%20(1).png)
Standing Room Only: What We Learned at the Prime Storage Data Center Meeting, and What Holly Springs Needs to Do Now
Updated: 13 minutes ago
THE SHORT VERSION
A private equity firm from Saratoga Springs, New York wants to convert part of its Holly Springs self storage building at 300 Rabbit Hill Road into an AI data center. Roughly 150 residents packed the Woodstock Rec Center on September 22 and stood along the walls for two hours.
What this building is for
Almost certainly government surveillance. The application names local governments as the demand and repeats "public safety" and "emergency management." The design firm named in the permit file has a CEO who describes AI data centers as the infrastructure for reading a petabyte a day of drone, satellite, and sensor surveillance. Cherokee County already has 111 Flock cameras, 622 private cameras with police access, two drones, and a Real Time Crime Center with nobody to watch it all. This is the machine that watches it, and it turns unwatched footage into a permanent searchable record of where everyone in this county goes and who they go there with.
What doesn't add up
The team said six megawatts. Prime's own marketing map lists this site as GA11 at ten, and has for a while. Told about it, they said the website is wrong and they'd change the website.
For the first hour they would not say "data center." The yard sign says "digital utility." The slide deck says "inference point." The permit uses a utility category written for phone and gas lines, because Holly Springs has no definition of a data center in its code at all.
The podium promised 15 to 20 six figure jobs. Their own slide, in the same room the same night, said a few technical employees and no large workforce.
The slide says ZERO water consumption in capital letters. Their engineer described 25,000 gallons trucked in to fill the system.
They stipulated no expansion, then pitched the benefits of clustering these facilities so they back each other up.
The answers that were true and empty
Asked about surveillance, a Prime representative said none of his tenants use Flock or any cameras. His tenants are software companies. The cameras belong to the Sheriff's Office. Asked about AI, they said they don't host ChatGPT or Claude, and that what the building does is inference. Inference is how facial recognition and plate matching work. Both answers are accurate and neither one closes the door anyone was worried about. There's a whole section on this below.
What they couldn't answer
No operational facility anywhere, so no neighbors to call. No tenant named, both under NDA. No ambient sound baseline. No property value study. No decommissioning plan. No revenue disclosure. And "N/A" written next to all eight of the city's impact questions about streets, utilities, schools, and the environment.
Who's asking
Prime Group Holdings paid over $20.5 million in 2023 to settle SEC findings that it made materially misleading statements to its own investors about fees paid to a brokerage owned by its CEO. Investors who asked directly, in writing, were told no such fees existed. Roughly $21.9 million went back to them in May. This is the company asking Holly Springs to take its word.
The Cavalry isn't coming
Cherokee County's moratorium covers unincorporated county only, so it does nothing here. Georgia's legislature adjourned in April without passing a single data center bill. And every ratepayer protection that exists, state and federal, kicks in at 100 megawatts. This site is six to ten, which puts it under all of them.
What the people want
Holly Springs should pass its own moratorium and write a data center definition into its code. Every promise made at that meeting should be a numbered, enforceable condition on the permit before anyone votes. A verbal assurance at an information meeting binds nobody. The tenant should be named before the vote, not after. The surveillance ban should prohibit the activity, not the company, because banning Flock bans Flock and nothing else. Third party noise monitoring, applicant funded, published publicly, with automatic penalties. The full list is further down.
One more thing
A source we trust says Mayor Ryan Shirley called the people at that meeting paid protesters. Nobody was paid. He should produce proof or retract it.
When
Planning Commission is expected November 12. Mayor and Council is expected December 2, though that date needs verifying. Seven weeks. Council emails and everything else you need are at the bottom.
CREDIT WHERE IT'S DUE
DeFlock Cherokee filed the open records request that produced the permit file, read every page, and published the best reporting anyone has done on this project: https://deflockcherokee.com/blog/holly-springs-data-center
The application itself: https://deflockcherokee.com/assets/records/cup-04-2026-application.pdf
Print it. Read it before November 12, and bring it to the hearing. Much of what follows builds on their work.
WHAT IS THIS BUILDING FOR?
If this building does what the evidence suggests, then every time you drive down Rabbit Hill Road, a computer a quarter mile away will see your plate, log the time, and remember. Not store the footage for someone to maybe review later. Watch it, understand it, and file it, instantly, forever, on every car and every person in range of every camera in this county.
That means a machine that can answer questions no one has ever been able to ask at scale before. Which cars were parked outside that church on Sunday. Who walked into that clinic. Which vehicles were near that protest, that union meeting, that divorce lawyer's office, that bar, that mosque. Whose car sat in whose driveway overnight. Who your teenager drives around with. Not because anyone suspected you of anything, but because the system watches everyone continuously and the cost of keeping all of it drops to nearly nothing.
The cameras for this already exist here. Cherokee County has 111 Flock cameras, 622 private cameras with police access, and two drones, feeding a Real Time Crime Center run by the Sheriff's Office. DeFlock Cherokee counted them.
