If a Data Center Comes to Lowndes County, Make It Pay Our Property Taxes

By Ricky Browning — September 2026

I want to be upfront about two things. First, I run a small IT business in Valdosta, so I am the kind of person you’d expect to be excited about a data center, and you should weigh what follows with that in mind. Second, I’ve read the room. On August 25, the commission chamber was standing-room-only and the crowd was not there to cheer. A data center can be a godsend to a county like ours or a curse on it, and I’ve become convinced the difference has almost nothing to do with the data center. It has to do with the deal.

Right now, for sixty days, Lowndes County holds every card it will ever hold. Here’s how I’d play them.

What has Loudoun County, Virginia actually gotten out of data centers?

More money than any county in America. Loudoun County’s own website says data centers generated $1.2 billion in real and personal property tax revenue in fiscal year 2026, about 39 percent of the county’s entire budget, projected to reach $1.3 billion next year. There are roughly 233 data center buildings there, the largest concentration on Earth.

And here’s the part that matters for a homeowner in Hahira: Loudoun has cut its real property tax rate every year for ten straight years, from $1.145 per $100 of assessed value in 2016 to $0.805 in 2026, and this year it cut the vehicle tax too. Its rate is now the lowest in Northern Virginia. That is not a county that raised taxes on families to fund growth. That is a county where the servers pay the bills and the people who live there pay less.

Now the honest half. Three days ago, on September 15, Loudoun’s Board of Supervisors voted 7–1–1 to draft a one-year pause on new data center applications, with a final vote set for October 20. The richest data-center county in the world, sitting on $1.2 billion a year, hit the brakes — over noise, power lines, substations, and what it did to the neighborhoods next door. Board Chair Phyllis Randall was careful to say it’s a pause to write new laws, not a moratorium. Either way, the lesson for us is not subtle: Loudoun is writing the rules after twenty years. Lowndes gets to write them before day one.

How much property tax do all the homes in Lowndes County pay?

Less than you might think, which is exactly why this proposal is realistic. According to the county’s own FY2026 budget, the 2024 assessed value of every residential property in Lowndes County combined was $2.55 billion. The county’s general-fund millage was 5.283 mills in 2024 — rolled back from 8.406 in 2021, because this commission has been genuinely aggressive about cutting it. Multiply those out and the entire county general-fund property tax on every house in Lowndes County is on the order of $13–14 million a year, before homestead exemptions bring it lower. Add the fire district and the other county-wide levies and you’re somewhere around $25 million. School taxes are a separate, larger bill, and I’ll get to those.

Read that last row again. Roughly one percent of what Loudoun’s data centers pay would erase the county property tax bill for every homeowner in Lowndes County.

Could one data center really cover that?

A big one could, and the reason is a detail most people never hear about. In Georgia, the computers inside a data center are taxable personal property, assessed at 40 percent of value like everything else, and a hyperscale AI campus is mostly computers — billions of dollars of them, replaced every few years. That equipment is what generates Loudoun’s revenue. It isn’t the building.

Run the arithmetic on a campus with $2 billion of taxable equipment and construction: 40 percent assessed is $800 million; at roughly 10 mills of county-wide levies that’s about $8 million a year to the county and its districts, plus something on the order of $10 million more to the school system. Around $2 billion is a modest hyperscale campus these days; the larger AI builds run several times that. Scale it up and one project plausibly pays the county general-fund property tax for every home in the county, with school money on top.

Here is the catch, and it is the entire negotiation. In Georgia, the standard way a county lands a big project is for its development authority to take title to the equipment and lease it back, which lets it abate that personal property tax — often for ten years or more, often most of it. Do that, and the godsend evaporates. You get the traffic, the water draw, the transmission lines, and a fraction of the money. The state isn’t going to protect you from a bad local deal, either: the legislature’s attempt to pause Georgia’s data center sales tax exemption was vetoed in 2024, and this year’s Senate Bill 410 to end it passed the Senate in March and died in the House. That exemption runs through 2031. The only leverage this county has is the leverage it keeps for itself.

What should Lowndes County actually put in the ordinance?

Six things, all in writing, all before the moratorium expires. Nothing here is exotic; most of it is how you’d handle any large customer who wants a lot from you.

