Local Resource Library · AtlantaThe Atlanta data center construction library
Why More Data Center Capacity Is Being Built Around Atlanta Than Anywhere Else in North America
For most of the last decade, one region held the top spot for data center construction in North America without much argument. In the first half of 2026 that changed. CBRE's North America Data Center Trends report for H1 2026 recorded 2,882 megawatts of capacity under construction in the Atlanta market, a 52.3 percent increase year over year, and for the first time more under-construction capacity than the Northern Virginia market carried at 2,420.2 megawatts.
The national context makes the Atlanta figure easier to hold onto. Total under-construction capacity across primary markets reached 7,481.1 megawatts in H1 2026, a record, up 24.8 percent in six months and well past the previous peak of 6,350.1 megawatts set in the second half of 2024. Against that, the Atlanta figure works out to roughly four in every ten megawatts being built anywhere in North America. CBRE credits tax incentives, labor availability and rural development opportunity around the metro.
None of that new capacity is sitting empty when it opens. Primary market vacancy fell to 1.4 percent in H1 2026, a record low, even though total supply grew 33.7 percent year over year. Roughly 80.4 percent of everything under construction was already preleased. Supply is being absorbed as fast as it is delivered, which is why developers keep starting new buildings instead of waiting to see how the last ones lease.
The state's own numbers describe the same picture from a different direction. The University of Georgia's Carl Vinson Institute of Government, working for the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts, counted 63 active data centers in Georgia as of December 2025, 35 under construction, and another 249 announced, with the majority in the metro Atlanta counties of Fulton, Douglas, Fayette, Walton and Cobb. Georgia Public Broadcasting, reporting on county land use activity, put it in geographic terms: 26 data centers under construction within 60 miles of Atlanta and 52 more planned in the same radius.
Where those projects land has shifted noticeably. In September 2024 the Atlanta City Council passed two ordinances together, one defining data centers as a use and prohibiting them within 2,640 feet of high capacity transit stops, and one prohibiting them inside the BeltLine Overlay District along the 22 mile trail loop. Counties across the metro followed with their own rules. Bartow County finalized a 200 foot buffer from property boundaries and noise limits of 65 decibels during the day and 55 at night. DeKalb County worked through 2025 and into 2026 on tiered categories based on square footage and power demand. Paulding County suspended new applications, zoning requests and civil plan reviews through the start of 2027.
The practical effect for anyone planning construction logistics is that the approved campuses increasingly sit on large parcels in the western and southern counties, well outside the core. A 615 acre campus in Fayette County, roughly 136 acres at Union City, two separate developers building inside Douglas County at the same time. These are not infill sites with a coffee shop across the street. They are bare parcels where the first building will not have usable conditioned space for a year or more.
That is the part of the story that matters at ground level. A market leading the continent in construction is also a market where a large share of the active work happens on ground with no finished building on it yet, in counties where the nearest commercial space may be a fifteen minute drive from the gate. Everything a crew does at a desk, plan review, RFI logs, receiving, inspection reports, orientation, has to happen somewhere on that parcel.
It is also worth being precise about what these figures are and are not. Under-construction capacity is a snapshot, not a forecast, and pipelines move. Georgia Power's own quarterly large load filings have shown projects entering and exiting the pipeline in gigawatt quantities from one quarter to the next. The reliable way to read the market is to follow what has actually broken ground rather than what has been announced, and by that measure the metro Atlanta counties are carrying more simultaneous heavy construction than at any point in the region's history.
Sources: Carl Vinson Institute of Government evaluation for the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts
The Five Levels of Data Center Commissioning, and Where the Paperwork Actually Happens
Commissioning is the phase that decides whether a data center building opens on schedule, and it is also the phase most outside observers understand least. On a hyperscale project it is organized into five numbered levels, a structure that maps loosely onto the ASHRAE Guideline 0 commissioning framework but which the industry has adapted into something more systems focused and more operationally blunt.
Level 1 is factory testing. Major equipment, generators, uninterruptible power supplies, switchgear, chillers, is witness tested at the manufacturer before it ships, because discovering a defect on the pad costs a schedule far more than discovering it on the factory floor. Level 2 is delivery and pre-installation inspection: equipment is verified on arrival against the submittals and the approved drawing set, and damage or substitution is caught before installation crews touch it.