What has protected you until now is that nobody has time to watch. Footage piles up unwatched because humans have to look at it, and there aren't enough humans. That's the only thing standing between a county full of cameras and a county where every movement is indexed and searchable.
AI removes it. Add facial recognition, gait recognition, and license plate history, and a pile of unwatched video becomes a permanent, searchable record of where everyone in Cherokee County goes and who they go there with. Built a mile from your house. Approved by five people at a zoning hearing. Never voted on by anyone.
So who is the customer?
The company would not say. The application does. It says the infrastructure supports health care, public safety response, and business operations. It says the site was chosen for proximity to governments that increasingly rely on fast response times for emergency management services. It says The Edge found significant local demand from local governments, medical providers, and high tech businesses.
Hospitals largely avoid these services over patient confidentiality, and no local high tech business is named. What's left is "public safety" and "emergency management," in a county that already runs a Real Time Crime Center and has nothing to run it with.
Alosanar is the data center design firm named in the permit file as The Edge's conversion partner. Its CEO, Emmanuel Daniel, described the market at a Potomac Institute for Policy Studies webinar: intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance from drones, satellites, and ground sensors generating a petabyte of data per day, impossible to interpret without the power to run AI against it. https://youtu.be/RJisYaIojUQ?t=991
A resident quoted Daniel's remarks back to the panel and asked whether the company would commit to no surveillance work at this facility. Nobody answered that. A Prime representative said Daniel was a short term consultant, that he was never part of this project, and that he doesn't speak for the company. All three statements are about Daniel. None of them is about what the building will do.
The permit file names his firm, Alosanar, as the conversion partner, so Holly Springs officials should get the company's position on that in writing. They should also get the answer to the question the resident actually asked.
Pressed further, the same representative said none of their tenants use Flock or any surveillance cameras, said his tenant would be blocked from that use, and offered to put it in the stipulations. That answer solves nothing, for reasons laid out in the next section.
One more finding from the records request. The application answers "N/A" to all eight of the city's impact questions covering streets, utilities, schools, and the environment. A facility their own map advertises at ten megawatts, dropped next to neighborhoods, apparently affects none of it. Sure buddy, sure.
THE MEGAWATT PROBLEM
The team said six megawatts all night, with 4.5 critical. The Edge's public network map lists this site as GA11 at ten. A resident raised it in the closing minutes and was told the website is erroneous and would be updated.
So the company's marketing says one number, the permit says another, and the proposed fix is to edit the marketing.
Then there's the timing. That site was listed on a national map as inventory before Holly Springs held a single hearing. While residents were being told nothing is approved, the capacity was already visible to investors and prospective tenants. The Planning Commission should ask when GA11 went on that map, what number it showed on each date, and what was promised to tenants in the meantime.
THE WORD GAMES, AND WHAT THEIR OWN SLIDE SAYS
For roughly the first hour of a two hour meeting, the presenters would not say "data center." Multiple attendees noticed. From the podium it was "digital infrastructure." On the yard sign it's "digital utility." In the slide deck it's "inference point."
A resident photographed that slide, and the company's own marketing is the most damaging document in the file.
Headed "What is an Inference Point?", it describes local infrastructure rather than a distant cloud or hyperscale campus. Under "WHAT WE ARE": inside an existing building, a portion of one building on a developed site; air cooled, closed loop, with no cooling towers and ZERO water consumption for cooling; standby generators only, running during outages and brief tests during business hours; and small operating staff, described as a few technical employees, no public customers, no large workforce. Under "WHAT WE ARE NOT": "Not a hyperscale campus" and "Not an AI training facility," among others.
Three problems:
The jobs. From the podium, residents were told 15 to 20 six figure positions, with local contractors and trades on the build. The company's own slide, in the same room on the same night, says a few technical employees and no large workforce. Those are not the same claim. Ask for the staffing plan in writing, with job classifications and whether the positions are on site, contract, or shared across facilities.
The water. The slide says ZERO in capital letters. In the meeting, the applicant's engineer described roughly 25,000 gallons trucked in one time to fill the loop. A one time fill is not zero, and nothing explains what happens when the loop is drained, flushed, topped off, or when the glycol mix is replaced over the facility's lifetime. Nothing explains where the water comes from, who hauls it, or where it goes at end of life. Those are answerable questions and they belong on paper before a vote.
"Not a hyperscale campus." True, and it's the wrong comparison. A hyperscale campus is one enormous site. Prime is doing the opposite on purpose. In April 2026 the company announced it will deploy edge data centers and battery storage across its self storage properties nationwide, with Microsoft and two Hanwha companies. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/prime-group-to-deploy-edge-compute-at-self-storage-sites-across-us/ It owns 17 properties in Georgia. Twenty small buildings scattered across a metro area can add up to the same capacity as one campus, and as the power section shows, the small ones stay under every regulatory threshold that exists. The reassurance isn't that this is small. It's that this is small enough to avoid the rules.
