Three residents of Effingham County, Georgia, have sued OpenAI, the county's six commissioners and several local officials under Georgia's racketeering law, alleging a coordinated scheme to push through a data center called Project Camellia.
The plaintiffs are Dr. Michelle Finch-Mincey, Lehman Mincey Jr., and Raymond Carver. They seek civil damages and say the project has hurt property values, noting that purchase offers on nearby homes have dropped or been withdrawn since it was announced. The defendants include Commissioners Damon Rahn, Forrest Floyd, Roger Burdette, Jamie DeLoach, Elizabeth Helmly and Phil Kieffer, County Manager Tim Callanan, and Brandt Herndon, CEO of the county's Industrial Development Authority, along with the authority itself. OpenAI, Octans GA LLC (which operates the site for OpenAI) and Savannah Industrial Development LLC, which was involved in the sale of authority property, are also named.
The complaint alleges fraud and concealment through non-disclosure agreements and misleading public statements, plus improper land transactions and zoning violations. It describes a civil conspiracy to advance the project through confidential negotiations and closed-door decisions. These are allegations, not findings.
Project Camellia is slated to cost $20 billion to $30 billion, be built in five phases, and draw 3.2 gigawatts of compute capacity. OpenAI has said it will cover the full cost of the infrastructure upgrades it needs, so local utility bills do not rise, and that a closed-loop water system will keep water use minimal.
The racketeering label is less exotic in Georgia than it sounds. The state's version is looser than the federal act and has been used in the 2023 election case against Donald Trump and 18 others, and in the Young Thug trial. Critics call it too broad. "When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail," Georgia State University criminology professor Volkan Topalli said in Atlanta Magazine.
The grievance underneath the legal label is secrecy, and it is familiar. Developers say NDAs keep them from running afoul of insider trading rules during negotiations, yet West Feliciana Parish in Louisiana closed a data center deal without one. In Gilroy, California, residents learned what an AWS data center would be only when construction began, after a five-year permitting process that relied on zoning rules set 45 years ago. Whether a court treats confidential negotiation as conspiracy or as ordinary economic development is the question this suit will put to Georgia's statute.