The USDA Just Made the Biggest Loan in Its History. It's Building a Gas Plant Half a Mile From Land Google Bought.

Monroe County, Georgia is mostly pine forest and cattle pasture about seventy miles south of Atlanta, and until last year it wasn't the kind of place that showed up in national headlines. That changed when Google quietly bought nearly 1,000 acres there for a data center it still hasn't committed to building. Roughly half a mile away, Oglethorpe Power has spent the year pouring concrete for something its own spokesperson insists has nothing to do with Google at all: a $3.3 billion natural gas plant now carrying the single largest loan the U.S. Department of Agriculture has ever made.

The loan itself is the headline. On October 14th, the USDA's Rural Utilities Service announced $3.3 billion for Oglethorpe Power Corporation, a wholesale generation-and-transmission cooperative that exists to keep the lights on for 38 member electric cooperatives across rural and suburban Georgia. The money finances the Smarr Combined-Cycle Energy Facility, a 1,425-megawatt, two-unit gas plant running GE Vernova turbines, which broke ground in May and is targeting commercial operation in 2029. RUS calls it the biggest loan in the agency's history, and it landed barely a month into a fiscal year in which rural utilities had already filed $8.6 billion in additional loan requests. Whatever else is true about Smarr, the demand for this kind of financing isn't slowing down anywhere in rural America, and Monroe County is only the loudest example of a pattern showing up across the rural South and Midwest.

The groundbreaking itself, back on May 7th, was a straightforwardly good day for Monroe County. Oglethorpe's president and CEO, Annalise Bloodworth, told the crowd the project represented more than $3 billion of investment in the county and that "electricity is the backbone of safe and prosperous communities." The company says the finished plant will be capable of powering roughly 800,000 homes, will employ about 30 people permanently once running, and will hand the county a new 4% local sales tax on the natural gas it burns, a real new revenue line for a rural county that doesn't get many of those. None of that depends on who, if anyone, ends up buying power downstream of it.

A federal official's aside, not the agency's own filing

Here's where the story gets complicated. The USDA's own October 14th release never mentions a data center. Two days later, in an interview with Reuters, Under Secretary for Rural Development Glen Smith volunteered that the plant would serve the 38 cooperatives and "support growing industry in the state, including potentially data centers." That single aside, from a federal official speaking past his own agency's press release, is the entire public basis for linking a taxpayer-backed rural infrastructure loan to the AI buildout. Nothing else on the record does.

Oglethorpe says the plant isn't for data centers at all

Oglethorpe pushed back immediately and specifically. Communications director Blair Romero told reporters the Smarr plant "is not being built to serve data centers," but rather to meet growing residential, business, and industrial demand across the cooperative's territory, which is exactly what a generation-and-transmission co-op exists to do when its members keep adding customers. Oglethorpe doesn't sell power to households directly; it generates wholesale and sells to the 38 retail EMCs that actually bill Georgia homes and businesses, which is a structurally different arrangement than an investor-owned utility signing a contract with one named customer. Only 29 of those 38 member cooperatives are even subscribed to Smarr's output specifically; the other nine aren't taking power from this plant at all. A plant built for a defined set of existing retail cooperatives is a different animal, financially and legally, from one built to lock in a single outsized customer.

Google's own statement splits the difference in a way that should make everyone wary of the easy answer, in either direction. Asked directly about the Monroe County land, the company told a local TV station it has "no confirmed timeline for development for the site" but wants "the option to further grow, should our business demand it." That's not a denial, and it's not a commitment. It's the same hedge most hyperscalers use to hold land without putting a signature on anything a reporter, a regulator, or a rural cooperative's own ratepayers could hold them to later.

A pledge, a denial, and a hedge aren't a signed contract

This is precisely the kind of gap GridPermit's own diligence work exists to sort before a lender or a county gets burned by it. Run the four public statements up our evidence ladder and they separate immediately. An official agency filing that says nothing about data centers sits at the top. A federal official's unscripted remark to a wire reporter sits below it. A company's flat denial sits beside that. A hyperscaler's own "we'd like the option" language sits closest to the bottom, nearer marketing than commitment. None of those four statements is a power purchase agreement, an interconnection request, or a signed subscription contract, and as far as the public record shows, no such document exists between Google and this specific plant. Until one does, "built near a data center" and "built for a data center" are different sentences, and a Kill Test treats them that way on purpose.

The underlying worry is real, and the rural electric industry's own leadership says so plainly. Jim Matheson, chief executive of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, has pointed out that a single 800-megawatt data center can draw roughly triple the electricity of everything else a typical cooperative serves combined. He isn't arguing against hosting them. In a separate interview, Matheson said that if co-ops "negotiate the right deals," large loads could be "a win-win for rural America and for the data centers," as long as those loads pay their own fair share of what they actually cost to serve. Pew Research found that 60% of rural Americans say they're uncomfortable with a new data center showing up in their area, which is the public mood every co-op manager in Georgia is operating against, whether or not Smarr ever delivers a single megawatt to Google. That discomfort isn't irrational. Rural cooperatives generally serve more sparsely populated territory than investor-owned utilities do, with fewer customers to spread a bad bet across, which is exactly why the subscription math behind Smarr, 29 of 38 members signed on, matters more here than it would at a utility the size of Georgia Power.

Strip the data center question out entirely and the Smarr loan is still a real, positive piece of infrastructure. Oglethorpe's 38 members serve, by the cooperative's own count, close to 4.7 million Georgians, and dispatchable gas capacity that can actually be built on a 2029 timeline is scarce enough right now that most regions in the country would take it gladly. Construction is underway, not a press release sitting on a shelf waiting for financing that never arrives, which is the opposite of the vaporware problem our own diligence work exists to screen out. The federal government underwriting that kind of capacity at the largest scale in its own rural-lending history, for cooperatives built specifically to keep power affordable for the customers who already have it, is a win by any ordinary measure of grid reliability and rural economic development.

The more useful version of this story, and the honest one, is that Smarr gets built whether or not Google ever puts a server in Monroe County, because 29 cooperatives already need the power and the financing is now locked in. What isn't locked in is who pays if a data center does show up later and starts drawing the kind of load Matheson is warning about. Georgia's investor-owned utility already went through a public, if redacted, commission review before signing its own hyperscaler contracts; Oglethorpe's co-ops answer to their own boards, not to the Public Service Commission, and Georgia still hasn't written the kind of large-load tariff protections Alabama adopted this fall. That gap, not whether the plant gets finished, is the thing worth watching if Google ever does sign on the dotted line.