Georgia Tech has opened the first three floors of its two newest Tech Square high-rises, George Tower and Scheller Tower, marking the physical completion of a two-decade university development in the heart of Midtown. The first three floors of George Tower and Scheller Tower opened to the campus community on Jan. 12, 2026, with full operation expected by fall 2026. The opening caps a project the university has built out in phases since the district's earliest days as a planned academic-corporate corridor.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Tech Square originated in 2001 as plan to transform derelict Midtown lots into academic and corporate hub, and that Phase 3 adds Georgia Tech's own high-rises to the skyline. That framing matters here: unlike earlier phases, which leaned on private and corporate partners, this stage puts Georgia Tech's own academic buildings directly into the district it helped seed at the start of the century.
The towers land in a corridor already dense with the kind of work Georgia Tech trains people for. Atlanta's computer and mathematical occupations employed 119,150 people as of the most recent available estimate, for May 2025, according to JobGetr's review of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Atlanta metro Computer and Mathematical Occupations employment was 119,150 people in May 2025, up 0.4 percent from a year earlier. Pay in that occupational group also sits above the national figure. The Atlanta metro annual median wage for Computer and Mathematical Occupations was $110,010 in May 2025, up 4.4 percent from a year earlier. JobGetr's own comparison puts that edge in context: Atlanta's computer and mathematical occupations annual median wage was $730 per year above the U.S. figure in that same period, though the calculation carries low confidence and should be read as a narrow, not decisive, gap.
None of that occupational data describes jobs the towers themselves created. It describes the labor market Tech Square now sits inside — a corridor where tech and math occupations already carry a modest wage premium over the national median, and where Georgia Tech is now a landlord as well as an anchor tenant. The distinction matters for how employers and recruiters should read this milestone: it is a real-estate and academic completion, not a hiring event. What it does confirm is that Georgia Tech's bet on Midtown as a tech corridor, made in 2001, has now extended into its own physical footprint rather than remaining dependent on outside developers.
For employers already clustered around Tech Square, the finished towers add academic space — classrooms, labs, faculty offices tied to programs the AJC's reporting associates with the relocation — inside walking distance of the district's existing corporate tenants. That proximity has long been the district's selling point: students and faculty working next to the companies that might hire them. A fully operational George Tower and Scheller Tower reinforces that arrangement without, on its own, changing the underlying occupational employment or wage figures reported above.
The near-term marker to watch is straightforward. Full operation of both towers is expected by fall 2026, which will determine when the remaining floors — and the programs moving into them — are actually staffed and in use. Beyond that timeline, the open question is which employers, if any, deepen their presence in Tech Square once the buildings are fully running; the evidence so far speaks to the university's own build-out, not to which companies follow it in.
Data: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics); JobGetr analysis of public data (May 2025 estimates).