In the words of one of our members: they found a loophole by not building a brand new data center, and they're using it to their full advantage.
TECHNICALLY TRUE
Nobody at that meeting needed to say anything blatantly false to mislead the audience. A land use team gets paid for a harder skill, which is giving answers that are technically accurate but fail to answer the root question being asked. Four answers on Tuesday worked that way: the claim that no tenant uses Flock or surveillance cameras, the claim that the building won't host ChatGPT or Claude, the comparison to a cell phone tower, and the promise to seek no tax breaks.
"None of our tenants use Flock or any kind of surveillance cameras."
It may be true that none of the tenants use Flock or surveillance cameras. That doesn't mean that this building won't be used to process data from Flock or other kinds of surveillance cameras. Prime's tenants are software and cloud companies. They don't buy cameras. The cameras belong to the Sheriff's Office and to 622 private owners who've given police access. The building doesn't need to own a camera to analyze what every camera in the county sees, and a resident said so on the spot: the server doesn't run with Flock.
To fix this, Holly Springs needs a permit condition that bans the activity rather than the company. Not "no Flock." No facial recognition, no license plate reading, no video analysis, no tracking people's movements for police, no matter who owns the camera.
"We're not hosting any of those models. No ChatGPT, no Claude, no Anthropic."
Take that at face value and it still rules out the wrong thing.
The presenters drew a valid distinction between two activities. Training a model means building it, which takes enormous facilities elsewhere. Inference means running a finished model against new data. They said this building does inference. Their words: inference is local level compute, it requires low latency, it's for the people in the area. The slide says the same thing, ruling out an AI training facility.
Surveillance analysis is inference. Facial recognition is inference. License plate matching is inference. Deciding whether the face on that camera matches the face in that database is inference.
We don't know what this building will be used for. Neither does anyone else outside the company, because the tenant is under NDA. What we know is that ruling out chatbots doesn't rule out surveillance work, because surveillance work is the same category of computing they confirmed the building is built for.
The tenant's name and a plain description of what its software does should be written into the permit application before the vote.
"It's no different than a cell phone tower."
This is false. A cell tower and this building do completely different jobs.
A cell tower exists to move your call from one place to another. It handles your traffic only as much as it must to hand it off, and it draws no conclusions about what's in it. Nothing at that tower asks who you are, where you've been, or who else was nearby.
This building exists to ask. Data comes in, software examines the contents, and the building produces an answer about what's in there. That is the entire reason it gets built. Nobody spends this kind of money to relay data. They spend it to analyze data.
A presenter admitted the difference when a resident pushed on it. He said a cell tower is purely communication, and this is compute within the communication. That is exactly right, and it means the comparison is wrong.
This false comparison also helps Prime get its permit. The application depends on the city agreeing this is a utility. Cell towers are utilities. So the analogy makes their case for them, and Prime never has to prove the building is a utility.
Holly Springs should add a definition of "data center" to its zoning code. Then the city decides what this building is, and Prime's comparison doesn't matter.
"We will seek no tax breaks."
Even if we believe them, that promise is irrelevant, because they were only talking about Holly Springs. Cities hand out tax abatements, and Prime says it won't ask for one.
Georgia hands out a separate break. The state exempts data centers from sales and use tax on their equipment. Lawmakers tried to end it this year and failed, so it runs through 2032. Promising not to ask the city for anything says nothing about whether Prime or its tenant will claim the state exemption. Nobody at the meeting asked, so nobody denied it.
The city should get a written answer before the vote on whether Prime or its tenant plans to claim the state exemption.
Every one of the answers Prime Storage gave is precise, narrow, and technically sound. Every one answers a question slightly to the left of the one that was asked. None of that makes anyone a liar… necessarily. But spoken answers are worth very little here, and the only wording that matters is the wording in the permit.
Keep one line from that night as the test for the next two hearings. Asked whether a surveillance ban would be a stipulation, the answer was that he'd be happy to do it, happy to put it in. Fine. PUT IT IN LEGALLY ENFORCEABLE WRITING.
Then read every word of what gets filed. This company has a documented history of lying, and federal documents (filed prior to our current crazy corrupt Trump administration) prove that.
In 2023 the SEC found that Prime Group lied to its own investors. The fund was paying a 3 percent brokerage fee on property purchases, and that money was going to a brokerage firm owned outright by Prime's CEO, Robert Moser. Nearly $18 million of it between 2017 and 2021. Prime's offering documents listed other fees paid to affiliates and left that one out. When investors asked directly, in writing, whether any such arrangement existed, Prime told them it didn't. It did. Prime paid $20,571,822 to settle, and roughly $21.9 million went back to investors this past May.
Sophisticated investors asked this company a direct written question, and got a direct written answer that was false. Those investors had lawyers, contracts, and due diligence questionnaires. Holly Springs residents will have a permit document and a city with no enforcement staff.
So expect the stipulation to be written the way the answers were: a ban on Flock instead of a ban on facial recognition, a ban on chatbots instead of a ban on surveillance work. The permit has to close the gap, not restate the dodge.
