Proposals for data centers will be subject to state review under new rules the Georgia Department of Community Affairs adopted Thursday at its quarterly board meeting in Savannah.
The board unanimously expanded what constitutes a “development of regional impact” to explicitly include data centers. The addition of a category called “technological facilities” was needed because DCA’s 12 regional councils weren’t in agreement on how to treat data centers, facilities that house servers and other computer equipment increasingly needed to support artificial intelligence.
“If you take the submissions that we have received specific to data centers, some regional commissioners, some regional commissions were processing those as industrial, some were processing them as commercial, and some were not processing them at all because they didn’t seem to fit within the definitions of either of those two categories,” DCA Deputy Commissioner Rusty Haywood said. “So what we have done is created a technological facilities category that would encompass that type of development.”…