DEKALB COUNTY, Ga. — Shadowbox Studios will ask DeKalb County’s Zoning Board of Appeals on Sept. 9 to overturn a staff decision denying its bid to build a data center on 155 acres at 3600 International Park Drive in south DeKalb County.
The land, once eyed for an expansion of Shadowbox’s film studio, sits next to the company’s existing nine sound stages and across the street from the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center.
The meeting will be held at 1 p.m. via Zoom. Those using a telephone can call 888-270-9936 and use conference code 691303. The agenda says the public can email comments by Sept. 3 to the DeKalb County Department of Planning and Sustainability at plansustain@dekalbcountyga.gov.
Shadowbox is asking the ZBA to reverse the planning department’s June 12 decision denying its application to change its land disturbance permit from film studio use to data center use. The county denied the application because the board of commissioners approved a temporary ban on new data center development last year.
In its brief to the ZBA, Shadowbox makes much of the same argument it made in a lawsuit filed last month asking a judge to declare the county’s moratorium illegal.
The company says that before the moratorium took effect, county officials sent it three written confirmations — in June 2023, April 2024 and February 2025 — stating that data centers were allowed on the property.
Based on those confirmations, Shadowbox says it has spent nearly $37 million on the project. Expenses include a data center-specific site plan, an economic development study and public relations professionals to promote the proposed data center, according to the brief.
The company also said it paid consultants “hundreds of thousands” of dollars to work with Georgia Power to secure the 651 megawatts of electricity the project would require.
Shadowbox’s requested 651 megawatts is comparable to a 600-megawatt data center project proposed in Columbus. A Georgia Power spokesperson told the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer that the city’s total residential and commercial electricity use is about 550 megawatts.
Shadowbox argues that the county’s three written confirmations, combined with the money it spent based on those assurances, established a vested right to build the data center before the moratorium took effect. The company says that vested right cannot be taken away by the county’s decision to implement a temporary ban on new data centers.
The county has argued that the letters were not legally binding and did not guarantee Shadowbox the right to build a data center.
DeKalb commissioners first approved the moratorium in July 2025 and have extended it multiple times, most recently through March 2027. Commissioners also rejected proposed data center regulations in June.
Proposed data centers have drawn opposition from residents, who have packed county meetings for more than a year to voice concerns about the developments’ potential environmental and community impacts, including their high electricity demands and use of fossil fuels.
The ZBA hearing comes after county commissioners unanimously rejected in August a separate $1.6 billion data center proposed for 95 acres in Ellenwood. That decision followed months of opposition from residents.
The Shadowbox property also has a contentious history. Its previous owner — Blackhall Studios, owned by Ryan Millsap — struck a 2020 land swap deal with the county that included a promised public park. The park was never built.
A county spokesperson said DeKalb does not comment on pending litigation.