OpenAI Launches Presence and Unveils $30 Billion Project Camellia in Georgia in Dual Investment
The Presence platform enters limited availability with BBVA, SoftBank, and IAG as its first clients, while Project Camellia adds 3.2 GW to the race for data center capacity in the United States.
OpenAI kicked off the week with two announcements that collectively reshape how the company positions itself against hyperscalers and competing models. On July 22, it unveiled Presence, a platform for large corporations to operate voice and chat AI agents with governance, guardrails, and integration into internal systems, alongside Project Camellia, a 3.2-gigawatt data center campus in Effingham County, Georgia, which, according to Vice President of Computing Strategy Sachin Katti, is expected to exceed $30 billion in private investment by the end of its build-out.
The three initial clients of Presence hail from three distinct continents: BBVA bank is testing voice support for operations in Mexico, SoftBank is validating Japanese dialogues for enterprise clients, and Australian insurer IAG is designing support for spikes in claims related to severe weather events. This marks the first time OpenAI has launched a paid platform explicitly aimed at mission-critical workflows, outside of the traditional API channel.
What Presence Delivers That the API Alone Did Not
The obvious reading is that OpenAI is filling the gap that Anthropic and Google opened with Claude Agent SDK and Gemini Enterprise. The sharper reading is different. Presence combines conversation routing, use case policies, integration with internal databases, and continuous monitoring into a single control plane. For the CIO who today manages three distinct teams orchestrating LangChain, Semantic Kernel, and raw prompts against APIs, the proposal is to replace that stack with a single contract.
The business model is not yet publicly detailed, but the platform operates in "limited general availability," with pricing presumably based on sessions and voice minutes, a format already tested by Twilio with Segment. For OpenAI's installed base, now concentrated in ChatGPT Enterprise and ChatGPT Team, Presence serves as the stepping stone to transition clients from experimentation territory into multi-year contracts equivalent to those Google Cloud has been securing in Vertex AI Agents.
Georgia: The Personal Hyperscaler
Project Camellia occupies 101 acres within the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub, about 25 miles northwest of Savannah, featuring four buildings and power delivery scheduled between 2028 and 2032 by Georgia Power. OpenAI has already secured a partial property tax exemption of 50% for 15 years and has promised $80 million in community benefits and $71 million in credits for students in the state. The cooling system will be a closed circuit, a direct response to local opposition regarding water consumption, which has already derailed similar projects in Texas and Arizona.
Adding to Alphabet's infrastructure announcements, which raised capex to as much as $205 billion in the same week, and the stated consumption by Microsoft and Amazon, the electricity market for data centers in the United States has entered a state of structural scarcity. JPMorgan analysts calculated that hyperscalers have already reserved capacity equivalent to 90 gigawatts for the next five years, against 40 GW available in approved pipeline. The winner will be who pays more and who has the land ready first.
Where Money Leaves the American Balance Sheet and Falls Outside of It
For BBVA, the experiment in Mexican Spanish and Portuguese serves as a laboratory before scaling to Spain, where the bank has been cutting about a thousand positions in local operations. If Presence operates effectively in the customer service queue in Guadalajara, the model will be replicated in Madrid by 2027, deepening the wave of automation in service that has already reduced a significant portion of the banking sector's call center headcount in the Iberian Peninsula since 2023.
SoftBank fits Presence into the thesis that Masayoshi Son has been selling to the market since the last shareholders' meeting: Japan as the largest corporate implementer of generative AI of the decade. SoftBank is already OpenAI's main partner in capital and local integration, and testing Presence with enterprise clients gives the group time to adapt the platform to the vocabulary of the fifth largest market for corporate software spending in the world before Japanese rivals undertake integration on their own.
For IAG, the Australian test is conceptually the most ambitious of the three. One of the largest operational costs in the insurance sector is the spike in calls during weather events, when the call center saturates in 15 minutes. An agent that handles triage, claim opening, and mass communication transforms this vulnerability peak into a competitive advantage, and that is the promise that competitors like Suncorp and QBE will have to respond to in the upcoming rounds of technology hiring.