Three proposals for data centers in Columbia County, Georgia, are meeting stiff opposition as town authorities are set to decide whether to approve each campus’ rezoning requests.

These are set to be discussed next week on January 15 at the Columbia County Planning Commission.

The largest of these data centers would be located in the White Oak Business Park, which will need to be expanded to accommodate the 8.1 million sq ft (750,000 sqm) campus.

The project is backed by commercial real estate firm and CBRE subsidiary Trammel Crow Company, which filed a Development of Regional Impact application with the Georgia Department of State Affairs last April.

The second-largest, named the Byrd Farms Technology Campus, is located to the east of Louisville Road. Backed by applicant Byrd Farms LLC, the campus is set to take up 944.27 acres of land.

The smallest amongst the three will be the 420-acre Pumpkin Technology Campus. Plans for the campus detail four data center buildings, two warehouses, and a substation.

The land is currently owned by the Prather family. Applicant Piedmont DevCo LLC is backed by Cloverleaf Infrastructure, a developer of large-scale digital infrastructure sites powered by low-carbon electricity.

The three projects, all of which are located within an approximately six mile (9.6km) radius, have attracted negative attention from the local community, which has formed a public discussion group on Facebook about data centers in the county.

A petition on change.org objecting to the Pumpkin Technology Campus has also gathered 195 signatures at time of writing.

Residents have expressed concerns about utility costs, the potential environmental impact, and the ways in which the character of the neighbourhood could be affected.

Columbia County is located west of Augusta, a city in eastern Georgia near the state’s border with South Carolina. The area around Augusta is not known for data centers – most of the state's data centers are clustered around Atlanta, which is one of America’s most prominent data center markets.