OpenAI doesn't own data centers. This is where its southeast traffic actually goes.
There is a structural confusion in coverage of OpenAI and the AI build-out that is worth clearing up before anything else.
OpenAI does not own or operate data centers. It is a research and product company that buys compute capacity wholesale from cloud providers and increasingly from specialized GPU infrastructure operators. Microsoft -- as OpenAI's largest investor and primary cloud partner via the Azure OpenAI Service -- has historically hosted the lion's share of OpenAI's inference and training workloads. Oracle, CoreWeave, and SoftBank have stepped in to provide additional capacity through the Stargate joint venture, but as recently reported by Tom's Hardware and Digitimes, OpenAI has essentially walked back its first-party Stargate data-center ambition in favor of more flexible leasing arrangements.
Which means when somebody in Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville, Jacksonville, or anywhere else in the southeastern United States queries ChatGPT or runs a Copilot completion, the request is most likely hitting Microsoft Azure infrastructure -- and going forward, that infrastructure increasingly lives in Georgia.
The Azure region being built right now to handle that traffic is called East US 3. It is the successor to East US 1 and East US 2, both of which are located in Virginia (the original "data center alley" we have covered repeatedly on this site). East US 3 is in Georgia. Most readers and most reporters have not noticed.
The cluster, by the numbers
The Azure East US 3 region is not a single building. It is a coordinated set of campuses across Fulton and Douglas counties (Atlanta metro), with additional Microsoft buildout further out in Floyd County (Rome, northwest Georgia). On the PoweredByWho project map, six distinct Microsoft GA records make up the picture:
1. **Microsoft Douglasville East US 3** (Douglas County) -- the cluster centerpiece. 300 MW capacity, 980,000 square feet across four data center buildings at 1601 North River Road, $1 billion investment. Under construction. Microsoft public materials describe zero-water cooling here. Region launch target: 2027.
2. **Microsoft Union City ATL11** (Fulton County) -- 324 MW under construction, $1.8 billion investment. Co-developed with EdgeConneX. This is the largest single MW commitment in the cluster.
3. **Microsoft Douglas County Campus** (Lithia Springs) -- 250 MW under construction, $1 billion investment. The second Douglas County footprint.
4. **Microsoft Palmetto Data Center** (Fulton County) -- 250,000 square feet under construction. Megawatt figure not yet publicly disclosed.
5. **Project Firecracker (Microsoft)** (Floyd County, Rome) -- 347 acres on Huffaker Road, $1 billion proposed campus. Announced October 2023 with a 12-year tax abatement and minimum-150-jobs commitment. Operational target 2027-2028. Until today this record was unpublished on our database (review status pending verification); publishing now alongside this story.
6. **Microsoft CCO06 Data Center** (Fulton County) -- canceled. A community win we track on the /wins ledger.
Active capacity totaled across the four sites with disclosed megawatts: 874 MW. Plus the Palmetto site, Project Firecracker, and any future Fulton expansion not yet publicly announced. At full buildout, the East US 3 region is likely to exceed 1.5 gigawatts.
Why "East US 3" and not just more East US
Azure regions are not just geography labels. They are capacity blocks that customers select when they deploy services. A region is composed of multiple data center campuses linked by low-latency networking, sold to Azure customers as a single addressable resource.
East US 1 (Virginia, around Ashburn) was Azure's original eastern flagship -- launched in the mid-2010s, hosts an enormous fraction of US-East cloud traffic. East US 2 (also Virginia, just south of East US 1) was added when East US 1 ran out of physical capacity. East US 3 was announced in late 2024 and is the third successive flagship, this time built in Georgia because Virginia's grid, water, and land are tapped out.
