Only just more than a handful of people turned out for the Town Hall meeting House District 121 Rep. Eric Gisler called last month to discuss data centers, but he stuck to his plan of reviewing bills proposed in the last session of the General Assembly before stating his position.
The state currently is exempting data centers from paying both state and local sales taxes as a result of legislation passed in 2018 to bring data centers to the state, and Gisler offered that as a beginning point of his review.
Four of the bills considered in the legislation session ending in April would have brought that exemption to an end, he said.
Two would have prohibited the state’s power companies from passing on to residential users the expansion costs to accommodate data centers.
Two of the bills attempted to prohibit nondisclosure agreements between local governments and data centers, and another would have required data centers to show their impact on community resources.
Two called for a moratorium on data centers.
“Not one of them passed,” Gisler said.
Gisler said he thinks enough is known about data centers to take action, and the first step should be eliminating the tax exemption.
Historical Overview
Gisler began his comments at the Oct. 24 meeting with a review of Georgia House Bill 696, passed in 2018 to exempt a portion of construction materials and other equipment related to data centers from state and local sales and use taxes.
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| Gisler 10/24/2026 |
Six people attended the session, held at the lobby meeting room of the Oconee Piedmont Health complex on Jennings Mill Road.
“Some of you know I work in IT,” Gisler said. He currently is a partner in a technology start-up. “I actually used to work at a data center. It was a very different animal.”
“About 20 years ago, we had a couple web servers, a few database servers in a room not much bigger than this, and that was considered our data center,” he said.
“The history I'm going to run through starts in 2018 with the introduction of the tax credit law,” he continued. “But between the time I was sitting at a data center in Norcross, and 2018, when this happened, data centers changed completely.”
“The whole cloud thing, Amazon, Google, all these data centers, it's changed the whole industry,” he said. “I've been in the industry, so I've seen it.”
“We went from having servers right there you can walk over and touch to running everything on Amazon Web Services or on Google Cloud or any of that kind of stuff.”
“So the whole industry very much changed, and that's kind of what led to the data centers we were looking at in 2018 when this bill was introduced,” he said.
“So that was HB 696, and that created the sales tax exemption that a lot of the data centers are still benefitting from today,” Gisler said. “That is not just the state portion of sales tax, but it's also the local portion.”
“So local communities are missing out on that sales tax revenue as well because of that sales tax exemption for data centers,” he said.
In 2024, the legislature passed a bill suspending that exemption, but Gov. Kemp vetoed that legislation, Gisler said. (Kemp vetoed House Bill 1192 on May 8 of 2024.)
2026 Legislative Session
“This year, we had a whole bunch of bills,” Gisler said. “There were a lot of bills addressing cost, tax exemptions, construction restrictions, and transparency. Not one of them passed.”
“But the real big thing is the Carl Vinson Institute here at UGA published a report last December about data centers in Georgia,” Gisler said. “And one of the things that really stuck with me was they said 70 percent of data centers in the state would come here even if that sales tax exemption was not available.”
The report estimated that the state tax gave up $474.2 million tax revenue in Fiscal Year 2025 as a result of the exemption, Gisler noted.
“I thought for sure this year we would...repeal the data center tax exemption,” Gisler said.
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| Gisler 10/24/2026 |
That didn’t happen.
A Senate bill (SB 34) and a related House Bill (1063) “made it illegal for the power companies to pass on any of the expansion costs to residential taxpayers,” Gisler said.
“So the Republicans killed their own bill because it wasn't friendly enough to power companies,” Gisler, who is a Democrat, said.
Four bills, SB 410, HB 186, SB 408, and HB 559, would have eliminated the tax exemption in varying time periods.
They didn’t pass.
HB 528 “would have required ‘high resource use facilities’...to disclose electricity, water, environmental and community impacts before permits or incentive agreements could be agreed to,” Gisler said.
Gisler said “I think it had a lot of support, actually.” (It didn’t pass the House.)
Gisler said HB 1012 called for “a temporary moratorium for one year, expiring March 2027,” and HB 1059 proposed “a moratorium that would run through December 2028, and it would set up a state board for reviewing large-scale projects like this.”
In both cases, Gisler said, “Didn't go anywhere.”
SB 421, the Data Center Transparency Act, would “prohibit local government non-disclosure agreements, which is a big deal, governing electricity and water usage, had bipartisan sponsors. Didn't make it out of the Senate.”
SB 436 “had similar NDA restrictions plus a one-year pause on the tax exemption that would take effect July 2026 to July 2027. That didn't go anywhere,” Gisler said.
Next Step?
“My position on it is,” Gisler said, ‘there's a lot of gray area between the wild west that we have right now with tax credits and tax exemptions to attract them here, not asking enough questions, and a complete moratorium.”
“Number one, I think we do need to set thresholds for water consumption in particular,” he said, “and I'd be even open to offering tax credits if the water consumption was kept to an absolute minimum.”
“Give them targets to try to hit, and don't legislate technologies, but legislate measuring that consumption and reporting on that and be transparent about that,” he said. “And if you're able to get it down far enough, then okay. There's precedent for that.”
“I think that we should have a real ‘bring your own clean energy’ policy, and if they're going to be here, let them do it clean. Let's not fuel these things with fossil fuels and build transmission lines and take up people's land to build those and all that kind of stuff.”
“We absolutely need to pass bills like Senate Bill 34, Chuck Hufstetler’s (Republican, Rome) bill, to just flat out protect rate payers from having to pay for this stuff. If these guys want to come here, they're the wealthiest companies on the planet. They can afford it.”
“So I think those are the main things,” Gisler said.
“And then, of course, the fact that the county boards, county commissioners, can negotiate these things on behalf of their communities with non-disclosure agreements in place that doesn't allow the community to see what they're negotiating,” he added.
“I think something's got to be done there,” he said.
Questions And Responses
Gisler finished his prepared comments after a little more than 12 minutes, but he stayed to respond to questions for another 30 minutes.
He told one of those who asked that he “was cautiously optimistic” about his prospects in the election.
“I think it is a good year for us,” he said.
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| Gisler 10/24/2026 |
In response to a question on his legislative plans, Gisler said he is redrafting legislation he worked on last year that would change the registration fee that the state requires electric vehicles owners to pay.
At present, they pay $238.59 annually plus the annual $20 tag fee.
“The whole point behind that EV tag fee is to have EV, electric vehicle, owners pay taxes for roads that gas taxes would pay for because they're not buying gas,” Gisler said.
“You'd have to buy enough gas to drive 20,000 miles a year in a car that gets 30 miles per gallon to equal that out,” he said. “So we're really penalizing EV owners, and I don't think that's the way we should be doing things.”
Gisler said he also is working on a bill to eliminate gerrymandering.
“If we hold this seat this year, it really sends a message that gerrymandering only goes so far. At some point, to win races, you have to have good policy.”
“And so to hold this seat, it gives me a great and excellent platform to push for an independent districting commission, and so I'm working on what that would look like so that, as soon as possible after election day, I can get that one into legislative council, get that bill drafted, and try to push that through.”
“That's one that I'm super excited about because I think if we get rid of gerrymandering, then a lot of other things just kind of fall into place,” he said.
Video
The video below is of the entire Oct. 24 Town Hall meeting held by Gisler at the Oconee County Piedmont Health Campus.
Gisler began immediately with his review of legislation and began taking questions at 12:10 in the video.
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