Project dossier · Fayetteville (Fayette County), Georgia

Microsoft Fairwater Atlanta Operating

Part of Microsoft AI WAN. Chip types: B200. Epoch AI estimates ~636 MW.

Key facts

Operator
Microsoft
Owner
Microsoft
Tenant
OpenAI, Microsoft
Size
636 MW
Location
Fayetteville (Fayette County), Georgia
Stage today
Operating

Source
read 2026-08-14

What to do next

Next step: Already operating — the leverage now is enforcement: noise and water conditions, tax revenue tracking, and any expansion filing, which reopens the record.

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What has happened so far (16 events)

  • 2022-06-30rezoning
    Fayetteville City Council voted 5-0 to annex and rezone 412 acres from R-70 residential to Business Park for a data center office park, with 18 rezoning conditions attached; approximately 24 residents spoke in opposition, some in tears. · source
  • 2022-08-15financing
    QTS purchased 615 acres in Fayetteville for $153.8 million (approximately $250,000 per acre) from the Fayette County Development Authority, brokered by CBRE, for what it called the world's largest multi-tenant data center campus. · source
  • 2022-09-19announcement
    QTS publicly announced Project Excalibur: a planned 6.6 million sq ft campus of 16 data center buildings plus 400,000 sq ft of office space on the 615-acre Fayetteville site, with construction to start in 2023 and full build-out by 2032, investing over $1 billion. · source
  • 2023-02-28permit
    Fayetteville Planning and Zoning Commission approved the conceptual site plan and schematic building elevations for the Excalibur Data Center after a 5-6 month Development of Regional Impact review involving GDOT and the Georgia Department of Community Affairs. · source
  • 2023-04-01construction
    Land clearing began at the QTS Project Excalibur site in April 2023, per Epoch AI satellite imagery analysis. · source
  • 2023-06-15permit
    Fayetteville City Council unanimously approved a development agreement between the City and National Acquisition Company, LLC (QTS affiliate) for the 612-acre data center campus at 1435 Highway 54 West. · source
  • 2024-03-19announcement
    The Fayette County Development Authority proposed 'Project Rita,' a 96 MW data center campus on 145.5 acres in Tyrone (adjacent to the QTS site), comprising two buildings totaling 490,000 sq ft with a requested Business Technology Park rezoning; the Town Council hearing was scheduled for March 21. · source
  • 2024-03-28vote
    Tyrone Town Council approved the rezoning for the Microsoft data center (Project Rita) on approximately 147 acres on North Highway 74, following Planning Commission and Town Council public hearings on February 22 and March 21 respectively. · source
  • 2025-05-01construction
    The first building on the QTS campus received its certificate of occupancy in May 2025, per the AJC, with a construction completion certificate issued September 25, 2025. · source
  • 2025-05-15report
    Fayette County Water System sent a letter to QTS revealing that a water meter installed during a system-wide smart-meter upgrade had not been read electronically, resulting in approximately 13 million gallons of unrecorded usage and a retroactive bill of approximately $147,000; the issue was discovered after a neighbor reported low water pressure. · source
  • 2025-10-01operational
    Microsoft's Fairwater 2 data center on the QTS campus began operations in October 2025, spanning more than 1 million sq ft and using closed-loop cooling described as consuming almost zero water. · source
  • 2025-11-12announcement
    Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced the Fayetteville facility as part of the world's first AI superfactory, connecting the Atlanta Fairwater 2 site with Fairwater 1 in Wisconsin across a single flat network to train AI models at planet scale. · source
  • 2026-01-01moratorium
    In January 2026 Fayetteville City Council passed a 90-day moratorium on new data center development applications while working to revise the Unified Development Ordinance; City Manager Ray Gibson stated 'we do not want anymore data centers in our community.' · source
  • 2026-02-22coverage
    WBRC reported on community impacts from the QTS/Microsoft campus, with resident Diana Dietz citing heavy truck traffic on residential roads, transmission lines through neighborhoods, and concerns over rising power and water bills; QTS stated it uses water-free cooling and is committed to paying its fair share of power costs. · source
  • 2026-03-18withdrawal
    Crow Holdings Development withdrew its appeal of a denied data center project on Highway 85 North in Fayetteville one day before the scheduled City Council hearing; the city had also enacted UDO changes on March 5 that made data centers no longer permissible. · source
  • 2026-06-08financing
    QTS Fayetteville I DC1-2, LLC began sounding out investors for $5.4 billion in new debt ($4.9 billion secured bond plus $500 million term loan) to finance expansion of the Fayetteville campus leased to Microsoft, under an updated green bond framework with a PUE threshold tightened from 1.5 to 1.4. · source

Find the paper trail

Find the paper trail (2 filed · 11 places to look)

Permits already on file (2)

Filings we have a source for — the record, not a place to look for one.

