MARIETTA — Residents opposed to a massive data center approved for a Bells Ferry Road site in Marietta are still planning to pack Wednesday night’s city council meeting, even though the agenda contains no item related to data centers.
How we got here
Two activist groups, A Better Cobb and Not For Us — Cobb County, began urging residents to attend the June 10 meeting at least a week ago, and this outlet reported on the planned turnout June 4.
By June 5, city officials were calling the groups’ claims “misinformation” — but at that point, the agenda had not yet been finalized. The Marietta City Council set the agenda Monday, June 8, with a draft posted later that day. The published agenda contains no mention of data centers.
It remains unclear if there were prior discussions within the city about a data center item appearing on the agenda prior to the city’s June 5 statement about the agenda.
Residents can still speak
Even without a data center item on the agenda, both groups are encouraging residents to attend and speak during the public comment period. The meeting includes an unscheduled appearances section that allows members of the public up to five minutes each, with a combined total of 30 minutes. Several residents have already signed up to speak during the scheduled apearances portion of the meeting.
The project that sparked the outcry
The controversy centers on a hyperscale data center — a large industrial facility that processes enormous amounts of data — already approved for 31.4 acres at 1751 Bells Ferry Road. The Marietta City Council voted unanimously in June 2025 to rezone the site from retail commercial to light industrial, clearing the way for Atlanta-based Grind Capital Group to build two buildings totaling 347,200 square feet. At 105 feet tall, the structures would stand higher than an eight-story building and draw a combined 108 megawatts of power — roughly equivalent, according to the developer’s attorney, to the power used by 80,000 homes.
The developer’s attorney told the council the project would bring significant tax revenue to the city and to the Marietta City School System, and that the cost of building an on-site electrical substation would not be passed on to customers of Marietta’s municipal power utility. The developer put the job count at 40. The opposition group, citing public records, puts the permanent job count at between 5 and 20.
During the June 2025 meeting, Ward 6 council member Andre Sims questioned the developer directly about heat coming off the facility. The developer acknowledged it would produce “a lot of heat.” Sims voted yes. No independent environmental or health impact study was required before the vote.
What opponents are pointing to
Not For Us — Cobb County cites a 2024 study from the University of California, Riverside and Caltech finding that training one large artificial intelligence model produces air pollutants equal to 10,000 round-trip car trips between Los Angeles and New York. The same research projected 600,000 asthma cases per year nationally by 2030 and 1,300 premature deaths per year tied to data center air pollution. The group also points to Bloomberg reporting that wholesale electricity prices near data center hubs have climbed 267 percent over five years. The group has not presented data specific to this site or this facility.
Why the county moratorium does not apply
In February 2026, the Cobb County Board of Commissioners placed a temporary pause on new data center applications in unincorporated parts of the county while studying their effects. That pause does not apply here. The Bells Ferry Road site sits inside Marietta’s city limits, not in unincorporated Cobb County, and the zoning was approved nearly a year ago. DeKalb County and Coweta County have each taken similar pauses — moves that have no bearing on this project but reflect a growing pattern of pushback across Georgia.
Wednesday’s meeting gives residents their next formal opportunity to put concerns on the public record. The council approved the rezoning unanimously in 2025 and would need to take additional steps to change or reverse that decision.
B.T. Clark is an award-winning journalist and the Publisher of The Georgia Sun. He has 25 years of experience in journalism and served as Managing Editor of Neighbor Newspapers in metro Atlanta for 15 years and Digital Director at Times-Journal Inc. for 8 years. His work has appeared in several newspapers throughout the state including Neighbor Newspapers, The Cherokee Tribune and The Marietta Daily Journal. He is a Georgia native and a fifth-generation Georgian.
- B.T. Clark
- B.T. Clark
- B.T. Clark
- B.T. Clark
