Georgia’s film-stage boom flipped to bust fast, and one Athens studio is now more valuable as a potential data center than as soundstages.
The site checks core AI infra boxes: industrial zoning, existing power lines, room for a multi-building campus, and enough land to scale far beyond the original 100,000-square-foot studio plan.
Local officials are scrambling to define “data center” in zoning and tighten standards, reflecting growing pushback over grid strain, water, noise, and thin tax benefits from hyperscale builds.
Residents question why they should accept heavy-energy server farms after already dealing with other industrial impacts, signaling more friction ahead for siting GPU-hungry AI facilities near communities.
Developers like Harber are pivoting from film to alternative tenants to keep assets alive, and data centers are the default plan B as production incentives weaken and demand shifts.
Utility capacity and new storage or transmission investments will be the real gatekeepers here, more than land or buildings, as Georgia’s grid gets stretched by AI growth.
This piece is worth a read to understand how surplus commercial space is quietly becoming AI infrastructure and how local politics may shape where the next GPU clusters land.
Source: This Georgia film studio’s future could be a conversion into a data center
