For a year, neighbors from off Bouldercrest drove to Tuesday night meetings in Decatur. They kept raising the same concerns about water, power bills, and what happens when a house sits next to a substation.
On Aug. 13, 2026, they got the vote they wanted. The denial was unanimous.
But eight days earlier, two companies had already filed a lawsuit in DeKalb County Superior Court. Their case centers on the same gap in the zoning code that made the Ellenwood fight possible.
What the commission actually decided
PCC-DeKalb LLC proposed a data center campus on 95 acres of undeveloped land at 4280 and 4358 Loveless Place and 2281 Pineview Trail. The project included three two-story buildings and an electric substation in a majority Black south DeKalb community surrounded by homes.
The DeKalb County Department of Planning recommended denial. The commission agreed without a dissenting vote.
The applicant valued the project at $1.6 billion. Its team told commissioners the development would add about $28 million a year to DeKalb’s property tax roll, with roughly $14 million going to schools. Those figures came from the applicant, not the county.
For people living near Loveless Place, the result is simple. The 95 acres stay vacant for now.
No new data center application can be filed in unincorporated DeKalb before March 30, 2027. Commissioners first approved the moratorium by a 4-3 vote in July 2025 and most recently extended it on July 7, 2026.
The vote stopped this project. It did not create a permanent rule.
DeKalb still has no definition for data centers
DeKalb County’s zoning code does not list data centers as a specific use. That is not a minor technical issue. It has shaped this entire fourteen-month fight.
PCC-DeKalb submitted its special land use application on June 10, 2025, four weeks before the moratorium began. The property is zoned mixed-use low-density within the Bouldercrest Overlay District, where the project would require a permit.
The application classified the campus as utility structures used for the transmission or distribution of services. In a May 8, 2026 email to Senior Planner John Reid, the applicant argued that the buildings qualified because their servers would transmit data to and from client companies.
Planning staff disagreed. But without a data center category in the zoning code, staff had no clear alternative classification to offer.
The moratorium was supposed to give the county time to solve that problem. Planning staff drafted regulations, but commissioners rejected them in June 2026 after residents questioned how the rules would be enforced and called for stronger protections. The commission extended the moratorium again in July.
DeKalb has now rejected the project and its own proposed regulations while continuing to push back the deadline.
The letters the county already mailed
Shadowbox Studios and Henrico 183 sued DeKalb County on Aug. 5, 2026. Their complaint says county planning officials stated in emails and letters between June 2023 and February 2025 that a data center could be classified as a communication utility or warehouse.
That classification would allow one on their nearly 200-acre property at 3600 International Park Drive, which is zoned M for light industrial.
Henrico bought the land in 2021 to expand studio space, and the county issued a land disturbance permit for a film studio in 2022. According to the lawsuit, demand for studio space later declined. The companies began considering a data center alongside the studio and asked Georgia Power for 651 megawatts in 2024.
The lawsuit says the companies have spent more than $30 million and that the moratorium reduced the property’s value by $200 million. They want a judge to invalidate the moratorium, allow the data center, and award compensation and attorneys’ fees. A county spokesperson said DeKalb does not comment on pending litigation.
Planning officials have said zoning certification letters are not legally binding. Shadowbox, Henrico, and Blackhall Real Estate received those letters.
A judge will now decide how much a county letter is worth.
The dates residents should watch
The Zoning Board of Appeals will hear the Shadowbox and Henrico permit dispute on Sept. 9. County officials previously denied their March 6 request to convert the film studio permit into a data center permit.
The moratorium expires March 30, 2027, whether or not new regulations are ready. The other date depends on whether DeKalb fights the Superior Court case or settles it.
I do not think south DeKalb lost anything on Aug. 13, and I would not tell those neighbors the win was hollow, because 95 acres staying vacant is a real outcome they organized for. What I would tell them is that the protection they are standing on expires on a date already on the calendar, and the county spent a year buying time it then declined to use. If you live off Bouldercrest, the meeting that matters most is not the next permit hearing. It is the first one where regulations come back to the dais, because a moratorium is a pause and a definition is a rule, and only one of those survives a judge.
