The U.S. Department of Agriculture has issued a record-breaking $3.3 billion loan to fund a natural-gas power plant rising in Monroe County, Georgia, the largest loan in the history of the Rural Utilities Service. The money is going to Oglethorpe Power Corporation to help finish its Smarr Combined Cycle Plant, a roughly 1.4-gigawatt facility that broke ground in May and is expected to start generating electricity in 2029.
A Record-Setting Loan With Strings Attached
The USDA announced the loan on October 13, according to the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, which reported the financing will save Oglethorpe's member cooperatives more than $25 million annually over the loan's 30-year term. Those cooperatives currently serve nearly 5 million Georgians, and the project is projected to create up to 1,200 construction jobs along with 30 permanent positions once the plant is running. The loan carries an interest rate of about 6.3%, calculated as the Treasury rate plus one-eighth of a percentage point, as reported by Georgia Public Broadcasting.
That same cost ultimately lands on ratepayers. Oglethorpe President and CEO Annalisa Bloodworth told the station, “We do have to pass the cost of that loan through to our consumers.” Bloodworth also addressed one of the more pointed questions hanging over the project — whether it's tied to the data-center boom reshaping Georgia's power grid. She said the 1.4 gigawatts of new generation is not intended for data centers.
A Google Project Right Next Door
The geography makes the question hard to ignore. The Smarr plant site sits about half a mile from a Google data-center project in southern Monroe County, per the same Georgia Public Broadcasting report. According to Reuters, Google purchased nearly 1,000 acres of land in Monroe County for a data center in 2025. An Oglethorpe spokesperson, Blair Romero, told Reuters the facility is not dedicated to serving a data center, saying instead it will help member cooperatives meet growing electricity demand across their communities.
Not everyone in the federal government framed it quite that narrowly. Glen Smith, the USDA's under secretary for rural development, told Reuters the Oglethorpe plant will support growing industry in Georgia, potentially including data centers, and that the utility will serve 38 rural cooperatives. Smith said he hopes to secure more funding for similar projects and plans to meet with congressional appropriators next week, where he intends to request more money for rural utility loans. He noted that nearly $8.6 billion in such loan requests have already come in with the fiscal year only a month underway — a reflection, National Rural Electric Cooperative Association reporting suggests, of demand for Rural Utilities Service loans frequently exceeding authorized lending levels.
The Bigger Power Squeeze Behind the Headline
Smith's comments to Reuters land against a backdrop of surging electricity appetite nationwide. Data centers are driving U.S. electricity use to record highs and in some regions are demanding more power than grids can supply, Reuters reported, with the Trump administration having supported their rapid expansion without seeking to regulate data-center construction itself. The administration has asked tech companies to pledge not to pass electricity costs on to consumers, per the same Reuters account, even as communities raise concerns about data centers' water use and utility costs — concerns Reuters reported Democrats are looking to capitalize on ahead of November's midterm elections.
National forecasts back up the scale of the shift. U.S. data-center power demand is expected to climb from 31 gigawatts in 2025 to 41 gigawatts in 2026 and 66 gigawatts in 2027, according to Goldman Sachs, which also projects data centers' share of total peak summer power demand rising from 4.1% in 2025 to 8.5% in 2027. The firm notes only about 50% to 60% of data-center capacity scheduled for the next one to two years is expected to come online on time, and it expects Texas and Georgia to see only marginal power-market tightening given the generation capacity already in the pipeline — a contrast with elevated reliability risks the firm flags in the Mid-Atlantic, Mid-Continent and Northwest markets.
That tension is playing out acutely for rural electric cooperatives, which increasingly find large-scale data-center projects targeting their service areas. The Oklahoma Farm Report describes cooperatives worried that massive new loads could push up rates for existing agricultural and residential customers, noting that a single 800-megawatt data center can require roughly triple the electricity consumed by all of a cooperative's other customers combined, according to NRECA CEO Jim Matheson. In response, some co-op boards are weighing specialized large-power rate structures and upfront capital contribution agreements that would require data-center developers to help fund substations, dedicated lines and other grid upgrades, the outlet reported.
How Georgia Power Frames the Tradeoff
Georgia Power, which is separate from Oglethorpe but operates in the same high-growth environment, says large energy users such as data centers pay upfront for the local infrastructure they need and cover the full cost of service through long-term contracts, collateral requirements, minimum bills and termination payments. The utility says it has proposed building more than 1,000 miles of new transmission lines over the next decade to meet growing energy needs. It projects that incremental revenue from large energy users could translate into roughly $180 a year in savings for a typical residential customer using 1,000 kilowatt-hours a month by 2028.
The Smarr loan underscores the challenge of keeping pace with a grid under pressure — even as the question of who ultimately benefits from the new generation, and who pays for it, remains unresolved.