WHO WE ARE DEALING WITH
Prime Storage is owned by Prime Group Holdings, a private equity real estate firm founded and run by Robert J. Moser out of Saratoga Springs, New York.
On September 5, 2023, the SEC issued a settled order finding that Prime Group made inadequate disclosures and materially misleading statements in the offering of Prime Storage Fund II. From 2017 through 2021, the fund paid nearly $18 million in brokerage fees to a real estate brokerage wholly owned by Moser, which made it an affiliate under securities law. The offering documents disclosed a 1 percent acquisition fee and a 5 percent property management fee paid to affiliates, and omitted the separate 3 percent brokerage fee. Investors who asked directly, through due diligence questionnaires, about broker arrangements and affiliate relationships were told no such relationships or fees existed. Prime settled for $20,571,822 without admitting or denying the findings. With interest, $21,941,064.97 was approved on May 1, 2026 for distribution back to investors.
Sources:
This is the company now asking Holly Springs to accept verbal assurances about noise, water, emissions, expansion, and tenants. Institutional investors with lawyers and contracts asked this company direct questions in writing and got answers that cost it twenty million dollars. Residents of Rabbit Hill Road will have a permit document and nothing else.
WHAT THEY PROMISED
The meeting opened with land use attorney Parks Huff introducing himself and explaining the process, joined by Prime Group staff, an engineer, and construction and development people.
They described converting roughly 30 to 40 percent of the existing 58,000 square foot building while the rest stays self storage, no change to the footprint, about three months of construction. On water, a closed loop system filled one time with roughly 25,000 gallons trucked in, no municipal water, no discharge to sewer or the detention pond. On power, three backup generators running only during outages and monthly daytime testing at one hour each, never for primary generation. On noise, a sound wall, anti vibration mats, baffled chillers, and a sound engineer designing attenuation. No tax abatements sought, 15 to 20 jobs expected.
They also committed on the record to a dBC low frequency sound study, publicly available sound monitoring reports, biodiesel generators as agreed in Marietta, a full emissions report, a stipulation against expansion, and disclosure of the actual tenants in the next filing.
The city can — and should — turn every one of those promises into a written condition on the permit. If it doesn't, they're just things people said at a meeting.
WHAT THEY COULD NOT — OR WOULD NOT — ANSWER
No operational facilities. Four are in lease up, one is going up, nothing runs until November, so they could not produce one person who lives near a finished site. A resident asked for verifiable neighbor references and was told to come back after November. Another said the obvious thing: there's no way to know whether any of this is true.
No tenant. Two possibilities, both under NDA, disclosure promised at a future filing. Everything in the pitch about 911, hospitals, and fraud detection rests on end users nobody was allowed to know.
No revenue discussion. Asked where the money comes from, a Prime representative said this was a public information session and that company revenue wasn't something he would know. The questioner noted that an executive not knowing how his company makes money is a convenient position to hold.
No sound baseline. The team acknowledged that establishing ambient noise would take roughly a six month survey, and that their own study is preliminary and about 90 percent finished. Without a baseline, "we'll meet the ordinance" is uncheckable. A Wentworth resident half a mile out said the application's claim about an existing vegetative buffer is nonsense, because he can already hear the freeway and construction from his front porch.
No consistency on expansion. Minutes after promising six megawatts forever, a member of the applicant's team laid out the advantages of building clusters that back each other up, citing connectivity they already have with Marietta. Two residents caught it and said so, twice.
Nothing on property values. Earlier in the night, a woman who retired from a data center after more than 20 years said her facility's neighbors hated it and property values dropped, and asked why anyone would put one in a residential area. Later, asked directly about home values here, Huff answered first in terms of how the building looks from the road, and when the questioner pressed that her concern was the knowledge of a data center rather than the view, said he isn't aware of any study showing an effect. A Prime representative added that he doesn't have a property value study and that this is a very small facility.
Nothing on decommissioning. Asked what happens when the technology moves on, the answer was that the space reverts to self storage. Nobody asked who pays to pull out the chillers, generators, transformers, and electrical build out, or what happens if the tenant folds and the equipment sits.
And nothing on the people who live closest. There is no impact study. The impact questions in the application were answered "N/A."
WHY WAS THE MEETING IN WOODSTOCK?
Nobody asked, and nothing in two hours of recording explains it. A Holly Springs project, affecting Holly Springs neighborhoods, decided by the Holly Springs council, was presented in a different city. DeFlock Cherokee flagged the same oddity beforehand and said the choice beats them too.
It may be nothing more than room availability. It's still worth knowing who booked the room, who paid, and whether any Holly Springs venue was considered, which is why it's on the records list below. A meeting held outside the affected city is harder for the affected residents to attend, and 150 of them made the drive anyway.
THE ATTORNEY'S OTHER CLIENT
Parks Huff also represents the group developing the Bobo property at Marlboro Road and Rabbit Hill Road, a 203 home development whose traffic plan routes cars onto Rabbit Hill rather than Marlboro. A resident raised it.