1. No abatement on the equipment, or a fixed payment in lieu of taxes that isn’t a discount. The buildings can get the normal treatment. The servers pay full freight from day one. If a developer walks over that, they were never going to be a godsend.
2. A Data Center Homestead Credit. Georgia counties can’t mail residents a check, but they can do what Lowndes just did: in May, voters approved four new homestead exemptions worth up to about $300 a year per home starting in 2027, including $40,000 off county taxes for seniors 65 and up. Write the ordinance so every data-center dollar above a baseline funds the next round of those exemptions, by referendum, the same way. That’s the honest version of “pay everybody’s property taxes,” and it’s legal, tested, and already popular here.
3. Ratepayer protection in the power contract. The Georgia Public Service Commission unanimously adopted rules in January 2025 requiring any new Georgia Power customer over 100 megawatts to sign a custom contract, up to 15 years, that can bill it for the generation and transmission it causes — so existing customers don’t subsidize it. The county should require that contract to be in place, and if the site is on an EMC instead, require the equivalent. Nobody’s light bill in Lake Park should go up to power somebody else’s servers.
4. Water in writing. Closed-loop cooling or a hard cap on withdrawals, metered and reported publicly. We live on the Floridan aquifer and the Withlacoochee. This is not the place to find out.
5. Local hiring and training commitments with Wiregrass Georgia Technical College and Valdosta State, with numbers attached, plus setbacks and noise limits measured at the property line so the folks who live next door aren’t the ones paying.
6. A decommissioning bond. Servers get obsolete. If the campus goes dark in fifteen years, the developer, not the county, pays to clean it up.

Chairman Bill Slaughter said in July that the county won’t move forward on any data center until an ordinance is in place. Good. This is what the ordinance is for.

What about the people who don’t want it at all?

They’ve earned a straight answer, and mine is that they may be right. At the August 25 meeting, Valdosta State student Noelle Lundy told commissioners the community “doesn’t want the data center at all,” and Tatiana Babcock put it more sharply: don’t tell us you’re worried about the cost of living while paving the way for an industry that treats human labor as a problem to be solved. Our earlier breakdown of the 720-acre proposal lays out those concerns honestly — power, water, noise, jobs that mostly end when construction does — and the national picture shows Lowndes is not the only place having this argument.

What I’d say to a neighbor who’s opposed is this. The question in front of the county is not whether data centers are good. It’s whether Lowndes County gets paid like Loudoun or gets used like a lot of places that took the abatement and the promises. A deal with the six terms above is one I’d take, because it would cut my property taxes and my neighbors’, and I wouldn’t need to trust anybody’s word for it. A deal without them is one I’d fight next to you. And if that means no data center ever comes, the county will be no worse off than it is today — which, with a rate rolled back from 8.4 to 5.3 mills and a fund balance that survived two hurricanes, is not bad.

Common Questions

How much do data centers pay Loudoun County?
$1.2 billion in property taxes in FY2026, 39% of the county budget, per the county’s own site. The homeowner tax rate has been cut every year since 2016.

Is there a data center moratorium in Lowndes County?
Yes — 60 days, unanimous, passed August 25, 2026, covering unincorporated Lowndes County while an ordinance is written.

Can a Georgia county make a data center pay homeowners’ taxes?
Effectively, yes: don’t abate the equipment tax, then use the revenue to roll back the millage or expand homestead exemptions by referendum, as Lowndes did in May 2026.

Did Georgia end its data center tax break?
No. The 2024 pause was vetoed and SB 410 died in the House this year. It runs through 2031, so the local deal is where the leverage is.

Is Loudoun still approving data centers?
Its board voted 7–1–1 on September 15, 2026 to draft a one-year pause on new applications; the final vote is October 20.

The Bottom Line

A data center can be the best thing that ever happened to a county’s tax bills or one more thing that happened to a county. Loudoun proves the first is possible and, as of this week, proves the second is possible too, even for the winners. The difference is written down in advance or it isn’t.

Lowndes County has sixty days and every bit of leverage it will ever have. Servers pay full tax. The money funds homestead exemptions. The power contract protects the neighbors. Put it in the ordinance, and a data center becomes what its salesmen promise. Leave it out, and the right answer is the one the crowd gave on August 25.