An expansive video display inside the Savannah Convention Center’s largest ballroom Wednesday showed a rendering of some fifteen cranes and seas of storage containers along Hutchinson Island’s Savannah River banks.
It’s an image of the Savannah River that is unrecognizable today. Yet it’s just the image the Georgia Ports Authority has envisioned, and that picture recently inched closer to reality.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approved in September the permit for a new 350-acre container terminal on Hutchinson Island, the authority announced at Wednesday’s Savannah State of the Port event. The video rendering shown to roughly 1,700 attendees was that of the planned 3.5 million twenty-foot-equivalent (TEU) terminal.
With the USACE-approved permit,
the authority is now set to begin construction in January 2028. The Savannah Container Terminal is a critical element to GPA’s plans to reach 12 million TEU capacity over the next decade, an increase beyond its current 7.75 million TEU capabilities, port officials say.
“To be announcing that we’re opening a 3.5 million TEU facility, that’s not happening anywhere else in the United State of America,” said GPA CEO Griff Lynch.
Wednesday’s State of the Port bridged GPA’s past with that ambitious future.
CEO Griff Lynch charted the Port of Savannah’s transformation over decades to its near 6 million TEU volumes experienced today. Lynch’s speech highlighted pivotal moments in that history—specifically those where GPA kept its course despite broader headwinds.
There was the 2008 recession where many companies halted growth plans and sweated out their assets. But GPA doubled down on building out its facilities, Lynch said.
Port of Savannah volumes grew from 2.9 million TEUs during the recession to 4.2 million TEUs by 2016. That doubling down was the same during the COVID-19 and also over the past two years amid tariffs, canal closures from military conflicts in the Middle East and challenging weather conditions at the Panama Canal.
The Port of Savannah logged 5.6 million TEUs in fiscal year 2026 and is off to its second-fastest start in history this fiscal year.
GPA has invested $4.8 billion of its own revenues in its facilities over the past 13 years, Lynch said. Those investments include the ongoing $1.6 billion renovation of Ocean Terminal to a 1.75 million TEU container yard.
“We are not going to sweat the assets. We are going to make sure we have our capacity ready to go when our customers need it,” Lynch said.
And GPA’s sustained commitment to its long-term growth was no more apparent than with Wednesday’s announcement.
The authority is halfway through a 1-year succession plan to transition President Kevin Price to president and CEO upon Lynch’s retirement on Aug. 1 next year. The succession plan was announced earlier this year along with Price’s appointment to president.
In his last State of the Port of his career, Lynch ceded the stage to GPA’s future leader. It was Price who made the announcement about the new key step for the Savannah Container Terminal.
The terminal’s completion is slated for mid-2030, just at the time the Talmadge Bridge is expected to be raised after a cable maintenance project. It will also be just around the time GPA projects 9 million TEUs of volume in 2036, alongside deepening and widening of the Savannah River’s shipping channel.
“What you saw here today was GPA continuing to go after the mission of being an economic driver for the state. I look forward to continuing that commitment,” Price said.
Evan Lasseter is the City of Savannah and Chatham County government reporter for the Savannah Morning News. You can reach him at ELasseter@savannahnow.com.
This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Savannah State of the Port bridges GPA's past with ambitious future
