Project Ruby and the Rules Columbus Didn’t Have

Author’s note: The author submitted an alternative ordinance — The People’s Overlay — to all Columbus City Council members, the city attorney, and the mayor before the June 9, 2026 public hearing, and spoke at that hearing. 706Report.com has covered Project Ruby since its February announcement. Prior coverage is linked throughout this series.

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On February 12, 2026, Missy Kendrick — CEO of Choose Columbus, the city’s economic development organization — walked into a Development Authority meeting and announced that a technology company — name not disclosed — wanted to build a $5.18 billion data center campus on 987 acres of rural land in northeast Muscogee County.

The room responded with enthusiasm. The public responded with questions. And the city, once it looked closely, discovered it had a foundational problem: Columbus had no rules for what was being proposed.

Understanding why requires starting with the basics — what the project actually is, and what it would actually require.

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What Is Project Ruby?

The core facts are easy to state but hard to absorb. Here they are in one place:

The number in that table that drives everything else — the one that shapes the project’s physical footprint, its infrastructure requirements, and its implications for Columbus’s electric grid — is 600 megawatts. To understand why, you need a point of comparison.

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What Does 600 Megawatts Actually Mean?

Most people have an intuitive sense of what a megawatt is. Few have a sense of what 600 of them look like at a single point on the grid. The most useful comparison is the closest one:

Columbus is the third-largest city in Georgia. Project Ruby, at full buildout, would draw more electricity than every home, business, hospital, school, and government building in the host city — combined. It would also exceed the total peak capacity of Flint Energies, the rural electric cooperative that serves northeast Muscogee County and would be responsible for delivering that power.

That single fact explains almost everything about what the project requires — starting with why it needs 987 acres when the buildings themselves occupy only about 150.

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Why 987 Acres for 150 Acres of Buildings?

A load larger than an entire city cannot simply be connected to an existing distribution network. The grid instability that a single 600-megawatt point load creates — voltage fluctuations, harmonic disturbances, cascading effects on neighboring customers — requires physical isolation. The developer’s own site map shows a GTC 230 Switch Station outside the property boundary to the north, connected by proposed transmission lines to a dedicated substation inside the parcel. That infrastructure needs space, clearance, and separation from neighboring loads.

The 837 undeveloped acres are not simply land banked for five future campuses — though the question of what happens to them under the adopted overlay framework is one this series addresses directly in Parts 2 through 4. In substantial measure, the parcel’s size is an engineering consequence of the load it is built to serve. You cannot serve a customer larger than your host city without building infrastructure that requires room to breathe.

Which brings Columbus to the problem it discovered in February: it had no legal framework for any of this.

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Why Columbus Had to Write New Rules

Columbus’s Unified Development Ordinance — the legal document governing what can be built where in Muscogee County — had no category for a hyperscale data center. Not for a large one, not for a small one, not for any one. The obvious workaround was industrial rezoning, but that carried a risk that zoning attorneys flag in situations exactly like this one.

The legal concept at issue is called spot-zoning — when a government rezones a specific parcel to benefit a specific applicant, courts can find that the action favors one party rather than serving a legitimate public purpose. By creating a Technology Overlay District available to any qualifying developer across applicable zoning districts, Columbus built a framework that is policy rather than patronage. Mayor Henderson framed it simply: establish expectations early, so any developer knows what they’re agreeing to before negotiations begin.

That decision — to write new rules rather than repurpose old ones — set everything that followed in motion. It meant four months of public process, three competing versions of those rules, and a final vote that left some of the most consequential questions still unresolved. The project’s scale also triggers a separate state review process — the Development of Regional Impact — that gives neighboring Harris and Talbot counties formal standing in the approval process; that process is addressed in Part 4.

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What the Rest of Georgia Had Already Figured Out

Columbus was not writing these rules in a vacuum. What had other Georgia communities already learned from confronting the same question?

The Newton County example was cited most often in Columbus’s public debate, and it illustrated a specific dynamic worth understanding. Once a county approves the first campus — once the grid connections are built, the tax revenue starts flowing, and the infrastructure is in place — the argument for saying no to the next applicant gets harder to make. Each subsequent application arrives before a community whose leverage has diminished since it approved the first one. One campus had become the foundation for nine more.

Columbus was watching that and writing its rules at the same time.

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What Columbus Knew in February — and What It Didn’t

Here is the information asymmetry that shaped the entire public debate. At the moment the project was announced, the people most affected by it had access to a fraction of what they needed to evaluate it.

That last item is the one that mattered most in February. The answer, once anyone looked closely, was no. The zoning code Columbus had didn’t cover what Columbus was being asked to permit. Before the city could say yes or no to Project Ruby, it had to build a legal framework from scratch.

What that process looked like — who wrote the rules, who was in the room, and what three very different ordinances proposed — is the subject of Part 2.

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Next: Three ordinances, a Chamber committee with undisclosed conflicts of interest, a citizen alternative, and a council that said it was there to listen — but didn’t ask a single question.