Bottoms, Jackson offer competing visions on data centers, Medicaid expansion at business luncheon

ATHENS, Ga. – Data centers and Medicaid expansion were on the menu as Georgia’s candidates for governor made their pitches to the state’s business leaders Wednesday at an annual luncheon hosted by the Georgia Chamber of Commerce.

Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms and Republican Rick Jackson took the stage at an Athens event center to pitch their policies to a crowd of over 1,000 members of the state’s business community.

“Small businesses in this state are seeing the same impacts from high inflation rates, affordability issues — they’re seeing that too, and so they want to hear what these two candidates have to offer,” Georgia Chamber President and CEO Chris Clark said after the luncheon.

“They also want to know that we’re going to have a chief executive that’s going to continue to help grow the state, grow the state’s economy in a quality way for jobs, not just in Atlanta or not just in Macon or Savannah, but in our most rural communities too,” he added.

Data centers

Georgia has seen its share of large data center proposals, and opposition to the energy-hungry server houses has echoed in city halls up and down the state.

The 2026 legislative session saw a number of bills with bipartisan support aimed at reining in new data center proposals, but none made it to the governor’s desk before the session ended.

Bottoms, who previously served as Atlanta mayor, said if elected governor, she will support a temporary pause on data center construction.

“I just want us to pause,” she told reporters. “I want us to gather all the information, factual information, and then make a determination on how we move forward. I can tell you when I’m moving around the state, a lot of people are concerned about the environmental impact. They’re also concerned about the rising cost of utility bills.”

But Bottoms indicated she would not support a permanent halt of the projects.

“I’ve also talked with some leaders, especially in our rural communities, who are saying that having data centers there helps them balance their budget,” she added. “So I am respectful of everyone’s thoughts on it, but at the end of the day, we’ve got to separate fact from fiction, and we don’t have enough facts on data centers to make an informed decision on how we move forward. We need a pause.”

Jackson, who is invested in a data center in Texas, was more supportive of the technology hubs, arguing that they could make economic sense in more remote parts of the state.

“First of all, every community needs to have control of whether they have a data center or not, full stop,” Jackson said.

Jackson said data center projects could eliminate property taxes in some Georgia counties.

“No property taxes for the data center, or don’t have one. It’s totally up to them,” Jackson told reporters. “As a business person, I just want to give them that option so that they know both sides of the street.”

Medicaid expansion 

Bottoms said if elected, she plans to eliminate Georgia Pathways, the state’s partial Medicaid expansion program created under Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. She said she would instead fully expand Medicaid.

Georgia is one of 10 states that have not fully expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.

“There’s not a single community that you go into in this state that hasn’t been touched by our refusal to expand Medicaid, from hospitals in the metro area to hospitals in our rural communities,” she said. “And it weakens our entire healthcare system when we don’t expand Medicaid. And the irony of it is we are paying into a system that’s helping fund healthcare in states throughout the United States. We just haven’t done it in Georgia.”

Bottoms said she is optimistic that Democrats will flip the state House this year, but she said she thinks she can convince Republicans to support Medicaid expansion even if they continue to control the Legislature.

“This is one of these issues that I believe can get bipartisan support,” she said. “It’s had bipartisan support before, but people have made it difficult for those across the aisle who want to support Medicaid expansion to get it done without money being put in races to run against them.”

But Jackson, a wealthy healthcare executive, is not behind traditional Medicaid expansion.

“I understand how Medicaid works from a healthcare standpoint, and I do believe in an intelligent Medicaid expansion,” Jackson said.

Jackson said that will involve emphasizing work requirements and instituting fixed federal block grants rather than open-ended matching funds.

“I want to be able to give the opportunity to every Medicaid recipient to be able to be trained and at least get a job and get off of Medicaid,” he said. “I’m not going to measure our state by how many people are on Medicaid. I want to measure how many people are on commercial insurance, and the way to do that is reduce the cost of commercial insurance, and that’s what I want to do.”