Same attorney, same two roads. In one proceeding the traffic is negligible and in the other it's somebody else's problem. The question got deflected to the engineer, then waved off with an assurance that Marlboro Road won't be blocked.
The Planning Commission should require a traffic analysis covering both projects together, because the people who live there will experience both.
"WE PAY CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS"
A longtime resident said she'd watched Holly Springs approve things residents didn't want for years, and asked how much Prime Storage was paying them as a kickback. The room cheered.
A Prime representative answered that they don't pay elected officials. They pay campaign contributions. It's all public, he said, and anyone can look it up. No kickbacks, ever, to anybody.
Look at what he's actually saying. Money handed to the official who votes on your permit is a kickback, and it's a crime. Money handed to that same official's campaign fund is a contribution, and it's perfectly legal. Same company, same official, same permit, same reason for writing the check. The only thing that changes is which account it lands in. He wasn't denying that Prime gives money to the people deciding this. He was pointing out that the way Prime does it is allowed.
Legal isn't the standard anybody cares about here. A company with a permit in front of the council writing checks to the people voting on it stinks whether or not it's a crime. And he's right that it's public, which means residents can find out exactly who took what before December.
So go look it up.
Georgia campaign finance disclosures are public and free at https://efile.ethics.ga.gov. Pull the filings for Mayor Ryan Shirley and every sitting council member. Search the contributor lists for Prime Group Holdings, Prime Storage, The Edge, Alosanar, CBRE, Parks Huff, Sams Larkin Huff, and the names of their executives and family members. Check the Bobo property developers while you're in there, since the same attorney represents both projects.
Send us whatever you find, including nothing. A clean record is worth knowing too. If you've got fundraiser invitations, event photos, or receipts from anything local, we want those.
WHY HOLLY SPRINGS, AND THE HOLE IN THE CODE
The county passed a moratorium, so who approved this, and how do we get one here? Huff answered plainly. The Cherokee County moratorium applies to unincorporated Cherokee County only. Holly Springs has its own zoning authority, so the county's pause does nothing inside the city. The resident who asked said it had been bugging the hell out of him, and thanked him for the straight answer.
(Plenty of people assumed a county moratorium covered the whole county, so here's why it doesn't. The Georgia Constitution, Article IX, Section II, Paragraph IV gives zoning power directly to the governing authority of each county and of each municipality, making them coequal inside their own boundaries. A county's ordinances govern its own jurisdiction, the unincorporated area, and most county zoning codes say exactly that on the first page. County rules can't override city rules here because they never reached inside the city to begin with. So every incorporated city is its own hole in the map. Woodstock, Canton, Ball Ground, Waleska, Mountain Park, and Holly Springs each need their own moratorium and code definition, and the only body that can pause this project is the Holly Springs mayor and council. It also makes annexation a pressure valve worth watching countywide, since land under the county's moratorium can step out from under it by joining a city with no data center rules.)
A licensed Georgia contractor asked the sharper version: the property is zoned general commercial, and a data center is light or heavy industrial, so what are they doing about zoning?
Most zoning codes contain no definition of a data center at all, Huff said. Holly Springs has a conditional use permit category for utilities, written for things like phone and gas, and that's the category this application uses. He compared it to an old cable utility building near Highway 140, and noted a Marietta facility that's been there 20 years without anyone knowing.
That's the loophole, in two halves. Converting part of an existing structure avoids the scrutiny a new build draws, because there's no new footprint, no grading, no site plan fight, and the visual argument becomes "nothing is changing." And with no definition of a data center in the code, there's no threshold to trip, no standard to meet, no specific review to trigger. The facility gets called a utility because the code has a slot for utilities and no slot for this.
Asked how the project came to Holly Springs, Huff said that from Prime's perspective the city was irrelevant, in the sense that the company already owned the facility and it happened to sit inside the city limits. Prime brought the idea to the city, and the city told them which permit to file.
So here is the demand that belongs at the center of this fight:
Holly Springs should adopt its own moratorium on data center applications and amend its code to define data centers as a distinct use with measurable standards. Cherokee County did it in July and extended it to 180 days in August, unanimously, after a packed hearing where eleven residents spoke and not one favored data centers. Marietta did a version of it. Holly Springs can do it.
Prime owns 17 Georgia properties and has a national program to convert storage buildings. Without a code definition, this permit is the first of several, each approved under a category written for phone lines.
WHAT THE LEGISLATURE DIDN'T DO
Somebody is going to tell you the state will handle this. The state already tried and failed.
Georgia's 2026 session opened in January with a stack of data center bills and adjourned in the early hours of April 3 having passed none of them. Four of those bills would have changed this fight directly.
