Residents of Effingham County, Georgia, filed a civil lawsuit on Nov. 6 against OpenAI, the Effingham Development Authority and county officials, alleging racketeering and conspiracy over the planned Project Camellia data center, WSB-TV reported1.
The suit is the second filed against OpenAI since Project Camellia was announced, according to WSB-TV. It targets how the project was disclosed and approved, rather than only the zoning step challenged in the first case.
The same law firm, Savage, Turner, Pinckney, Savage, Sprouse & Gilluly, filed the earlier case in September on behalf of some of the same plaintiffs, WSB-TV said. That case alleges the zoning decision did not comply with open meetings laws and ignored county procedures. The new case was filed in Effingham State Court on behalf of multiple county residents.
The defendants are OpenAI, the Effingham Development Authority, "Effingham county officials and other associated parties," per WSB-TV. The station does not identify the officials or say whether individuals or only offices are named.
The attorneys said the defendants undertook a "concerted effort to keep the massive, multi-billion dollar Project Camellia, the land transaction, and its terms secret from the people of Effingham County until the land was committed and the decisions were essentially made behind closed doors," WSB-TV reported.
The residents' claims include fraudulent concealment, fraud and misrepresentation, civil conspiracy, breach of mandatory legal duties, procuring injury, and violating Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, according to the station.
Lead attorney Ben Michaud said: "It is a demand for transparency and accountability." WSB-TV reported that, according to the attorneys, the filing is not meant as an attack on artificial intelligence but as an "attack on the ways these defendants acted" to secure what was needed to build the project.
Firm partner Greg Gilluly said: "Government power should come from the consent of the people, not multibillion-dollar corporations having secret meetings with public officials."
Headlines linked on WSB-TV's page refer to a utility approval of a Georgia Power and OpenAI data center agreement and to a development start date of 2028. The retrieved text of the report does not include those stories' details, and the project's size and cost are not described beyond the complaint's phrase "multi-billion dollar."
The complaint and court docket are not among the documents cited here, so the allegations are as relayed by WSB-TV and are unproven. The station said it has reached out to the defendants for comment; its report includes no responses, no damages sought and no next steps in the case.