Jacqueline Lassetter wanted to see America’s biggest data center. So one day in July last year, at the age of 78, she jumped into a car with her daughter, Daphne, and headed west across the muddy Chattahoochee River, leaving their wooded Georgia home for the Nevada desert. A week later, she was standing in front of the Citadel Campus, owned by data center company Switch, which lies along a stretch of highway outside of Reno, Nevada more than 2,000 miles from her home.
Lassetter was finally able to imagine what might soon be coming to her doorstep in Coweta County, Georgia: a gigantic, windowless computing complex emitting a strange hum.
The mother-daughter duo had made the trip after learning about plans to build an enormous data center complex called Project Sail on roughly 830 acres of land outside of the town of Newnan, about 35 miles southwest of Atlanta. That’s the equivalent of about 600 football fields of industrial development in a landscape of rolling back roads lined with houses and farms. San Francisco-based Prologis, one of the world’s biggest real estate companies, is the main backer of the development. But Prologis kept its role in the project hidden for months while Atlas Development, LLC — a company based in nearby Carrollton, Georgia, with no known record of building data centers, and only a handful of employees — served as the project’s public face.
