Thursday, October 2, 2025–11:00 p.m.
-Staff reports-
Residents of the Summerville Park community learned more about a proposed data center at the nearby Battey Business Complex during a town hall meeting Thursday night.
Attendees also got to [express their concerns and ask questions about the project.
In August, the Rome-Floyd County Development Authority approved the sale of property in the former Northwest Georgia Regional Hospital complex to Atlas Development.
Many of the concerns regarding data centers have to do with noise and the impact on the power grid.
“You can’t tell me that a business that is only allowed to go into Heavy Industrial, that there isn’t a reason for that,” said Summerville Parl resident Lynne Jacobs. “You need to tell me what the noise level will be. It has to cool itself, it has to run, and I am going to hear that, and my daughter is going to hear that. We are going to hear that 24 hours a day.”
Jacobs asked Rome-Floyd County Planning Director Brice Wood about the level of noise that is allowed in Heavy Industrial zones.
“Under our current zoning ordinance, which is now 25 years old, we actually don’t have a noise ordinance,” Wood replied.
“They do not emit this noise that everybody seems to think they do,” said Spencer Hogg with the Rome-Floyd County Development Authority. “Their technology has come a long way since data centers were first introduced. I think the commissioners can hopefully speak to this as well, we went to Douglasville. Not only did their community speak glowingly about the positive benefits of these facilities across the board, we stood from here to that wall from a data center, and we had to turn the bus off to hear the data center. The bus was louder than the data center.”
According to Melissa Free with Georgia Power, the costs associated with serving the data center will not be passed along to rate payers, and reliability will not suffer.
“They pay all infrastructure costs that it takes to serve them,” she said. “So, if we have to upgrade generation, ir we have to upgrade transmission, they are paying all those costs, everything to serve them, they are paying for, and they are paying up front.”
Free commented on the timeline for when Georgia Power could be ready to serve the data center.
“Even if Atlas asked us today for electrons to flow to this data center, the absolute earliest is 2030,” she said. “I don’t even know if it’s possible, but I cannot speak specifically because this is a very long process that gets studied by a lot of people in the company, 2030 is the earliest that we could even begin to serve this data center, and that’s a big if.”
