AWS Advances Georgia Expansion with Planned Data Center and $100M Water Facility in Covington
December 18, 2025
Amazon Web Services is advancing its major infrastructure push in the Southeastern United States with plans for a new data center in Covington, Georgia, supported by a significant investment in sustainable water infrastructure. The move underscores the intense competition among cloud giants to secure capacity and resources in strategic markets to support growing demand, particularly from artificial intelligence workloads.
The cloud computing division of Amazon.com Inc. has reached a $100 million agreement with the city of Covington to construct a dedicated water reclamation and cooling facility, a critical piece of infrastructure for the planned data center. The deal was approved by the Covington City Council during a meeting on December 15. The data center itself is slated for development along Alcovy Road, just north of Atlanta.
Amazon spokeswoman Simone Griffin framed the project as a community and environmental investment. "This new project is expected to generate significant new tax revenues to support local priorities such as schools, public safety, and infrastructure, creating meaningful benefits for the community," Griffin stated. She highlighted the project's water efficiency, noting, "We are also proud of our water innovations as part of this project, which limits water usage to only six percent of the year, with the remaining 94 percent relying on only outside air for cooling."
The company further emphasized that the new reclaimed water system is designed to preserve over 45 million gallons of freshwater annually once operational. This Covington initiative is part of AWS's broader $11 billion investment plan for Georgia, announced earlier this year, which is also focused on sites in Butts County and Douglas County. AWS had previously acquired 430 acres of land in the Covington area for $36 million in early 2024, though its specific use was not confirmed at the time.
While AWS has not disclosed the scale or IT capacity of the planned Covington facility, a separate large-scale development in the immediate vicinity may offer clues. In March 2025, an entity named Universal Planning LLC filed plans for a massive data center campus on Gregory Road, which intersects with Alcovy Road. That proposed "Gregory Road Data Center" campus would span approximately 213 acres, feature multiple buildings totaling up to 1.41 million square feet, and represent a potential investment of up to $5.7 billion. The Covington City Council agenda referred to the AWS-related project as "Project Lighthouse," a codename also associated with data center developments in neighboring Douglas County.
The Atlanta metropolitan region, including Newton County where Covington is located, has become a focal point for data center development. Meta Platforms Inc. operates a facility nearby in Social Circle, and other developers like Sailfish Investors and TPA have recently proposed additional campuses in the county totaling millions of square feet. AWS's latest move, coupled with its substantial investment in proprietary water management, signals a strategic deepening of its physical infrastructure in a key growth corridor, ensuring resource security and operational efficiency as it scales to meet future compute demands.
Source: datacenterdynamics
AWS Advances Georgia Expansion with Planned Data Center and $100M Water Facility in Covington
