ATLANTA — The most expensive public high school ever built in Georgia opens Wednesday in an old I.B.M. office building.

With 11 stories, a 900-car parking deck and views fit for a corporate executive, the school, North Atlanta High, looks very much like the fancy office buildings and glittery shopping strips that populate its Buckhead community.

The school cost about $147 million. That is small change compared with the Robert F. Kennedy high school complex in Los Angeles, built in 2010 for $578 million — a figure critics liked to point out was more expensive than Beijing’s Olympic stadium.

But in the Deep South, where the median cost of a new high school is $38.5 million, it might as well be the Taj Mahal.