Georgia’s own auditors just cut their estimate of data center economic impact to less than one-third of what they originally claimed.
Instead of 28,350 construction jobs and 5,471 operations jobs, the corrected numbers are 8,505 and 1,641, with total economic value revised down from billions to about $1.25 billion.
Those inflated figures were used to justify roughly $474 million in annual tax breaks for data centers, including large AI builds like Microsoft’s new Atlanta facility.
The correction lands as Georgia Power has already secured approval for nearly 10 GW of new capacity, much of it driven by AI and cloud data center demand.
This gap between promised jobs and actual outcomes sharpens questions about whether generous incentives and major grid expansion for GPU-heavy AI workloads are paying off locally.
For anyone modeling AI infrastructure ROI, this is a good reminder to interrogate state economic impact numbers before treating them as input assumptions.
The original report and its correction are worth a close read for anyone tracking AI data center policy and power planning in Georgia.