House Bill 1059 would have stopped it cold. The Data Center Impact Assessment and Development Moratorium Act of 2026, sponsored by Rep. Derrick Jackson of Tyrone, would have barred every county and city in Georgia from issuing construction permits for new data centers from July 1, 2026 through December 31, 2028. Had it passed, Holly Springs could not legally approve this permit in December. It died in the House Technology and Infrastructure Innovation Committee. https://legiscan.com/GA/bill/HB1059/2025
Senate Bill 34 would have protected your power bill. Sponsored by Republican Sen. Chuck Hufstetler of Rome, it would have barred utilities from passing data center infrastructure costs on to everyone else. Hufstetler said 80 percent of Georgians supported it. Senate leaders abruptly adjourned a March session just before the vote, and a weaker House version also failed. Without it, whatever grid costs this facility creates stay on the table for ratepayers.
Senate Bills 408 and 410 would have ended the state tax break. One would have sunset the data center sales tax exemption in 2027, the other would have killed it for new facilities. Neither made it. The exemption now runs through 2032, and Georgia is giving up an estimated $2.5 billion in revenue this fiscal year, rising toward $3 billion next year. That's money not going to schools, roads, or anything else.
Transparency bills would have forced the disclosure this applicant is refusing. They would have required data centers to report their water and electricity use, and barred local governments from signing nondisclosure agreements that hide those numbers. Neither reached the governor's desk. NDAs are the exact reason Prime says it can't name its tenants.
So every tool that might have covered Holly Springs from the outside is gone until at least the 2027 session, which starts after this permit is decided. A Monroe County resident said it plainly when the session ended: the power now lies with local government, and there's going to be a lot of pressure on local officials.
That's what's left. The Holly Springs mayor and council are the only people who can stop this before December, and they know it.
Sources:
MARIETTA LOST AND STILL GOT SOMETHING
Marietta is the same company, the same conversion, the same fight, a short drive south of here, a month ago. It's the closest thing anyone has to a preview of how Holly Springs goes.
In July, Prime applied to convert part of its Powers Ferry Place facility in Marietta into an 18 megawatt data center, labeled "regional mission critical digital infrastructure." Huff described that site at the meeting: a 90,000 square foot former Pace warehouse with roughly 40,000 square feet converted, about three times the size of what's proposed here.
Hundreds of residents packed City Hall. The council tabled the vote and passed a six month moratorium that didn't apply to Prime's already filed application. On August 12, over public outcry at another packed hearing, the council approved it five to two.
The opposition still got conditions written into the approval: independent sound studies, continuous monitoring, silencers on coolers and generators, and no use of city water or wastewater. Most significantly, Prime agreed not to build at its other Marietta facilities, cancelling 48 megawatts of planned capacity.
Sources:
Marietta shows what November and December can realistically produce. Residents didn't stop the project, and they still walked away with monitoring requirements the city can enforce and a promise that killed three other conversions. Showing up changed the terms even when it didn't change the vote.
THE STIPULATIONS CHECKLIST
Specific asks produce specific conditions. Here's what we're pushing, with Marietta's conditions as the floor rather than the ceiling.
Numeric sound limits. Written dBA and dBC limits at the property line and the nearest residential property line, not averaged, including nighttime limits.
An independent baseline before approval. Ambient monitoring by a third party the city selects and the applicant pays for, covering the low frequency range, filed publicly before any vote.
Continuous monitoring after construction. Permanent third party monitors, applicant funded, data published on the city website, automatic penalties for exceedances up to shutdown.
Silencers and enclosures on every cooler and generator, plus anti vibration mounting, written as a requirement rather than a design intention.
No municipal water or wastewater for cooling, ever, in any operating mode, with the closed loop and leak containment requirements written in and inspected. Include the initial fill, any refill, flush, or glycol replacement, with volumes and sources reported annually.
Biodiesel for all generators, testing restricted to weekday daytime hours, a cap on total annual runtime that includes outage runtime, and a written prohibition on primary power generation.
A full emissions report filed before the Planning Commission vote rather than after.
The tenant's name and what its software does, written into the application before the vote. If the tenant can't be named before approval, postpone the vote until it can be.
A surveillance ban on the activity, not the company. No tenant may perform, host, or process biometric identification, facial recognition, gait or body recognition, automated license plate reading, video or audio analytics, gunshot detection, location or movement tracking, social media monitoring, predictive policing, or data fusion for any law enforcement, intelligence, military, or immigration enforcement agency, no matter who owns the camera.
A hard megawatt cap at the delivered service level, with a no expansion covenant and a requirement that any increase returns to full public hearing. Prime's own team pointed out that permit stipulations attach to the land rather than to the current tenant or owner, which means a cap written this way survives a sale, a new tenant, or a new operator. Ask the city to write it that way on purpose.
A square footage cap as a number, not a percentage, since percentages of an unstated denominator aren't enforceable.
A staffing plan in writing, since the podium said 15 to 20 six figure jobs and the slide said a few technical employees.
A written answer on the state tax exemption, meaning whether Prime or its tenant plans to claim Georgia's sales and use tax exemption for data centers, which runs through 2032.
Disclosure of Prime's total planned Georgia load across all its properties, so the city can see whether it's approving one small facility or one node of something larger.
