A New Report Revealed Slick Rick Jackson is Profiting from a Closed-Door Data Center Development While Residents Are Fighting for Answers
A breaking report from Courier Georgia today explained how Slick Rick Jackson is investing in a data center that has local residents raising the alarm — yet another example of how Slick Rick is profiting from insider deals while people pay the price.
The report details how Jackson is investing in a data center development in Texas that is being forced onto local residents who are concerned about its impact on their community. Jackson has refused to answer questions as residents demand answers.
Keisha Lance Bottoms has called for a pause on the new construction of data centers to prevent Georgians’ utility bills from rising.
“While Georgians are concerned about rising utility bills and threats to the environment, Slick Rick Jackson is profiting from forcing data centers onto a community,” said TaNisha Cameron, Keisha for Governor campaign spokesperson. “Rick Jackson is hiding from the voters of Georgia by refusing 5 debates and he’s hiding from the communities where he’s trying to build a data center without their support. Keisha is the only candidate who will stand up and put a pause on data centers to protect communities, while Rick Jackson just tries to profit off of data center projects.”
Read below for excerpts:
In an open letter addressed directly to Rick Jackson, the Republican candidate for governor of Georgia, Proctor asked Jackson to hold himself to the same standard for data centers that he has advocated for in public.
“We are against the idea that rural communities should have less influence over their own futures because the people developing around them possess more money, more attorneys, more political connections and more power,” Proctor wrote.
Jackson has built his campaign for governor, in part, on the idea that Georgia communities—not distant officials or corporations—should decide whether a data center gets built in their backyard. Proctor’s message asks whether that principle extends to a project in the corner of East Texas where Proctor lives and Jackson has a documented financial interest.
“If communities in Georgia deserve the right to decide whether a data center belongs in their backyard, why should the people of Hooks, Texas, deserve anything less?”
Proctor is not a lone letter-writer. He is part of a local group, No Bowie County Data Centers, that has spent months organizing residents at a local diner, showing up at commissioners’ meetings, and pressing officials for specifics on water use, power demand, and environmental review. They have urged elected officials to reject the data center proposals that are tied to Rick Jackson’s company, but have so far been unsuccessful.
“The decisions made by a few are destroying the lives of many,” Paula Sorenson, another resident, said at a recent community meeting opposing the surge of data center projects in her area.
Jackson has said publicly that he has money invested in a Texas data center project. Asked by the Macon TV station 13WMAZ in April about his views on data centers, he said he understood the issue firsthand.
“I do have an investment and that’s the reason I’m knowledgeable about it,” he told the station.
Jackson’s financial disclosure form, filed with the Georgia’s ethics commission, lists him as “CEO & President” of a company called Datahub Developers, LLC. The company’s address is the same one used by Jackson Healthcare, the staffing company that made Jackson his fortune.
It isn’t clear from the paperwork why Powell signed as Datahub’s president when Jackson’s disclosure lists him as holding that same title. But the two men do have a history together. In a 2022 interview, Powell mentioned “my business partner from the Jackson Investment Group,” a company that SEC records confirm is one of Jackson’s own investment firms. The men were doing business together years before Datahub ever existed.
That August sale is the one Proctor and his neighbors packed the Bowie County Courthouse to fight. Dozens of residents showed up to a special commissioners’ meeting to press officials on property values, pollution, water use, and the county’s approach to economic development before the sale was approved.
When Proctor, who attended the meeting, asked whether commissioners had signed a nondisclosure agreement covering the sale, Judge Howell confirmed they had, describing a confidentiality clause as standard practice in real estate contracts.
“We signed a contract that had a confidentiality clause,” Howell said.
That pattern is exactly what strikes Proctor as irreconcilable with what Jackson has said publicly about data centers.
In an op-ed for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jackson wrote that decisions about data centers “should never be decided behind closed doors,” and that the people who live with the consequences “must have a meaningful voice in the decision.”
“You said the people who must live with the consequences deserve a meaningful voice,” Proctor wrote to Jackson, quoting the same language back. “Now you have an opportunity to demonstrate whether they are also a standard you are willing to live by.”
As of this writing, neither Jackson’s campaign nor Bob Powell had responded to requests for comment on the letter or the underlying land transactions.
For Proctor, the answer matters less as a matter of corporate structure than as a test of character—whether a man who has spoken at length about growing up without money, connections, or power is willing to extend that same deference to people who currently have none of those things.
