The first check arrives in December, and nothing has been built yet.
Under a community investment agreement announced on August 13, QTS Data Centers will pay the City of Blakely and Early County $7.5 million a year for three years, beginning this December, before construction starts on its planned data center campus. Alongside the payments, the company will place at least $28.75 million in a Community Betterment Fund for the town and county. Counted together, more than $51 million is committed to a community in Georgia’s southwest corner before a single server is switched on.
The money, in order
The payments come first, $22.5 million across three years while the project moves toward construction. The fund follows, at least $28.75 million for infrastructure upgrades, school improvements, workforce development, and resources and training for law enforcement and fire departments.
Then the campus starts paying for itself in public. Once buildings open, QTS expects to pay between $4.5 million and $12.5 million per building each year, and the company estimates the current site plan could average $60 million to $85 million annually in payments that become property tax revenue for Early County. The campus, planned for land off the Martha Berry Highway near Early County Airport, could reach 12 million square feet at full build-out by the end of 2035, according to the project’s state filing.
QTS also agreed to pay for the energy infrastructure and electricity the campus needs, so the project’s power costs do not land on residents’ bills. The buildings will cool themselves with a closed-loop system that consumes no water for cooling once it is running.
A mayor who had a hard summer
Blakely is led by Travis Wimbush, the first African American mayor in the city’s history and the youngest person ever elected to the office. In August, the same month the QTS agreement was announced, Wimbush signed a declaration of local emergency and put the city under a 30-day overnight curfew after a series of shootings.
Read the agreement against that summer and its priorities stop looking generic. Money for police and fire resources, for training, for the infrastructure of a small town, is written into a fund controlled by the community’s own stated needs. Susanne Reynolds, who leads economic development for Blakely and Early County, got the first call about the project in July 2024, from a developer asking to discuss what he called a “generational-changing” opportunity. She asked how soon he could get to her office.
Jobs that start at graduation
The workforce case is the one local leaders repeat. QTS plans to partner with the Early County school system on programs that train students for careers in data center operations, and the company hires veterans at a notable rate, about 30 percent of campus staff across its sites.
“A high school graduate has the potential to make a salary of over $50K a year,” Reynolds said after touring a QTS campus with city, county, and school leaders. “That is absolutely life changing for our community.”
QTS, owned by Blackstone, has operated Georgia campuses in Atlanta since 2006 and Suwanee since 2005. Blakely is a different kind of site: a farming town on the Alabama line, where a single employer arriving with nine figures of patience changes the arithmetic of staying.
The school the alumni would not let go
School improvements sit near the top of the fund’s list, and in Blakely that phrase has a specific address. Washington High School, the city’s historic Black high school, was donated to the Washington High School National Alumni Association, which cut the ribbon on the building in July 2024 and now runs it as a resource complex. Its alumni association installed a new advisory board last November and is restoring the campus piece by piece.
A fund that names schools as a priority, in a town where graduates organized to save their own schoolhouse, has an obvious first conversation waiting for it. What the Community Betterment Fund ultimately restores in Blakely will say as much about the town as the campus QTS builds outside it.
The checks begin in December. Blakely has been preparing its side of this bargain for years, in classrooms, at city hall, and in an old school its graduates refused to surrender. This winter, the money starts keeping its part.
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