Level 3 covers pre-commissioning and pre-functional start-up. Static checks, point to point verification of control wiring, torque checks, megger readings, and first energization. Level 4 is functional performance testing, where each system is exercised on its own against the design intent: the generator starts and picks up load, the chiller sequence stages correctly, the fire alarm signals the right devices.
Level 5 is where everything comes together. Integrated systems testing, usually shortened to IST, runs all the interconnected systems at once under simulated load, including deliberate failure scenarios. The utility feed is dropped and the site has to prove it rides through. A cooling unit is failed and the remaining capacity has to hold the space. Power, cooling, fire suppression and controls have to behave correctly not just individually but in combination, and the whole schedule is judged on whether the building passes.
Every level generates documentation that a human being has to sit down with. Witness test reports from the factory. Submittal registers reconciled against what actually showed up. Pre-functional checklists with hundreds of line items. Deviation logs. And the IST script itself, which frequently runs to hundreds of pages and is walked line by line, in a room, with the owner's representative, the commissioning agent, the general contractor and every trade contractor whose systems are in the test.
There is a timing problem baked into all of this that catches teams out. ASHRAE's thermal guidelines set a recommended envelope of 64.4 to 80.6 degrees Fahrenheit for IT equipment spaces, with a recommended humidity ceiling of 60 percent relative humidity, and the building has to hold that band before servers and network gear can be delivered and installed. That means mechanical commissioning has to be substantially complete before the largest phase of interior fit-out can even begin.
Meanwhile the permanent break rooms, restrooms and office space inside the building are typically among the last interior spaces finished on any commercial project. Put those two facts side by side and you get the situation every commissioning agent recognizes: the building has the least usable conditioned space at exactly the moment when the most people are on site, running electrical and mechanical rough-in, controls work and testing simultaneously.
The fix is not complicated, it is just easy to leave off the plan. A conditioned, connected room that arrives on a truck sits nowhere on the building's critical path. It does not wait on mechanical commissioning, it does not compete with the fit-out schedule, and it can be positioned close enough to the building that someone can step out, check a reading, and step back into the meeting. On a campus where the same testing sequence will repeat building after building for years, that room stays useful long after the first building has been handed over.
Sources: ASHRAE, Thermal Guidelines for Data Processing Environments and Guideline 0 commissioning framework
Plan Review, Private Providers and Third Party Inspections on a Georgia Data Center Site
Georgia has 159 counties, more than any other state east of the Mississippi and second nationally only to Texas. For most purposes that is a piece of trivia. For a general contractor building data center campuses around Atlanta, it is a description of the job. CBRE defines the greater Atlanta data center market across five counties, Fulton, Douglas, Fayette, Walton and Cobb, and a contractor working in more than one of them is running more than one local permitting and inspection relationship at the same time.
The codes themselves are statewide. Georgia adopts construction codes through the Department of Community Affairs, and new code editions and amendments took effect on January 1, 2026. The City of Atlanta aligned to the same state minimum codes on the same date. What varies county to county is administration: local amendments, submittal formats, review queues, inspector availability and the exact sequence of walks a project has to pass.
State law anticipates that variation. Under O.C.G.A. section 8-2-26(a)(1), local governments that enforce the codes must adopt reasonable administrative provisions covering enforcement procedures, hearings and appeals from decisions of local inspectors. That is the legal basis for the county by county differences a project team runs into.
The provision that matters most on a fast moving campus is the private professional provider law at O.C.G.A. section 8-2-26(g). It authorizes private professional providers to perform plan review and inspections confirming that state codes are met, and to file an Affidavit of Plan Review by Private Professional Provider with the local government. The Department of Community Affairs publishes the affidavit form itself. On a project where a county review queue would otherwise set the schedule, that pathway is often the difference between a phase starting on time and slipping a month.
Independence is the condition attached to it. O.C.G.A. section 8-2-26.1 governs qualified inspectors and inspection reports, and requires that a qualified inspector performing plan review or inspection not be an employee of, affiliated with, or financially interested in the firm engaged in the project under review. In practice that means the person walking your work is genuinely an outsider, arriving on a schedule the permit sets rather than one the contractor sets.
