Athens, Ga. — When Athena Studios was announced in 2021, local leaders and filmmakers saw it as a turning point. Athens, long known for its music scene and the University of Georgia, appeared poised to claim a place in Georgia’s booming film and television economy.
At the time, the state’s production industry was generating roughly $4 billion a year, propelled by generous tax incentives and a surge in streaming demand. Soundstages in and around Atlanta were fully booked. Union travel rules and a shortage of studio space meant that productions routinely bypassed smaller cities like Athens, despite their architectural variety and ready workforce.
Athena Studios, planned near Ben Epps Airport, was meant to change that — a signal that Athens was ready for its close-up.
Just four years later, the facility is preparing for a very different role.
Instead of housing film crews and lighting rigs, most of the property is slated to become a 1.3 million-square-foot data center, designed to support the growing computational demands of artificial intelligence. Reynolds Capital, the commercial real estate firm that developed Athena Studios, recently submitted plans to Athens–Clarke County to repurpose the site, effectively marking the end of its ambitions as a major production hub.
“It was conceived at a time when you couldn’t find a soundstage anywhere,” said David Sutherland, a film producer and senior lecturer at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business who studies the creative economy. “Everything was booked. Post-Covid, the dynamic changed.”
That shift has been profound. In 2023, Georgia’s film and television revenue fell to $2.3 billion, battered by the Hollywood writers’ strike and a sharp pullback in spending by streaming platforms. Only about a quarter of the state’s roughly five million square feet of studio space is currently in use, according to Sutherland.
Once briefly ranked ahead of Hollywood, Georgia now stands seventh in production volume, trailing not only California but also several countries abroad.
“The industry has taken a dip because people are going offshore to film,” Sutherland said. He pointed to Marvel Studios’ decision to move major productions from Atlanta to the United Kingdom, where labor costs are lower and tax incentives rival those in Georgia, as a particularly painful blow.
As the film business contracts, studio owners across the state are being forced to rethink their investments. For Athena Studios, that has meant pivoting to one of the fastest-growing sectors in the American economy: data centers.
The proposed facility would convert nearly the entire site, with the exception of a soundstage reserved for the University of Georgia, into infrastructure for AI-driven computing. Joel Harber, the founder of Reynolds Capital, did not respond to requests for comment. But Jon Williams, the president and chief executive of W&A Engineering, an Athens-based firm involved in the project, confirmed the plans in an interview with Flagpole, an alternative weekly newspaper.
Data centers have proliferated across Georgia in recent years, drawn by inexpensive land, access to power and proximity to major fiber networks. They are essential to running artificial intelligence systems, cloud computing platforms and large-scale data storage. But they have also sparked backlash.
Such facilities can consume enormous amounts of electricity and water, straining local utilities and raising environmental concerns. In response, several municipalities in metro Atlanta have enacted moratoriums or stricter regulations on new data centers. The Georgia Department of Community Affairs has also issued new guidelines for regional development commissions to evaluate proposals, though final approval remains with local governments.
In Athens–Clarke County, planners believe data centers fall under the existing employment-industrial zoning category, even though the county’s 25-year-old zoning code does not explicitly address them. Because Athena Studios is already zoned E-I, the project could proceed without a vote of the county commission, provided it complies with requirements governing buffers, setbacks and the mitigation of noise, light and traffic.
A traffic study has not yet been completed, but Williams estimated the facility would generate roughly 200 vehicle trips during peak hours and a similar number of jobs.
Williams said the data center would rely on a “closed-loop” cooling system, which is designed to minimize water consumption once initially filled. “This is a lot of reuse and recirculation of water, as opposed to just moving it through the system,” he said.
Even so, local officials are pressing pause.
The Athens–Clarke County Commission is scheduled to vote Tuesday on a moratorium on new data centers, a move inspired in part by the Athena proposal, as well as a nearby Atlanta Gas Light data center that is already operating. Mayor Kelly Girtz said county planners have been working for months on new regulations tailored specifically to data centers, which are expected to be presented to the planning commission later this month.
“It’s a unique thing,” Girtz said. “So it needs its own specific code language written around it.”
Whether the moratorium would apply to Athena Studios remains unclear. Because plans have already been submitted, the project may be considered legally vested under Georgia law. The county attorney did not respond to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, Athens’ film community is adapting to the industry’s new reality. Sutherland said local discussions have shifted toward smaller, more sustainable studios, including a recently opened facility at Wire Park in nearby Watkinsville.
Athena Studios previously hosted several feature-length productions, including American Deadbolt, The Woman in the Yard, and three films starring James Franco. But the broader industry is moving toward leaner formats. One growing trend is the rise of “microdramas” — serialized stories broken into five-to-seven-minute episodes, often filmed vertically for smartphones. A recent microdrama was shot at the Bulldog Inn, and another is in development in Winterville.
“There’s been some good things happening,” Sutherland said. “And this kind of came out of the blue.”
For Athens, the transformation of Athena Studios from film soundstage to data center reflects a larger national story: as Hollywood retrenches, the infrastructure built for storytelling is increasingly being repurposed for the algorithms and machines shaping the next economic chapter.
