through a special-use permit, or the LaGrange City Council, under Mayor Arrington, through annexation and a special-use permit with a public hearing.