Counties add their own procedures on top. DeKalb County, for example, publishes a third party inspection application guide dated September 2025 that lays out its own submission and qualification process. Other counties handle the same statutory framework differently. None of that is unusual or a problem, it is simply administration, and it means a project team has to know which county it is standing in.
All of it converges on the same physical requirement. An independent reviewer or special inspector arrives at a campus at the edge of a county, does the walk, and then needs a table, power, a screen and a connection to write and file the report before leaving. If that space does not exist on the property, the report gets written that night from a hotel or a truck cab, which is slower, less accurate and more likely to bounce back with questions.
There is one more permitting question that comes up constantly, which is whether the site office itself needs its own approval. Practice varies. In most Georgia jurisdictions a jobsite trailer on an active site that already holds a valid building permit is treated the way scaffolding and dumpsters are treated, as a temporary element covered by the main permit. Some jurisdictions want a separate temporary use approval, usually with a site plan showing placement, the unit specifications and the utility connection detail. A trailer placed somewhere that is not an active permitted jobsite generally does need its own approval. The reliable move is a five minute call to the county or city building department before delivery, with the unit specifications in hand.
Sources: Georgia Department of Community Affairs, enforcement of the state minimum codes
Running a Site Office on an Atlanta Campus That Will Still Be Building in 2032
Most jobsite offices get planned around a single project's timeline. Mobilize, build, close out, move the trailer to the next job. Several of the campuses going up around Atlanta break that pattern badly enough that planning the office the usual way costs money, and understanding why changes how a contractor should approach it.
Start with the horizon. A campus in Fayette County covers 615 acres and is planned for as many as 16 buildings, with build-out running to 2032. A campus at Union City covers roughly 136 acres across three buildings, with the first phase targeted for 2026 and the full campus also running to 2032. Douglas County carries two separate hyperscale campuses from two different developers at the same time. These are not two year jobs with a defined end.
Now add the schedule reality for each individual building. A hyperscale data center now typically takes roughly 18 to 30 months from groundbreaking to energization, up from about 12 months before 2022. Almost all of that extension comes from electrical equipment lead times and grid interconnection waits rather than from civil work. Utility interconnection and power agreements alone commonly absorb 6 to 12 months, and the widening gap between how fast land and permits move and how fast power moves is now the defining constraint on site selection across the industry.
Because of that, phased occupancy is standard practice. Two or three buildings on a campus are live and operating while the next two are still steel. Plan review for building four happens the same week as the punch walk on building two, and the commissioning script for building three is being walked while site crews trench for building five. There is rarely a clean break between phases where an office would naturally come down and go back up.
That is the setup where repeating a setup and teardown cycle building by building starts to hurt. Over the life of a campus that runs six or eight buildings, standing up new office space every time means doing the same procurement, delivery, connection and teardown five or six extra times, with gaps in coverage in between. A single unit that stays with the program and relocates on the parcel as the active work zone shifts removes all of that repetition.
Two product details do the heavy lifting on this kind of program. The first is connectivity. These campuses regularly break ground on parcels where no carrier build has reached, and Georgia's own broadband mapping work identified hundreds of thousands of locations statewide without service at the state's threshold, close to 70 percent of them rural. Built-in satellite internet means the office is working the hour it lands rather than the month the circuit is installed.
The second is power. Grid interconnection is usually the longest lead item on the entire campus schedule, so early phase work runs on generator or temporary service as a matter of course. A unit built around a standard 240V 50A shore cord connection fits that reality, rather than assuming permanent power on day one. Being dual axle with electric brakes means repositioning it on the parcel is a short move, not a remobilization.
There is a simple test worth running before signing a short term agreement for the first building on a new campus. Ask whether the same parcel has additional buildings entitled or planned. Around metro Atlanta right now, it very often does. If so, plan the office around the campus timeline from the start rather than renewing building by building. The second approach nearly always costs more once you count the repeated setups, teardowns and coverage gaps between phases.
Sources: Georgia Broadband Program, statewide availability mapping
