What happens when you combine hospitals with data centers?

When the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported last week that the hospital, which Lt. Gov. Burt Jones’ father is proposing to build in Butts County, is to be surrounded by data centers, a spokeswoman for Jones called it a non-story.

Even if you don’t agree, you can see her point. This “simple rezoning application by a private company” involves Jones’ father, not the lieutenant governor directly. There’s a long runway before next year’s primaries and general election, and by then this may be a non-story, even if it’s a little one now.

On the other hand, if you were searching for the tinder to build a political fire next year, hospitals and data centers would be top on your mind. In combination, they could be even more flammable.

If you’ve sat around a lazy Susan at Buckner’s or visited Indian Springs State Park, you’ve been to Butts County. It’s a little county situated between Atlanta and Macon, which is the center of some gigantic development plans. The 250-acre site where a company partly owned by the lieutenant governor’s father, former state Rep. Bill Jones, has proposed building a hospital is adjacent to the 1,200-acre River Park, which already bills itself as the largest mixed-use development in the Southeast.

When the elder Jones’ firm, Interstate Healthcare Systems, filed its original proposal to build the hospital in 2023, plans included a large campus with other medical buildings. The revised plan filed last week still includes 1.2 million square feet of medical office space in addition to the 450,000-square-foot hospital. But that would be surrounded by a hitherto-unmentioned 13 lots designated for data centers, covering a total of 11 million square feet.

The way was cleared in 2024 for construction to begin when the General Assembly exempted certain hospital projects — notably this one — from the state’s Certificate of Need law. That law has been the subject of discord for years. The much larger issue in the coming election year is likely to be the effect of massive federal healthcare cuts on rural hospitals across the state, potentially including the one planned for Butts County.

The worldwide outage, which originated on Monday at Amazon Web Services’ massive data center hub in Northern Virginia, was the latest reminder of how dependent a sweeping number of businesses have become on these computing behemoths. The Trump White House has come down solidly on the side of building out the resource-dependent, rate-increasing infrastructure that supports this economic model.

At the same time, Democrats across the country are beginning to embrace resistance to data centers and higher rates as a key issue. We’re seeing that in the current Public Service Commission races in Georgia. In races in New Jersey and Virginia, the self-proclaimed data center capital of the world, Democrats are campaigning against higher energy bills associated with data centers.

With such a sharp divergence in the way this issue plays at the local level and from the perspective of the national economy, this issue is destined to become increasingly politicized, and Georgia is likely to be one of the states in which that plays out.

In next year’s Republican primary, being tied indirectly to 13 more data centers than we knew about already might not be such a problem for Jones, even though there are a lot of data center-resistant Republicans at the grassroots.

Further down the road, if Jones makes it that far, the issue could be more problematic. The political climate in Georgia is likely to be very nationalized, because we’ve got one of the biggest U.S. Senate races in the country. If you’re a candidate for governor who’s already closely identified with President Donald Trump and you’re still knee-deep in a lingering data center story, you’ll likely draw national attention.

Jones’ campaign might say that’s a problem they’d like to have, but he’d probably prefer the Donald without the data.