BY: Till Daldrup, Jenny Ahn
EDITOR: Vikas Kumar, Jim Impoco
Digital Realty ($DLR), the giant real estate investment fund, paid $120 million for parcels of land that include a former Army dump near Atlanta, Georgia, used as an “indiscriminate burial” site that contains carcinogens like trichloroethylene and military ordnance. In December 2025, crews unearthed white phosphorus that began smoking and had to call in a bomb squad. And there may be more surprises lurking underground that could endanger workers and nearby residents.
Hunterbrook Media’s investment affiliate, Hunterbrook Capital, does not have any positions related to this article at the time of publication. Positions may change at any time. Full disclosures on our website.
In 2025, Digital Realty spent $120 million to purchase a 97-acre parcel of land that was once part of Fort Gillem, a former United States Army post in Forest Park, Georgia. The company, one of the world’s largest real estate investment trusts, is constructing a massive data center complex on the site, returning valuable land to a “productive, tax-generating use,” as its executives put it.
But the land came with a historical burden. From 1941 until around 1980 the Army dumped everything from gas masks and medical waste to solvents and sewage sludge on this parcel in the northwest corner of the former army base that now houses a maze of warehouses, including a Kroger distribution center and an Amazon delivery station.
There’s quite a bit of environmental issues with the site,” a Digital Realty asset manager said at a meeting with county officials in 2025. “Tons and tons and tons of — physical tons — of trash and environmental hazards.”
An investigation by Hunterbrook found that the hazards unearthed included military waste that was still combustible. Meanwhile, residents in neighboring communities are reporting cracks on their walls from explosive blasting on the site and say their questions about environmental and health threats stemming from Digital Realty’s Fort Gillem project are being ignored.
The company plans to spend $3 billion on this project, and the first phase is expected to open in early 2028. But a document filed with the Georgia Environmental Protection Division suggests construction may surface some surprises.
In December 2025, the company encountered white phosphorus on the property, which “reacted when exposed to air and exhibited a dense white smoke,” according to a letter an environmental consultant sent on behalf of Digital Realty to Georgia EPD. The company asked the Army for guidance and contacted the local police department, which sent a bomb squad to inspect and sample the material.
The letter states that the white phosphorus was found in an area on the western side of the property that’s going to be under the planned data center.
“Upon completion of the Property’s redevelopment, the area of concern will be encapsulated with a concrete building foundation,” the letter states. “At this time, the size of the area of concern is not known but is not anticipated to be larger than 100-feet by 100-feet by 8-feet deep based on grading already completed at the Property.”
The material has since been removed, a Digital Realty spokesperson told Hunterbrook in an email.
“Trained professionals carefully excavated the 100-foot by 100-foot by 8-foot area in accordance with an approved work plan, using appropriate equipment and personal protective equipment to identify any additional material containing white phosphorus,” the spokesperson wrote. “The excavation recovered five 30-gallon steel drums of material containing white phosphorus, far less than could have been encountered across the full area. The drums were then transported under a hazardous waste manifest to a permitted treatment, storage, and disposal facility.”
The company also said that “work in the area where the material was initially discovered was stopped immediately upon the discovery of the material” and that “there were no reported injuries.” No other munitions and explosives of concern have been encountered since the white phosphorus discovery, according to Digital Realty.
A Georgia EPD spokesperson confirmed the temporary work stoppage in the area where white phosphorus was found and that Digital Realty was in the process of removing the material in February, when EPD representatives visited the site.
White phosphorus is used in artillery shells, rockets, and grenades to create dense smoke screens, provide battlefield illumination, mark targets, or act as an incendiary weapon. The use of white phosphorus weapons in civilian areas has been considered a war crime by human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Its presence at the Digital Realty construction site “is assumed to be associated with historical Army disposal operations,” according to the letter to the Georgia EPD.
“Measures are in place to protect construction workers, future occupants, and the public throughout remediation and development activities,” the Digital Realty spokesperson told Hunterbrook.
TOXIC LAND IS DATA CENTER BOOM’S NEXT FRONTIER
The frenzied AI build-out has turned Digital Realty into a digital infrastructure colossus. According to its website, Digital Realty operates more than 300 data centers worldwide. It counts Oracle, IBM, Meta, AT&T, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley among its customers.
Amid the scramble to feed AI’s seemingly endless need for compute, other companies besides Digital Realty have resorted to building data centers on contaminated land. TeraWulf is developing the former Century Aluminum smelter site in Hawesville, Kentucky, into a more than $4 billion data center campus, with Anthropic as its tenant. Decades of smelter waste disposal and PCB spills left both soil and groundwater at this site contaminated.
SB Energy, a SoftBank subsidiary, is building a campus of up to 10 gigawatts (roughly eight of which OpenAI has contracted) on land that also includes the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Pike County, Ohio, which enriched uranium between 1954 and 2001. Operations at the plant generated hazardous and radioactive waste and “resulted in soil and groundwater contamination at areas located within plant boundaries,” according to the Department of Energy.
