The timing could hardly be sharper. In the same week the Atlanta City Council voted to ban data centers within a half-mile of MARTA stations and along the BeltLine, a development team filed plans to build a 300,000-square-foot data center downtown, roughly a block from Five Points station.
The Special Administrative Permit filing covers 10 Forsyth St. NW, a 1.08-acre site wedged between Ted Turner Drive and Marietta Street alongside active rail. It is surface parking today. For scale, 300,000 square feet is the same size as The Mitchell, the 19-story apartment tower that just topped out at Centennial Yards a few blocks west.
The application indicates an ordinance grants special use for the property to be remade as a data center, and notes that vertical improvements and streetscape work will be addressed in a separate submittal. Property records list the owner as an LLC called Spring Street Atlanta, which bought the site three years ago for $22.6 million from an affiliate of CIM Group, the developer behind Centennial Yards. The applicant, working through law firm Troutman Pepper, did not respond to Urbanize Atlanta's inquiry. A hearing was set for Oct. 24.
The council legislation, introduced by Jason Dozier and Matt Westmoreland and cosponsored by every other member, rests on a straightforward argument: server farms employ very few people, and the land nearest transit and the BeltLine is the scarcest and most valuable land in the city for housing and commercial uses. Demand for data centers has surged from tech giants including Facebook and Microsoft, and most of that construction has gone to the suburbs.
The Forsyth Street parcel sits inside a Special Public Interest zoning district whose stated purpose is to “preserve, protect, and enhance downtown's role as the civic and economic center of the Atlanta region” and to foster a “24-hour urban environment where people can live, work, meet, and play.” A windowless server building is a difficult fit for that language, which is the tension the hearing will have to resolve.
It would not be the only such facility in the immediate area. Equinix operates a roughly 7,600-square-foot data center next door on the fifth floor of 56 Marietta St. Elsewhere in the city, QTS is expanding its 100-acre campus west of Midtown, considered the largest data center in the Southeast, by more than 36 acres.
What makes this filing worth watching is location rather than size. The block sits between Underground Atlanta, Five Points, and the Gulch, at the center of the area where the most downtown investment is currently concentrated. Whatever gets built there sets the tone for the surrounding streets for decades.
Original reporting by Josh Green for Urbanize Atlanta, published September 2024.
