RINCON, Ga. — As Effingham County weighs the potential arrival of one of the largest AI data centers in the Southeast, Georgia Tech experts spent Wednesday answering questions about how the facilities work and what they could mean for the community. How much electricity does an AI data center use? How much water does it need? How are the facilities cooled? What happens when the power goes out? And what can a community do about noise and lighting? Those questions were the focus of morning and evening sessions organized by the Effingham County Chamber of Commerce and local officials at the Herald Center on Aug. 26. The panel included Georgia Tech professors specializing in economics, data science, energy policy, mechanical engineering and water-energy systems. Effingham County Commissioner Roger Burdette and Effingham County Industrial Development Authority CEO Brandt Herndon also participated. OpenAI was not represented. The session was not a Project Camellia information session, Chamber President and CEO Susan Kraut emphasized. Instead, it was designed to give residents a better understanding of modern data centers and provide information that could help the community evaluate projects such as the $20 billion AI campus proposed by OpenAI in Effingham County. “We’re just here to answer questions and provide, again, data and research and sort of fact-based answers,” Betsy McGriff of Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute told the audience. McGriff, who facilitated the…
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