Traffic analysis covering this project and the Bobo property together.
A decommissioning bond posted before construction, sized to remove all equipment and restore the site, with a defined vacancy trigger.
A revocation clause. Any violation of any condition voids the conditional use permit.
WHO ENFORCES ANY OF THIS
One of our members came away from the meeting with a question that was left unanswered.
Most of it sounded pretty benign to him. Not a lot of power, closed loop cooling, a limited share of the building and no more, same footprint, noise barriers on generators that only run for backup. His problem was that those promises aren't in the permit as stipulations yet, and he's skeptical about whether the company stays inside its stated bounds. His question: the company's record isn't great, so do we expect Holly Springs to hold them accountable?
Honestly, no. Not as things stand.
Everything presented on Tuesday sounded benign because it was engineered to. That's what an experienced land use team is paid to produce. A conditional use permit with numbered conditions creates an obligation, and only to the extent someone measures compliance and acts when it fails.
Holly Springs has no data center definition in its code, no acoustic monitoring capacity, no low frequency measurement equipment, and no enforcement staff assigned to anything like this. Code enforcement in a small city is complaint driven, which puts the burden of proving a violation on a resident with a phone app, arguing against a company with an acoustics consultant on retainer. In practice that means the homeowner loses.
Which is why the Marietta conditions matter as a template. Third party monitors, applicant funded, data published, penalties that trigger automatically. Those move the burden off the neighbor and onto the operator. Anything weaker is a promise with no way to enforce it.
Stipulations or nothing. That's what the next two hearings come down to.
POWER, YOUR BILL, AND THE 100 MEGAWATT LOOPHOLE
Who pays for the power? The answer from the applicant's side was that Prime pays commercial rates, that the company is responsible for replacing whatever reserve capacity it draws from the substation, and that the facility runs at a constant draw instead of spiking during peak demand hours. None of that was verifiable at the meeting, and the person making the claim doesn't work for Georgia Power.
Georgia has a rule meant to keep data centers from shifting costs onto households. The Public Service Commission adopted terms allowing Georgia Power to bill new large load customers for site specific costs plus upstream generation, transmission, and distribution, and requiring new contracts in that category to be submitted to the PSC for review. It applies to customers using more than 100 megawatts.
Congress is moving the same way. On September 16, 2026, the U.S. House passed the Ratepayer Protection Act, H.R. 9340, by 417 to 3, directing state regulators to consider standards making data centers cover the full cost of the grid upgrades built to serve them. It now sits in the Senate. It applies at 100 megawatts or more.
Georgia's legislature reached for the same number. Senate Bill 34 defined a commercial data center as a facility or group of interconnected facilities with a peak demand of 100 megawatts or more. The state rule that exists, the state bill that failed, and the federal bill in the Senate all draw the line in the same place.
This facility is six megawatts. Or ten, depending which company document you read. Either way it's nowhere near 100, so none of the three touches it. No special billing terms, no PSC contract review, no federal standard, no state statute in any version anyone has drafted. Prime buys power on ordinary commercial terms, and every ratepayer protection fought for in the last two years misses this building entirely.
Now put that next to Prime's strategy of converting storage properties one at a time, and next to the clustering pitch the team gave. Senate Bill 34 tried to close exactly this by counting interconnected facilities together, which fairly describes what residents were told Prime wants to build. That bill is dead.
One 100 megawatt campus triggers every review on the books. Twenty facilities at five megawatts each, scattered across a metro area and linked so they back each other up, trigger none of it and end up in roughly the same place. Whether that was the design, we can't say. The effect is identical either way, and Holly Springs should assume a sophisticated private equity firm knows where the thresholds sit.
In December 2025 the PSC certified nearly 10,000 megawatts of new generation, roughly 80 percent of it expected to serve large customers like data centers. Georgia Power's base rates are frozen through 2028 under a 2025 PSC order. What happens after 2028, and who absorbs the cost of that new generation, is the live question in state politics right now.
So the questions for Holly Springs are: what are the interconnection terms for this site, who pays for any substation upgrade, and is anything about this project subject to PSC review at all. We're putting those to the Commission directly. If ratepayers carry any part of it, the people who packed that rec center are paying for this facility whether or not they ever benefit from it.
A resident with 340 units a quarter mile away made the sharpest related point. Georgia Power's outage record means those "monthly testing only" generators will run considerably more than the twelve hours a year per generator being advertised, and no cap on outage runtime has been proposed. She had lived through a neighbor's whole house generator running three days and shaking her house.
Sources:
OPEN RECORDS WORTH FILING
These requests haven't been filed yet. Any resident can file them, and the more of us who do, the harder they are to slow walk. If you file one, send us what comes back. The city's portal is at https://www.hollyspringsga.us/295/Open-Records-Requests
All communications between city staff or elected officials and Prime Group Holdings, Prime Storage, The Edge, Alosanar, CBRE, Parks Huff, or Sams Larkin Huff regarding this property or any data center, including pre application meeting notes and calendars.
