It’s a digital gold rush as data center development engulfs small-town America.
Intense demand for artificial intelligence, cloud computing and digital storage is driving developers to find new ways to come up with the massive amounts of power such facilities require, while also ensuring strong connectivity and access to water.
Newton County, which is located about an hour east of Atlanta, is one of four counties that are home to Meta’s Stanton Springs campus.
FOX Business received an exclusive look at the site, which opened in 2018 and has been growing with a second campus now being built. Spread over a 1,000-acre site are eight enormous buildings, each about the length of four football fields, filled with rows of high-speed servers that operate 24 hours a day.
The cable network stretches to the moon and back. And it’s the place where data for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Meta’s other platforms are processed and pushed at lightning-fast speeds.
Data centers consume massive power and water, impacting local resources. These wealthy tech companies shouldn’t offload these costs onto residents. Communities are realizing the limited economic benefit & opposing construction. #DataCenters #TechImpact pic.twitter.com/pxE6vwXEuQ
— CISO Marketplace (@CisoMarketplace) December 17, 2025
It is just one of 26 data centers now under construction or in operation in the United States and even more growth on the horizon.
“I’ve been in the business for over 20 years and I don’t think I have seen this kind of focus on data centers,” KC Timmons, director of SiteOps Global Operations, Meta told FOX Business. “It’s innovative. There is so much good we can do.”
Meta’s arrival was broadly welcome, and its investment has become a significant economic lynchpin for the area, bringing in hundreds of jobs, making money for local contractors and yielding long-term tax income that will support schools and other public services. The company now has about 400 employees in HVAC, electrical, operations and technical positions — and most are hired from the surrounding community.
But Meta is now a presence that coexists with the explosive growth the county has witnessed this year alone. And not everyone is happy about it.
“It’s all pie in the sky,” Newton County Commissioner LeAnne Long,Arnett said on one call. “It’s not what they say it is. “You get these big developers who come in with a lot of glitz and glamour; it seems like they have everything, zoning, water, electric. It’s the biggest smoke-and-mirror, you know, you ever did see.”
Long, who is also a real estate broker in the region, wonders what happens years from now if the footprint of industry changes and those giant buildings are no longer necessary.
“What’s the fate of the communities that we lost?” Long asked.
Newton County has emerged as one of Georgia’s most aggressive data-center build-out zones. And 11 other data centers are in planning or under construction since January alone, local officials say.
Amazon has already started adding on a $25 million acreage purchase — some 50,000 per acre — fed by Georgia Power. And in the adjacent Social Circle, where Meta is also based and which straddles Newton and Walton counties, local officials have zoned seven additional data center projects without a long-term land use plan.
“Some would say we’re building the plane while flying it,” Serra Hall, executive director of the Newton County Industrial Development Authority, told FOX Business.
Meta’s success has brought a surge of new interest to the region, Hall said, and strategy and coordination are more important than ever. Calls to her cellphone have been “ringing off the hook” since early 2020 from companies interested in constructing locally, she said.
One reason the growth is happening so fast here is that Meta has brought tremendous power, it’s very close to the I-20 and they put fiber in everywhere,” says Tarkanian. The move to design open-source hardware for scalable and efficient data center has already driven down costs, thanks to the Open Compute Project that Meta co-founded. Prior to Meta coming over, the same land had been off of the tax digest for almost two decades when it was owned by the government.
Meta has also introduced programs targeting small businesses, including workshops that educate local business owners on how to expand via Instagram Reels. In Newton County, Amazon teamed up with Newton County Schools and Goodr, a white-label food sharing app that focuses on technology to source excess meals from restaurants, to open a free grocery store for students stocked with fresh produce and shelf-stable items.
An Amazon spokesperson told FOX Business that its $11 billion investment would lead to AI innovation and create “tens of thousands” of jobs for network engineers to construction workers – all the while benefitting the community.
“We are building these facilities over the next few years and we continue to be a good neighbor,” said a Frito-Lay spokeswoman.
Another rising problem is energy need. Data centers are on track to consume about 8 percent of all U.S. power by 2030, and U.S. utilities will have to invest in between $40 billion and $50 billion in new generation capacity just to meet their needs, Goldman Sachs said.
Despite the anxieties, local leaders and residents across the region agree that rejecting the industry isn’t the answer. It’s to slow down, work through and plan for the long-term consequences.
As the region’s first anchor tenant, Meta has said it will provide more clean power than it consumes and achieve water positivity by 2030 in an effort to demonstrate what responsible growth looks like.
“If I have anything to say to the entire country, it’s think about it,” Miller said. “Plan it. Don’t just suck ’em into any old cow pasture that goes up for sale.”
