I was going to send my father in law some fig cuttings. He lives 45 minutes north of Atlanta. 

I have cuttings of:

Peter's Honey Fig
VdB
Osborne Prolific

Are these okay for the south or will the spoil/get ants? (don't have these problems in CA :)

Start here.

For pots or in ground? Which city does he live in?

Canton, GA 

In ground

checking link now....

Ohjust ants like the fig trees fruit, i use tanglefoot and it stops them .
There are other products im sure that work also but its tanglefoot each season i use.

It can get quiet cold in the foot hills in the winter. Zone 7a.  VDB would be the best of those three. Ants can be a problem but the use of tanglefoot can take care of that.

Easiest, cheapest and greenest solution for ants in the southeast is borax + powdered sugar + water. They feed it to the queen who cant pass the sharp particles because her digestive track is too small. A couple days later the colony collapses. Good if you have kids or dogs around.

If you use the borax and sugar with water you can soak a cotton ball in and keep it wet, they will keep coming back to it and if you keep it moist you don't use as much as well with out it caking in the lid.

I do basically the same as Chivas except I use folded up wads of paper towel.  It is lethal and they can't develop a resistance to it.