Plans for a data center in the site of a former cotton mill in Augusta, Georgia, have been abandoned.
Sibley Mill was built from 1880 to 1882 in place of and with the materials from the Confederate Powder Works where gunpowder used by the Confederates during the US Civil War was made. The cotton mill was in operation for more than 100 years until closing in 2006. The Augusta Canal Authority bought the mill in 2010 to clean up and redevelop the site, which was completed in 2018.
In 2016 Cape Augusta Real Estate Development announced plans to redevelop the site into a 20-acres and 500,000 square feet (46,500 sqm) mixed-use office and data center campus.
The company originally planned to create the ‘Augusta Cyberworks’; a 10MW data center that could also service as the home of cyber security companies. The data center was to be housed in the mill’s former boiler room and powered by water from the Augusta Canal, which would have flowed through the mill’s three built-in hydroelectric turbines.
Some phases of office development have been completed and current tenants of the site include cybersecurity training firm Cyberworks Academy, IT services firm Corsica Technologies, telecoms engineering firm M-Communications, and University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) subsidiary UMBC Training Centers.
However, the Augusta Chronicle this week reported that the planned data center on the site has been abandoned.
Robby Wray, CEO of the company managing the project, MonteCristo Consultants, told the publication that the plan was abandoned as the planned facilities couldn’t provide the kind of scale required by potential tenants.
"It became abundantly clear that the type of tenant that the market's morphed to now looks at data centers that are 300 meg [megawatts/MW], 400 meg, 500 meg, not 10 or 20[MW]," Wray said. He further explained that making a center of that caliber would not be feasible as there is "not enough space, not enough power… the economics just didn't work."
Wray said the developers realize this around late 2019/early 2020 and instead planned to turn Sibley into a luxury hotel, only for Covid-19 to make the idea unfeasible.
There is potential around turning Sibley into a mixed-use site with the majority of the space becoming apartments and the rest being used for retail/commercial purposes. The redevelopment would cost approximately $45 million, but the owners have not given final approval on the plan as of yet.
Redevelopment work on the neighboring King Mill site, which will include office and warehouse space as well as residential housing, is ongoing.
The Sibley mill site is reportedly haunted by the ghost of a mill worker shot by a jilted lover in 1906.