  • 2023-06-15
    Fayetteville City Council unanimously approved a development agreement between the City and National Acquisition Company, LLC (QTS affiliate) for the 612-acre data center campus at 1435 Highway 54 West. · source
  • 2023-02-28
    Fayetteville Planning and Zoning Commission approved the conceptual site plan and schematic building elevations for the Excalibur Data Center after a 5-6 month Development of Regional Impact review involving GDOT and the Georgia Department of Community Affairs. · source

State environmental permits

Backup generators, water withdrawal and stormwater are permitted by the state, usually earlier and in more detail than anything filed locally.

County & town filings

The rezoning application, site plan, traffic and noise studies, staff report and every revision.

Utility & grid records

The electricity request is filed with the grid operator and the utility long before the town hears about it — and states the real load.

  • No organised market covers this statenoteThere is no public queue to read. The record is the utility's integrated resource plan and its filings at the PUC — plus FERC eLibrary for anything federally docketed.
  • Georgia Public Service Commission — docket searchSpecial contracts, large-load tariffs and rate cases are docketed here. Testimony and exhibits are public, and are usually more candid than the press release.
  • FERC eLibraryFederal filings: transmission agreements, interconnection service agreements, and co-location disputes.
  • Search the serving utility for a will-serve lettersearchThe will-serve or load-service letter is the utility's own written commitment. Ask the utility and the PUC for it by name — it is frequently the first document to exist.

Federal databases

Works anywhere, and covers the operator's record at its other sites.

  • EPA ECHO facility searchEvery federally-reported air, water and waste permit at a facility, plus its inspection and violation history. Search by address or draw a radius around the site. This project's locality centres on 33.420, -84.460 — search that point with a 5-mile radius.
  • EPA EnvirofactsThe same underlying records, queryable by county — useful for 'what else is permitted near this site' rather than one facility.
  • EPA Facility Registry ServiceResolves the shell LLC on a permit to the facility it belongs to. Worth a look when the filing name means nothing locally.

These are places to look, not evidence that anything has been filed. Links were checked on 2026-08-21; search links are queries, not records. What to ask for.

Recent news

5 stories tracked since 2026-05-11 across 5 outlets. 5× Water use for cooling is straining the local supply. Most recent: “Data center used 30 million gallons unnoticed — is America’s AI boom quietly pushing local water systems t” (The Economic Times, 2026-05-13).

Automated news aggregation, not human-verified — follow each link to the original outlet. Part of the story tracker, 5 headlines archived.

Around here

Other tracked projects in Georgia

Cite this page: GridWatch AI, “Microsoft Fairwater Atlanta”, aigridwatch.com/projects/microsoft-fairwater-atlanta, retrieved 2026-10-11.

As of August 2026 (2m ago) · changes weekly — re-check before citing

A working set of identified proposals a community can track, not a census — most of the country's activity is not in here yet. Pennsylvania is the exception: its rows are synced from PA DEP's own data-center permit tracker, so the state's coverage is close to complete and carries the permit trail with it. **Each row carries its own provenance.** Rows showing a verification date link to reporting or the governing body's own record and were read on that date; rows marked *unverified* have no source on record — a lead to check, not a fact to cite. **Stage is derived, not asserted.** *Hearing scheduled*, *Awaiting decision*, *Approved* and *Withdrawn* are computed from each row's milestone dates on every rebuild, so a hearing date that has passed stops reading 'scheduled'. Hearings get moved and projects re-file under new names — treat a scheduled date as the earliest to act by, and confirm with the clerk before relying on it. Leads are mined into data/project_candidates.json and promoted here only after a human reads a primary source.

Part of the data center project tracker — open data, CC BY 4.0 (JSON · CSV).

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