Atlanta City Council has passed two pieces of legislation limiting where data centers can be built in the Georgia city.
Officially approved on September 2, the regulations will prevent data centers from being built near the Beltline and within a half mile of MARTA rail stations, as reported by RoughDraft Atlanta.
From the first to the second half of 2023, data center projects “skyrocketed from over 235MW to over 730MW, equivalent to the output of a typical natural gas plant,” the legislation said.
The City Council has cited an effort to make the city more pedestrian-friendly as a motivating factor.
The Beltline is an urban redevelopment plan consisting of green space, trails, transit, and new developments along a 22-mile (35km) historic railway corridor encircling the center of the city. The city council recently granted millions of dollars in new funding for a new trail along the line.
“Whether it’s a MARTA train station or the Beltline itself, what makes those two things successful is to have as many people around them as possible — whether it’s residences or jobs,” said council member Matt Westmoreland. “Data centers don’t provide any housing and they provide very few jobs. So they are the opposite of the type of development that we want to see near our transit quarters.”
Council member Jason Dozier added: “The winds were pushing us in a direction that really has set Atlanta apart from other cities across the country in that we’re looking to make some changes in how we treat data centers in our urban core."
The two council members spearheaded the campaign which began in May 2024, with the two at the time saying they wanted to preserve those areas for "people-orientated priorities," though the idea to protect the Beltline has been in discussions since 2019.
Younwoo petitions to grandfather land in the Beltline
While Dozier and Westmoreland are pleased the legislation has gone through, New York developer Youngwoo & Associates' planned data center development could be impacted.
Youngwoo founder Young Woo is looking to develop a data center on a 17-acre at 1611 Ellsworth Industrial Blvd in the Blandtown neighborhood, located within the Beltline.
Having owned the site for more than two decades, the developer proposed an 800,000 sq ft (74,322 sqm) mixed-use development on the land on August 30, and had previously put the site up for sale describing it as a potential data center development.
Woo is now petitioning to grandfather the land so that a 400,000 sq ft (37,161 sqm) data center project can be developed on the site, reports Bisnow.
The August 30 proposal does not explicitly mention a data center, though Woo said: "Data center is the right use, in my opinion. That’s what we asked them to consider. So we don’t know how this thing is going to turn out.”
Youngwoo has been seeking to develop the site since 2019, then planning to convert an existing warehouse into a 200,000 sq ft mixed-use project including retail and office space.
Woo purchased the site for $1 million in 1996, but has been plagued by delays, citing the pandemic as the reason the 2019 proposal never came to fruition. According to Woo, rising interest rates have made it difficult to find financing for any project other than data centers.
“I wish that they'd approve our application,” Woo told Bisnow. “If we can build data centers, that’d be great. But if not, I don’t know what.”
Atlanta has a major data center market. According to a recent report from JLL, the city has the greatest data center absorption with 815MW since 2020, surpassing Northern Virginia. Atlanta was also named the top market for colocation capacity under construction.
Last month, T5 Data Centers acquired land outside Atlanta for a 300MW data center. Other companies operating data centers in and around the city include Microsoft, CoreSite, QTS, DataBank, Flexential, Switch, DC Blox, Edged Energy, Stack, T5, Vantage, and EdgeConneX.