And Sentinel Data Centers has begun building a project at the Foote Mineral Co. Superfund site in East Whiteland Township, Pennsylvania, where lithium metal and chemical production contaminated the soil with arsenic and hexavalent chromium.
Concerns over possible health impacts caused East Whiteland Township to order Sentinel Data Centers and its development partner Green Fig LLC to stop work on their data center in early July until “greater clarity is provided with respect to the ongoing review of the Soils Management Plan (SMP) and Health & Safety Plan (HSP) by the Township,” according to an announcement on Facebook. Residents had told the Philadelphia Inquirer that they had seen “dust plumes rising from the site” in June. Work at the construction site resumed later in July, according to the Inquirer, though work was partially halted again in late August over questions regarding the data center’s water supply.
Construction on Digital Realty’s campus, by contrast, continues apace.
Digital Realty has acknowledged that the land it bought comes with a considerable environmental cleanup burden. After all, the Army base’s toxic legacy was no secret: In 2000, workers discovered a burn pit with ash at astronomical lead levels of up to 25,000 milligrams per kilogram. In 2009, they unearthed rusted drums labeled “Trichloroethylene Tech” (TCE is a known carcinogen that is linked to kidney cancer.) And a chemical-warfare-clothing compound called “XXCC3” had also been detected in the soil here.
Urban Redevelopment Agency (URA) chair Kimberly James told Hunterbrook in an email that “Digital Realty is undertaking substantial environmental remediation efforts and site work” — efforts that Digital Realty has put more than a $100 million tag on.
“We expect to invest more than $100 million in site remediation and environmental work, including stream mitigation, methane remediation, and soil and bedrock stabilization,” the company’s website for the project states.
Digital Realty’s most recent annual filing lists environmental contamination as a general business risk, without naming the Fort Gillem project specifically.
“The presence of contamination or the failure to remediate contamination at our properties may expose us to third-party liability or materially adversely affect our ability to sell, lease or develop the real estate or to borrow using the real estate as collateral,” Digital Realty’s risk disclosures read.
Fort Gillem’s toxic footprint is massive. The Army buried chlorinated solvents, including the known carcinogen TCE, and household trash that now generates methane.
Groundwater plumes containing solvents have migrated beyond the fence line and reached residential wells. After toxic vapors were found seeping into nearby homes in 2014, the Army installed a ventilation system beneath a nearby daycare and agreed to place carbon air filters in 22 homes, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The future data centers in Forest Park may face the same risk of soil vapor intrusion into buildings, which is why the environmental consultant in a letter to the Georgia Environmental Protection Division (EPD) said that a mitigation system “designed to address both chlorinated volatile organic compounds (CVOCs) and landfill gas (e.g., methane)” will be installed.
“Onsite data center buildings will be constructed with vapor mitigation systems to protect against chlorinated volatile organic compounds. To the extent warranted based on sampling data and advice from qualified environmental professionals, methane-specific components will also be included in the mitigation systems,” the Digital Realty spokesperson told Hunterbrook. “All decisions related to onsite data center buildings are based on current, onsite data, not from historic offsite data related to neighboring properties.”
And noxious fumes are not the only hazards facing construction workers and future employees. The Army’s 2023 property transfer report also warns of buried expended ordnance, spent munitions that had already been fired. But there’s always a risk of happening upon munitions that didn’t detonate, and the Army requires anyone who finds suspected unexploded munitions to immediately stop work and call the police department. That’s exactly what happened after workers discovered the aforementioned white phosphorus, which turned out to be still combustible.
For nearby residents, the explosive remnants of war are just one of many concerns linked to the Digital Realty construction site, which has literally been rattling their lives.
RESIDENTS SAY BLASTING CAUSED CRACKS IN WALLS, SEEK TRANSPARENCY
Pamela Felder, who said she bought her “forever” home less than a mile from the Digital Realty project three years ago, says blasting at the construction site earlier this year has damaged her home.
Blasting is the controlled use of explosives to break up and remove hard rock and dense soil for excavation and site preparation.
The blasting, which Felder said felt like somebody picked her home up and dropped it back down, has left numerous cracks inside and outside her and her neighbors’ homes, she said.
Documents obtained by Forest Park resident Zack Parker through Georgia Open Records Act requests and shared with Hunterbrook include a contractor’s schedule for 67 days of rock blasting at the data center site’s substation and building pads, from early December 2025 through late February, plus 38 additional days listed as “overblast.”
After Felder complained to the blasting company, Maine Drilling & Blasting, an inspector sent out by the company diagnosed the cracks as “settling,” Felder said. She tried to claim damages through a prepaid legal service, but “they denied me a second time,” she said.
Felder is unsure what her options are. She said it would cost $5,000 to retain a lawyer, “which was out of my budget.”
