A campus bigger than the models it will train
OpenAI announced Project Camellia on July 22, naming a 1,441-acre site at the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub in Effingham County, Georgia, near the town of Rincon. The plan calls for four buildings and 3.2 gigawatts of power under a 25-year agreement with Georgia Power, delivered in phases between 2028 and 2032. The disclosed initial investment is at least $20 billion, and the company's vice president of compute strategy, Sachin Katti, has said the full build-out will exceed $30 billion. It is the first campus OpenAI designs, builds and operates itself rather than leasing from a third party, and it sits inside the wider Stargate programme.
The bottleneck is power, not ideas
The schedule explains the current mood in the industry. Nothing from Camellia reaches production before 2028, while model releases keep arriving. On September 21 alone, xAI shipped Grok 4.7 at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output, and Xiaomi put its MiMo-V2.6 series on Hugging Face under an MIT licence. Labs can ship weights faster than utilities can string wire.
Why memory and vacuum hardware matter
Every new campus pulls on the same upstream chain: high-bandwidth memory, advanced logic chips, and the deposition and etch equipment used to make them. Analysts have flagged HBM supply as the tightest link for 2027, and equipment makers report longer lead times for parts that must hold ultra-high vacuum. Keeping rotary motion inside that vacuum without breaking the seal is one of the smaller problems that decides whether a fab line stays up.
The water and the grid
OpenAI says the Georgia site will use a closed-loop water system, a response to local concerns about draw from the Savannah River basin. Georgia Power's filings show the load arriving gradually, which leaves the region exposed to rate cases and construction delays. For now the clearest signal from Camellia is arithmetic: compute demand is growing faster than the electricity, land and machines needed to serve it.
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