The Port of Savannah has approved the first phase in building out container handling capacity at Ocean Terminal, its second-largest marine terminal that has a new role serving as a lay berth for big ships calling the larger Garden City terminal.

The lay berth's startup last month comes as anchorage delays at Savannah have fallen to about one day.

The board of the Georgia Ports Authority (GPA) this week approved $614 million in spending for the first phase of improvements at Ocean Terminal, including the container yard, terminal and other infrastructure. The first phase of the terminal's renovation is expected to be completed in 2027.

A second phase of Ocean Terminal's buildout will be completed in the second half of 2028 for a total investment in the facility of $1.54 billion, the GPA said in a statement.

While Ocean Terminal has limited lift capability for small container ships, the 200-acre site is expected to handle two large container ships simultaneously at full buildout, with nominal capacity of 2 million TEUs per year. Along with berth improvements, the GPA plans to build expanded truck gates and a new exit ramp for trucks from Ocean Terminal.

The GPA this spring completed some of the first renovation work at Ocean Terminal, opening a berth to handle super-post-Panamax ships. That berth is now available as a“parking spot”for ships to wait for a working berth at nearby Garden City rather than sit outside the port at anchor and wait out the tidal delays for transiting the Savannah River.

“This lay berth, combined with our eight start times for ship labor, creates exciting new possibilities for ships to stay on schedule or make up time,” GPA Chief Executive Griff Lynch said in the statement.

Lay berth cutting idle time

The GPA said the first ship to use Ocean Terminal's lay berth arrived in September, cutting 12 to 15 hours of idle time down to about three.The GPA did not identify the vessel, but tracking data from Sea-web, a sister company of the Journal of Commerce within S&P Global, shows that the Hamburg Sud-operated 9,030-TEU CCNI Arauco arrived at Ocean Terminal on Sept. 11 and spent just over two hours there before proceeding to Garden City.

The Arauco spent over two days sitting at anchorage outside of Savannah before calling Ocean Terminal, but that time at anchorage appears to be an outlier.

Sea-web data shows the 267 container ships that called Savannah in the third quarter sat at anchorage for an average of just over 29 hours. When the GPA first proposed the lay berth, it was working down a severe backlog of ships sitting outside of Savannah due to winter weather. In the first quarter of 2025, 319 container ships sat at anchor for an average of 61 hours, according to Sea-web.