“Blasting-related damages claims were thoroughly evaluated using pre-blast surveys and geotechnical monitoring. Following that review, it was determined that the damages claims were not the result of site activities,” the Digital Realty spokesperson told Hunterbrook.
Precision Blasting LLC, Maine Drilling & Blasting’s subsidiary in Georgia, did not respond to a request for comment.
Construction at the site continues, according to satellite images reviewed by Hunterbrook.
Digital Realty has requested tax abatements of undisclosed size from the City of Forest Park Downtown Development Authority, Clayton County and Clayton County Public Schools, according to meeting minutes reviewed by Hunterbrook. In exchange, the company would sign a community benefits agreement worth about $5 million over 10 years including scholarships, park funding, and grants, based on Hunterbrook’s review of a draft agreement.
When asked about the community agreement, Digital Realty’s spokesperson told Hunterbrook: “Amounts remain subject to active negotiation and have not yet been finalized but are currently expected to exceed the $5 million initially requested.”
To date, the City of Forest Park has done little to address residents’ concerns about the project, according to Ann Pellegrine, another Forest Park resident who has sought answers from the city about the blasting and other environmental concerns.
Pellegrine said the project had remained secret under the city’s non-disclosure agreement with the developers until June 2025, when word leaked that the city’s design review board was examining plans for a data center — more than two months after the land sale had quietly closed in April 2025. At that point, it was too late for the residents to fight back, she said. “It didn’t have to go before council vote. It was completely done through the URA separately and in secret.” Georgia’s Urban Redevelopment law allows cities to grant the Urban Redevelopment Agency (URA) land-dealing powers, and once it does, the law allows the URA to do so without council vote.
URA chair James told Hunterbrook that URA entered into an NDA “in connection with the transaction” restricting the “URA from discussing the name of the company (Digital Realty).” Digital Realty denied signing an NDA with the city.
Pellegrine’s numerous efforts to obtain more information about the project through the Georgia Open Records Act have been “stonewalled,” she said, including, most recently with a $14,763 fee for the requested documents.
Zack Parker described a similar ordeal in an email to Hunterbrook. Since January, Parker has made nearly a dozen requests concerning the Fort Gillem redevelopment, blasting and incentives, including several for officials’ emails and texts, that he said “are simply being ignored.” The city’s own IT department had identified roughly 1,900 possible email matches concerning the redevelopment, he said, none of which he had received as of August.
“I would bet everything I have that my requests are personally being delayed,” Parker said.
The city of Forest Park did not respond to a request for comment.
Pellegrine believes the “way these URAs have been set up and the way these corporations are coming in with their NDAs” are “exploiting communities like ours because we were weak.”
“We were naive and ignorant.”
AUTHOR
Till Daldrup is an investigative journalist who joined Hunterbrook from The Wall Street Journal, where he focused on open-source investigations and content verification. In 2023, he was part of a team of reporters who won a Gerald Loeb Award for an investigation that revealed how Russia is stealing grain from occupied parts of Ukraine. He has an M.A. in Journalism from New York University and a B.S. in Social Sciences from University of Cologne. He’s also an alum of the Cologne School of Journalism (Kölner Journalistenschule).
Jenny Ahn joined Hunterbrook after serving many years as a senior analyst in the US government. She is a seasoned geopolitical expert with a particular focus on the Asia-Pacific and has diverse overseas experience. She has an M.A. in International Affairs from Yale and a B.S. in International Relations from Stanford. Jenny is based in Virginia.
EDITOR
Vikas Kumar joined Hunterbrook from The Capitol Forum, where he led the corporate investigations team for a decade as a senior editor. He was previously an attorney at Gordon Feinblatt, a trial attorney for the Department of Justice, and a law clerk for a federal judge. He has a J.D. from University of Virginia School of Law and a bachelor’s from Emory University. Vikas is based in Maryland.
Jim Impoco is the award-winning former editor-in-chief of Newsweek who returned the publication to print in 2014. Before that, he was executive editor at Thomson Reuters Digital, Sunday Business Editor at The New York Times, and Assistant Managing Editor at Fortune. Jim, who started his journalism career as a Tokyo-based reporter for The Associated Press and U.S. News & World Report, has a Master’s in Chinese and Japanese History from the University of California at Berkeley.
GRAPHICS
Dan DeLorenzo is a creative director with 25 years reporting news through visuals. Since first joining a newsroom graphics department in 2001, he has built teams at Bloomberg News, Bridgewater Associates, and the United Nations, and published groundbreaking visual journalism at The Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, The New York Times, and Business Insider. A passion for the craft has landed him at the helm of newsroom teams, on the ground in humanitarian emergencies, and at the epicenter of the world’s largest hedge fund. He runs DGFX Studio, a creative agency serving top organizations in media, finance, and civil society with data visualization, cartography, and strategic visual intelligence. He moonlights as a professional sailor working toward a USCG captain’s license and is a certified Pilates instructor.
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