Atlanta's data center pipeline now runs through county commissions

Atlanta has claimed the top spot in American data center construction on the strength of 2,882 megawatts under way against 1,803 already operating, a pipeline close to 1.6 times the standing base that in most property types would spell oversupply and in this one spells a scramble for power. The Real Deal reported the CBRE finding, crediting WSB-TV 2 for the megawatt counts.

Megawatts are a power statistic as much as a real estate one, which is why the ranking moved: Atlanta's under-construction total tops every other primary U.S. market and displaces Virginia, the previous leader, while Texas, which held the crown before Virginia, has stalled under strict new state-mandated audits. Nothing in the three reasons CBRE gives for Georgia's rise is unique to Georgia: tax incentives, a strong construction workforce and a friendly state business environment are all copyable, which is how the title has changed hands twice now. The demand side is not in question; the coverage describes a national development spree driven by the race to build artificial intelligence and by the economy's growing dependence on AI companies.

The coverage does not publish the under-construction figure for Virginia or Texas, so the margin of Atlanta's lead is unknown: first place is the claim, and by how much is not in it.

The two things CBRE says will decide whether the run continues are enough power for the load AI now requires and project approvals. CBRE, whose research desk produced the count, brokered the Norwalk office trade this publication covered in August, when two buildings sold to a joint venture planning 286 apartments. Neither constraint the report flags is a macro variable; one is settled by a utility, the other by a county commission.

Follow the capital and the same split appears: what institutional money is buying in this cycle is power, land, cooling and the position in an interconnection queue that determines when a campus can energize. The Atlanta count keeps score on the real estate side of that trade, and Georgia's incentives and construction labor are what pulled the score in its favor. Land can be optioned and capital raised; a queue position cannot be conjured, which is why the energization calendar sets the pace of this asset class. None of it matters if the electrons do not arrive.

Georgia Tech's Data Center Ordinance Hub tracks land use ordinances city by city and county by county, and it counted 39 moratoriums enacted between September 2025 and July 2026, roughly one every nine days. Nine had expired by July 2026 or earlier, leaving 30 that had not lapsed, and Decatur County's carries no expiration date at all, the hub notes. The pauses can run as long as a year, which is enough time to reset a project's schedule.

None of it shows up in the construction count, because the count sees only projects that already cleared; a campus under construction has by definition won its approvals. That matters more here than the headline suggests, since the state that now leads the country in megawatts under way is also the state where 39 local governments wrote moratoriums in eleven months.

The politics have climbed to the statehouse without resolving anything: Sen. Raphael Warnock supports a statewide moratorium while Gov. Brian Kemp supports the developments. Other states have gone further than Georgia has. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has put a one-year freeze on data center development, Texas has made building and interconnecting to its grid harder, and Palm Beach County in Florida has paused new projects. The concerns residents raise, power bills and water use, land on households and local supply rather than on the tenant's lease.

The statehouse fight carries the largest single consequence for the pipeline: a statewide moratorium would replace 39 local calendars with one, and it would fall on the market CBRE just ranked first in the country for megawatts under construction. Georgia's two most prominent voices on the question point in opposite directions, and the counties have not waited for them to settle it.

The two constraints CBRE names are decided by the same local process: a county grants the land use and a utility grants the interconnection, and the second gets harder as queues fill with requests sized for AI campuses. A market's real capacity lives in whether its utilities and commissions can say yes on a schedule that matches a hyperscaler's, which is a different asset than a land inventory or an incentive package. As this publication has argued, the data center trade has become a county-level power and land game, and Atlanta's promotion is the cleanest evidence yet: the country's leading construction market sits in a state whose counties spent the past year writing moratoriums.

Treat the 2,882 megawatts as a green light and you are buying the last cycle's approvals at this cycle's prices. The megawatts under construction are financed and going up, and the inputs that will price what comes after them are substation capacity and commission calendars. The nine expired moratoriums are the number to watch, since a pause that lapses and gets renewed turns today's pipeline into tomorrow's ceiling. Decatur County's open-ended order is the one ordinance in the hub with no end date attached to it.