DeKalb County Rejects $1.6B Data Center in Ellenwood
A unanimous no vote and a moratorium lawsuit in Georgia are the same playbook Palm Beach County developers have run into twice this year.
DeKalb County commissioners unanimously rejected Project Preserve, a $1.6 billion data center proposed for 95 acres in Ellenwood, Georgia, on August 13. The vote came as a separate developer sues the county to overturn the data center moratorium that has been in place since July 2025, a challenge that could unravel the legal basis for the rejection itself.
Why it matters
County staff built the denial on a technicality: a data center does not qualify as a “utility structure” under DeKalb’s zoning code, and the applicant, PCC-DeKalb LLC, offered no mitigation for the strain the three-building, 1 million-square-foot campus would put on local power and water. But the technicality only worked because the project cleared its application in June 2025, three weeks before the moratorium took effect. That is the pattern developers now have to underwrite everywhere: capital and power contracts get a site to the table, and then a county commission, not a utility or a lender, decides whether it ever gets built. Palm Beach County ran the same two-step this year, a moratorium first, then a 5-1 denial of the $2.6 billion Project Tango data center in Loxahatchee. See our national data center coverage for how often that sequence is now repeating.
The numbers
Project Preserve would have generated an estimated $28 million a year in county tax revenue, including $14 million for schools, according to Decaturish’s reporting on the county’s own projections. DeKalb’s moratorium, extended once already, now runs through March 30, 2027. A separate applicant, Shadowbox Studios and Henrico 183, has sued to overturn that moratorium so it can pursue a 200-acre data center at 3600 International Park Drive, also in south DeKalb.
What’s next
The Shadowbox lawsuit is the one to watch. If a court finds the moratorium itself invalid, it could reopen the door DeKalb just closed on Project Preserve and every other filing caught behind it. Developers weighing Sun Belt sites should treat local entitlement risk, not interconnection queues or construction cost, as the variable most likely to kill a project between announcement and groundbreaking.