Quilliam Barber surveyed his backyard on a beautiful fall morning – the towering trees shading the southern sun, early autumn leaves dotting the green lawn, a tuneful bird working the quiet of this rural Georgia district to its advantage – and let out a heavy, forlorn sigh. It's right there,” said the 67-year-old retired truck driver, gesturing towards the sprawling open land behind his backyard. And I can do nothing about it.” Quilliam Barber and his wife, Wilhemina Barber, take a break in their backyard in Coweta County in the southern US state of Georgia. © Leela Jacinto, FRANCE 24 The Barbers’ property abuts a massive, 800-acre tract earmarked for a hyperscale data centre in Georgia’s Coweta County in the Middle Chattahoochee River Basin, part of the wider Apalachicola Basin in southeastern USA.
His new neighbour, the Project Sail data centre, made headlines in early 2025, when the eye-popping scale of the plan came to light. The $17 billion venture, estimated to require roughly 900 megawatts of electricity and 9 million gallons of water, includes 13 buildings, each covering 378,000 square feet, taking the total land area to more than 4.9 million square feet, according tocounty filings. Standing next to her husband, Wilhemina Barber knows that with such a mega project coming up next door, things are about to change – dramatically.
We love it, I love it, he loves it. We’ve got a pretty clear feeling it's going to play an important role if they do put it right in our back door," she said. Around two miles down the road, Ron Bockrath, picked up a poster from a pile on his kitchen buffet table.
Ron Bockrath puts up a resistance at home in Newnan, Coweta County, Georgia. © Leela Jacinto, FRANCE 24 Bockrath’s opposition to the data centre has kept him busy over the past few months. From organising collectives and filing lawsuits, to collecting petition signatures, his efforts are part of a multi-pronged community campaign to stop the Sail project. Across the US, in cities and counties rich or poor, rural, urban or semi-urban, citizens are raging against the machine.
Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the mega centres required to power it, emerged as one of the major campaign issues ahead of the November 3 midterm elections, popping up in debates and town hall gatherings, leaving many candidates scrambling to articulate a cogent position and their constituents dissatisfied.The public sentiment has been at odds with US President Donald Trump’s promotion of AI as “Superior Intelligence” (SI). Community-led initiatives have targeted AI-driven surveillance systems, including cameras misused by law enforcement officials. Read more'Get the Flock out': Americans respond to AI-driven surveillance cameras The backlash has at times been spearheaded by software engineers and geeks capable of hacking systems to identify guardrail weaknesses, and the gap between spin and reality.
But with data centres, the mega infrastructure required to power AI, the pushback has been sweeping, drawing together Democrat and Republican supporters in a rare display of bipartisanship in a bitterly divided country. That’s because they represent a confluence of concerns: from rising electricity bills, to environmental hazards affecting local communities and impacting global warming, to a public dissatisfaction over millionaires, billionaires, tech mandarins and financiers profiting from the new technology amid a cost-of-living crisis. Georgia, a state that defined itself as a symbol of the “New South” after the American civil war, has kept up with the times.
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