The technical reason this matters for OpenAI specifically: the Azure-OpenAI Service is offered region-by-region, and Microsoft's published model-region-support documentation lists East US 3 as one of the regions where the newer GPT-class models are or will be deployed. For users in the southeast, the latency-shortest route to OpenAI's models will run through these Georgia data centers when East US 3 goes live in 2027. For Microsoft, East US 3 is the region designed for AI-scale workloads from day one -- the prior East US regions were built for general cloud and have been progressively retrofitted for AI; East US 3 is purpose-built.
This is the part nobody outside the cloud-infrastructure world is paying attention to. The single largest AI infrastructure region launching in 2027 in the United States is not in Texas or New Mexico or Virginia. It is in Georgia.
What this means for Georgia communities
Three things follow.
**First, water.** Microsoft is publicly stating zero-water cooling at the Douglasville build, which is a credible commitment as a specification but is a different question from what actually happens once 980,000 square feet of building are pulling load. The QTS Fayetteville story we just published is the cautionary tale here: a Blackstone-owned campus 20 miles south of downtown Atlanta drained nearly 30 million gallons of water through two industrial-scale hookups -- one installed without the county utility's knowledge, the other unbilled -- before residents in an adjacent subdivision noticed low water pressure and the discrepancy surfaced. Fayette County charged $147,474 in retroactive fees at the construction rate. No fine. The structural pattern is: small suburban utilities, residential ratepayer bases, limited audit staff, regulating multibillion-dollar campuses. East US 3 is being built in Douglas and Fulton counties -- the same regulatory profile.
**Second, electricity.** 874 MW of active construction across five sites in one cluster is roughly the load profile of a mid-sized city. The Georgia Power service territory has not built that level of generation capacity ahead of demand. Some combination of new generation, transmission upgrades, behind-the-meter generation at the campuses themselves, and -- per existing reporting -- delayed coal-plant retirements is required to bring East US 3 online. The bill for that infrastructure typically lands on residential ratepayers, not the hyperscale customer.
**Third, accountability.** Microsoft has been a comparatively transparent operator in the data-center space (better than QTS, better than most of the shell-developer stack we have documented). Its Georgia announcements are public; its tax-abatement structures are on the record at the local development authority level; its operating practices are codified in publicly available sustainability reports. None of that is a reason to relax oversight. It is a reason to set the oversight baseline at what Microsoft commits to and audit against it. If Microsoft's actual operational water and energy footprint at East US 3 differs from its public commitments, that gap is the story.
What to watch
1. The 2027 region launch. Azure regions go through a staged opening: initial availability for select customers, then general availability, then specific service availability (Azure-OpenAI is typically among the last to enable in a new region). The first time East US 3 appears in Azure's official region-status dashboard as offering the Azure-OpenAI Service is the moment OpenAI workloads start landing in Georgia.
2. Project Firecracker. Newly published today on PoweredByWho with its $1 billion budget, 12-year tax abatement, 150-jobs floor, and 2027-2028 operational target. We do not yet have its megawatt rating or square-footage publicly disclosed. The Rome Floyd Development Authority is a small body, and the abatement was granted in October 2023 with little local opposition documented at the time. Worth watching as construction begins.
3. Whether any Microsoft GA site experiences a Fayette-style water-billing discrepancy. With zero-water cooling on the Douglasville build, the construction phase still pulls significant water for concrete, dust control, and site prep. Same vulnerability pattern as QTS Fayetteville. If you live in Douglas, Fulton, or Floyd county and you notice unusual water-pressure patterns near a Microsoft site, that is a tip we want.
4. Whether the Atlanta Regional Commission or Metro North Georgia Water Planning District publishes updated water-allocation modeling that incorporates East US 3 at full buildout. Some of the relevant numbers should appear in their 2026-2027 plan updates.
5. Georgia Power's 2027 Integrated Resource Plan filing with the Georgia Public Service Commission. The 874 MW currently under construction is the obvious capacity tell; what new generation Georgia Power proposes (and how much of the cost flows to residential rates) is the political tell.
Project dossiers for all five active sites are linked below. Subscribe to the weekly to get the East US 3 region-launch milestone the day it lands.