OpenAI Project Camellia: Georgia Students Get Free Codex Credits

OpenAI announced on July 22, 2026, that it is developing Project Camellia, a large-scale datacenter campus in Effingham County, Georgia. The company has contracted with Georgia Power for 3.2 gigawatts of electricity — enough to rank among the largest single power agreements for an AI facility in the U.S. — with delivery phased between 2028 and 2032. But tucked inside the infrastructure announcement is something immediately useful for hundreds of thousands of Georgia students: up to $71 million in free access to Codex, OpenAI’s autonomous coding tool.

What OpenAI Is Actually Building

Project Camellia will sit within the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub, a pre-existing industrially zoned warehouse district. OpenAI frames the datacenter as a better neighbor than a warehouse would be — projecting less traffic, lower ongoing water use, higher long-term tax revenue, and more durable employment. The company says it expects to become the largest taxpayer in Effingham County and will create thousands of construction and permanent on-site jobs.

On the environmental side, the facility will use a closed-loop water system — OpenAI describes it as working like a car radiator — that recirculates water rather than continuously drawing from and discharging into local supplies. That approach is consistent with at least six other Stargate-affiliated sites that use closed-loop liquid cooling.

OpenAI is also promising that Georgia residential ratepayers won’t absorb any project costs. Under Georgia Public Service Commission rules, infrastructure costs tied to large industrial customers cannot be passed to existing ratepayers, and OpenAI says it will cover the full cost of the infrastructure and electric service required for the project.

$80 Million in Community Commitments — and an Annual Audit

Beyond the physical footprint, OpenAI has pledged $80 million in community benefits over the life of the project, directed toward schools, public safety, healthcare, housing, workforce training, veterans’ services and small businesses. That figure is separate from projected tax revenue. A public open house was scheduled for July 23, 2026, and community input will shape a Georgia Community Compact — a formal document translating local priorities into specific, auditable commitments. An independent firm will conduct and publicly release an annual audit to track whether OpenAI follows through.

Project Camellia is part of OpenAI’s broader Stargate infrastructure buildout, which already has its flagship campus operating in Abilene, Texas. Combined with other announced Stargate sites and ongoing CoreWeave projects, the program is approaching nearly 7 gigawatts of planned U.S. capacity and over $400 billion in investment over three years. The 3.2 GW contracted for Project Camellia represents a substantial addition to that total.

The Student Angle: $100 in Codex Credits, No Application Required

Eligible students at Georgia colleges, community colleges and technical schools can claim $100 in Codex credits through their ChatGPT accounts at chatgpt.com/codex/georgia-college-students/. OpenAI says the total pool of credits available reaches up to $71 million — meaning roughly 710,000 students could benefit if fully distributed.

Codex is not a simple autocomplete tool. It’s an autonomous, cloud-based coding agent built into ChatGPT: you describe a task in plain English, and Codex can clone a GitHub repository into a sandboxed environment, write code across multiple files, run tests, iterate on failures, and open a pull request — all without you manually writing each line. It’s available via ChatGPT’s web and desktop apps and integrates with several popular code editors. On paid ChatGPT plans, Codex is already included, but those plans start at a price point that’s out of reach for many community college and trade school students.

That cost gap is exactly why this credit offer stands out. GitHub Copilot does offer a free student tier, though it paused new student sign-ups in April 2026 before reopening them in June — an instability that left many students without access during a critical period. Anthropic does not publish a comparable individual student discount for Claude, and Claude Code runs through Claude plans priced between $20 and $200 per month. OpenAI’s geography-specific, URL-based redemption requires no application, no lottery and no waitlist — at least as currently described.

Why This Matters Beyond Computer Science Majors

OpenAI explicitly names engineering, manufacturing, healthcare, education, entrepreneurship and the skilled trades as target career areas for students using these credits — a signal that the program isn’t aimed only at CS majors. A nursing student automating a scheduling tool, a small-business management major building a simple inventory app, or a welding student exploring digital fabrication workflows could all plausibly use Codex for real projects.

There’s also a portfolio dimension worth noting. Codex outputs — GitHub pull requests, completed repositories, working prototypes — are tangible artifacts that students can show to employers. For students at institutions without robust industry recruiting pipelines, that kind of demonstrable output can matter a great deal in a job search.

The broader infrastructure won’t come online until 2028 at the earliest, and OpenAI acknowledges that significant work remains on financing, design and operating models. But the Codex credits are available now — or will be as the program rolls out — making this one of the more direct and immediate AI skill-building opportunities tied to a major corporate infrastructure deal in recent memory.

Source: OpenAI