Centennial Yards Company has signed a long-term lease with Cosm, the immersive technology and entertainment firm, for a 70,000-square-foot, three-level venue at the edge of Mercedes-Benz Stadium and State Farm Arena. It will be Cosm's third location and its first in the eastern United States, following venues in Los Angeles and Texas.
The draw is the dome. Cosm's venues are built around an 87-foot-diameter LED dome running at 12K and above, wrapping the audience in what the company markets as “Shared Reality” — live sports, concerts, and art shows presented at a scale meant to feel closer to attending than to watching. Gensler designed the Atlanta venue, which pairs the dome with elevated dining rather than arena concessions.
Placement matters here as much as technology. The venue lands inside the 7.5-acre Sports and Entertainment District, itself a slice of the broader 50-acre, $5 billion Centennial Yards project rising in the Gulch. That district is being built against a hard deadline: completion in time for the FIFA World Cup matches that begin in June 2026. Alongside Cosm, it is slated to include a 230-room hotel, a plaza, a retail building, and a music venue.
Cosm arrives with a content pipeline already assembled. The company holds partnerships with ESPN, the NBA, NBC Sports, TNT Sports, FOX Sports, and UFC, and its programming slate extends past sports to Cirque du Soleil's “O” and immersive art experiences. That mix is what makes the lease meaningful for the Gulch: an arena or a stadium fills on event nights, while a venue with a rotating slate of sports, performance, and art has a reason to be open the rest of the week.
The logic behind the whole district follows from that. Downtown Atlanta already has two of the busiest large venues in the country sitting a few hundred feet apart. What the blocks between them have historically lacked is anything to do before or after a game. Dropping an immersive dome into that gap is a bet that the district can hold a crowd rather than just move one through.
Original reporting by Josh Green for Urbanize Atlanta, published July 2024.
