Georgia Gas Plant Tests the AI Power Thesis

Georgia regulators' own staff have put a number on the faith behind the state's power build-out. Of the new generation Georgia Power asked to certify, they testified, "Only about 1,900 MW is supported by such contracts," and the rest "is speculative.", Utility Dive reported.

That testimony sits awkwardly beside what happened this week in Monroe County. Reuters, carried by Investing.com, reported on Oct 16 that a record $3.3 billion loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture will fund a power plant there. Oglethorpe Power is building the Smarr Combined Cycle Plant, and the loan is the largest in the history of the Rural Utilities Service, NRECA's publication reported. The plant's capacity is 1,425 megawatts, enough for about 800,000 homes. Google bought nearly 1,000 acres in the same county last year for a data center, Reuters noted. Georgia Public Broadcasting put the Google project about half a mile from the construction site, roughly as far as a Buc-ee's under construction.

The question is whether AI-driven demand is real, speculative, or both, and who pays for generation built ahead of it. Federal officials and the cooperative give different answers on the first part. The second has a clearer answer.

Two stories about one plant

USDA Under Secretary Glen Smith told Reuters the plant will serve 38 rural cooperatives and support growing industry, potentially including data centers. Oglethorpe's spokesperson, Blair Romero, said in an email that the facility is not dedicated to serving a data center. CEO Annalissa Bloodworth went further, telling GPB the 1.4 GW of new capacity is not for data centers. She conceded that some member co-ops have been approached by developers in the past.

Both can be true. A plant that serves 38 co-ops without a data-center contract can still be the reason a data center connects nearby. USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins framed it in broader terms at the groundbreaking. "American energy dominance is not going to be achieved through renewable sources alone," she said, adding: "It requires increasing our generating capacity with more baseload power, not less."

The demand ledger

Georgia Power's own numbers show how fast the demand story moves. Its pipeline of large-load projects stood at 50.9 GW in the third quarter of last year, Utility Dive reported on Nov. 24, 2025. About 6.8 GW of new projects entered that quarter, while 14.3 GW left. The utility counted 28 committed large-load customers, 18 of which had broken ground and 10 of which were pending construction.

Commission staff counted the departures more bluntly. Since the 2023 IRP Update, they testified, thirty-three data center projects with 11,332 MW of announced load have been removed from the pipeline.

Forecasts elsewhere are wide enough to hold both readings. EPRI estimates, per a Rallies.ai summary, that U.S. data center electricity use could reach between 383 and 793 terawatt-hours by 2030. A range that broad is a bet, not a forecast. Reuters reports that data centers are already pushing U.S. electricity use to record highs and, in some regions, demanding more power than grids can supply. NTT DATA's stress test found that power availability and grid connections are becoming decisive constraints, particularly in the United States and Europe.

So the demand is real somewhere. Whether it is real at Rumble Road, on Oglethorpe's schedule, is a separate matter.

Who carries the bill

Here the answer is plain. Oglethorpe says the loan, priced at the Treasury rate plus an eighth of a percentage point, or about 6.3%, will save member co-ops about $25 million a year in interest over 30 years, and its own account of the arrangement is that the savings are real. Bloodworth also said it directly: "We do have to pass the cost of that loan through to our consumers."

The co-ops have borrowed from this federal lender before. Over the past 20 years Oglethorpe has paid around $2 billion in interest to the federal government through RUS financing, Bloodworth said. The plant is due to start operating in 2029. It promises up to 1,200 construction jobs and 30 permanent ones.

The Trump administration has not sought to regulate data center construction, Reuters reported. It has asked tech companies to pledge not to pass electricity costs on to consumers. A pledge binds the company that makes it. The co-op members who will repay a 30-year loan did not make one.

Smith told Reuters demand for such loans is heavy: "We have almost $8.6 billion in requests, and we're only into our fiscal year one month," He plans to ask appropriators for more money. NRECA CEO Jim Matheson was blunter: "We need Congress to increase the authorized lending authority for RUS."

A cheaper way to be wrong

Some of the analysis points to a less costly hedge than steel. An MIT study in iScience found that flexible data-center energy use would cut costs by up to 5 percent in Texas. To get there, facilities would have to shift more than 20 percent of their consumption to off-peak hours, sometimes closer to 50 percent. MIT economist Christopher Knittel described the appeal of "connect and manage," arrangements this way: "They would rather connect a year earlier, and throttle down computation a few hours a day, than to have to wait."

The idea is already in play in Georgia. OpenAI agreed to cut grid draw by up to 1 gigawatt from a planned 3.2-gigawatt Georgia facility during periods of grid stress, per the Rallies.ai summary.

If a data center will throttle on demand, the plant it leans on need not be sized for its peak. Oglethorpe's plant is being sized as though the peak will come anyway.

The first turbine is due in 2029. The loan will still be running long after anyone learns which of the two stories the signed contracts were telling.