The complete permit file, including any revisions filed after September 22.
All records regarding the selection, booking, and cost of the September 22 meeting venue, including any consideration of a Holly Springs location.
The slide deck presented at the meeting, in full, with any handouts distributed that night.
The preliminary sound report the applicant's engineer said is roughly 90 percent complete and already in his possession.
The city's written standards of review for a conditional use permit, and any staff report prepared for the Planning Commission.
Any correspondence between the city and the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office, Cherokee County, or any other government agency regarding this facility or its capacity.
Georgia's Open Records Act gives agencies three business days to respond. Filing before mid October means having documents in hand with time to read them.
WHAT OUR MEMBERS SAW
Tech Watch volunteers attended, and their reads differed.
One member came away less concerned than he went in. Smaller footprint than the mega campus he'd feared, storage units stay, one portion of the building converted. He also noted that not everyone felt the same and there were tense moments.
Others landed elsewhere. One pointed out that a smaller footprint says nothing about impact on the people living right next to it, that the website and application numbers don't match, and that refusing to say "data center" for the first hour was its own answer. She added that she wouldn't want to live near it, and that nobody has studied what it does to the people who do. Another said the presentation was believable in person and meaningless on paper, because none of it is a stipulation yet.
Both reactions point to the same next step. Whether you left calmer or angrier, the promises that made you calmer only exist if the city writes them into the permit with teeth. If the project is as modest as described, the applicant should have no objection to saying so in an enforceable document. If he objects, that tells you something.
Among the residents asking questions that night: an AI engineer, a data center retiree of two decades, a corporate compliance officer, someone who knew the difference between A weighted and C weighted measurement, and a licensed Georgia contractor. He put it bluntly. If you think you don't have power, you're being lied to.
One member expects approval regardless, with enforcement as the only recourse afterward. He may well be right, which is the strongest argument for making every condition specific, measurable, and enforceable before any vote.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT
Planning Commission: November 12
Mayor and Council: December 2
Both dates come from the applicant's team, who called the November date anticipated rather than set. Verify before you make plans. December 2, 2026 falls on a Wednesday, and published information indicates the council meets the first and third Monday, so this date in particular needs checking against the city calendar. We'll confirm both and post any change. Agendas and minutes are at https://www.hollyspringsga.us/AgendaCenter
The applicant's team confirmed nothing is scheduled between now and November 12, and that the sound study, emissions report, and tenant disclosure will be filed shortly before that hearing rather than now. Seven weeks to organize, and a narrow window to read documents before the first vote.
Six things you can do.
1. Read the reporting and the application, then bring the questions they raise for you. https://deflockcherokee.com/blog/holly-springs-data-center
2. Write the mayor and every council member, by name, individually. Form letters get counted once. Individual letters get read.
Mayor Ryan Shirley, rshirley@hollyspringsga.us
Mayor Pro Tem, Ward 3, Michael Roy Zenchuk II, mzenchuk@hollyspringsga.us
Ward 1, Kyle Whitaker, kwhitaker@hollyspringsga.us
Ward 2, Dee Phillips, dphillips@hollyspringsga.us
Ward 4, Kevin Moore, kmoore@hollyspringsga.us
Ward 5, Jeff Wilbur, jwilbur@hollyspringsga.us
City Council page: https://www.hollyspringsga.us/164/City-Council
3. Submit written comment into the record before November 12. Spoken comment gets three minutes and a memory. Written comment becomes part of the file the commission reviews and part of the record any appeal is built on. Send it to the city clerk, copy the mayor and council, and ask for written confirmation that it was entered into the file for the case.
4. Sign up to speak at both hearings. Sign up early, pick one point, and bring a number or a document with you.
5. Demand a Holly Springs moratorium and a code definition for data centers. This permit exists because of a gap in the code. Ask every council member, in writing, whether they support closing it, and publish their answers.
6. Record everything. Bring a phone, record audio and video, go live if you can, and keep your files. Georgia's Open Meetings Act expressly permits visual and sound recording during open meetings. Getting records of local meetings after the fact has been a problem around here, and the record we keep is the record that exists.
Join Tech Watch at https://www.ngacan.org and we'll make sure you know what's been filed, when the hearings are, what the documents say, and what to say when you get your three minutes. Then get in with DeFlock Cherokee, who broke this story and map every camera in the county: https://deflockcherokee.com and deflockcherokee@proton.me
One last thing, for the member who said he wishes people got this engaged about everything else. So do we. People show up when the threat has an address, and this one has one: 300 Rabbit Hill Road. The job now is keeping the hundred and fifty who stood along that wall, because the next fight will have an address too.
They're counting on seven quiet weeks. Let's not give them one.
A NOTE ON SOURCING
This account comes from audio and video recorded by NGA CAN volunteers, conversations with people who attended, the permit file, and the sources linked throughout. We're volunteers, we're human, and we make mistakes. If we got something wrong, tell us and we'll correct it.
Comments