Microsoft files in Fulton County for a campus six years out

Microsoft has filed a Developments of Regional Impact application with the Georgia Department of Community Affairs for a two-building campus at 5235 Stonewall Tell Road in Union City, southwest of Atlanta in Fulton County. The filing, as reported by Data Center Dynamics, describes two three-story buildings totaling 910,000 sq ft (84,540 sqm) on an 88-acre parcel west of Stonewall Tell Road and north of Koweta Road, with a launch in 2032.

The date is the part worth underwriting. Six years between an application and a launch describes a project whose binding constraints sit well upstream of construction — entitlement, substation capacity, a place in the interconnection queue — and it says something the square footage cannot: this is a filing for position. The queue, the permit, and the connection now trade before the electron does, and a company with Microsoft's balance sheet does not need 88 acres of Fulton County ground in 2026 to serve demand in 2032. It needs to be the counterparty the utility and the county have already modeled, priced and planned around.

Union City is not new ground for Microsoft, whose Georgia presence runs through Fairburn, Douglasville, Palmetto, Rome, East Point and Tyrone, with the report indicating more beyond those six. PWD's tracking has logged 40 Microsoft items as of Sept. 13, and the recent run has been land, leases and power: the $465.5 million Gainesville purchase, the expanded Qcells arrangement pairing data center load with dispatchable batteries, the Lambda lease that backstops a $1 billion private placement. ATL50 belongs to that same family of moves — a claim on a corridor's capacity, dressed as a construction announcement and filed early enough to shape what the corridor builds.

Microsoft's Union City plans look likely to run past one address: Data Center Dynamics reports, attributing the claim to others, that the company is also developing at 4810 Stonewall Tell Road on the north side of South Fulton Parkway — the same road, the same municipality — in partnership with EdgeConneX, a project reportedly sized at 324MW across 2.1 million sq ft (195,096 sqm), more than twice the floorplate of ATL50 on a reported basis. The ATL50 filing as described carries no load figure, and the coverage does not say whether the two projects share a substation, a landowner, or a construction calendar.

Run the reported ratio across Microsoft's filing and the gap becomes a number: 324MW over 2.1 million sq ft works out to roughly 154 watts a square foot, and the same density applied to 910,000 sq ft implies something near 140MW. That arithmetic rests on a third-party figure, not a Microsoft disclosure, and the two product types differ: a three-story suburban shell versus a hyperscale hall. It is still the right order of magnitude for the question Fulton County will end up asking, which is whose power request is carrying the corridor.

Consent is the new capital, and a Developments of Regional Impact application is where a developer goes shopping for it. Filing with the state Department of Community Affairs rather than only with Union City suggests Microsoft expects the project's traffic, water and load effects to be reviewed as a regional matter. For readers who underwrite these assets, the practical read is that ATL50's value today sits in the option it creates on interconnection and county tolerance — an option with six years to run before anyone pours a shell.

Capital is the one input this project is not short of, which is why the paperwork reads the way it does. Hyperscaler-anchored digital infrastructure clears at infrastructure pricing while everything else fights for capital, and ATL50 sits on the right side of that divide before a tenant is named; whatever colocation counterparty eventually shows up inherits the cheapest funding in the asset class. The permit queue does not grade on that curve; it prices ATL50 on the same terms it prices the merchant developer in the same county.

Georgia's other recent Microsoft filing shows how the option gets tested. Two years after paying $465.5 million for 124 acres in Gainesville, the company is still asking the Corps of Engineers to approve two buildings and a substation, across 955 feet of stream and 1.95 acres of wetland; the Union City filing has the same two buildings and a substation, but faces a state regional review rather than a federal wetlands permit. Neither gate opens on a schedule the capital markets set, which is the part of the buildout that gets misread when filings are counted as capacity.

Which leaves the silences to price. There is no purchase price for the 88 acres, no named seller, no tenant, no megawatt figure, and nothing on the record about how the two Union City projects relate to one another; the coverage does not say.

What is on the record is a timetable: 910,000 sq ft, two three-story buildings, launched in 2032 on a parcel that works out to about 10,300 sq ft of floorplate per acre — suburban density that suggests Fulton County will be reviewing one corridor rather than two unrelated sites. If the reported campus next door is what it is claimed to be, the megawatts in Union City sit there, and ATL50 is the smaller filing that gets the traffic and water studies moving for both. Watch whether the DRI conditions push the 2032 date, and whether a load figure ever attaches to ATL50. Six years is long enough for both.