A 4-1 rejection, a lawsuit two days later, and excavation weeks after that. That is what actually happened in Saline Township, Michigan, over the past eight months.
The OpenAI and Oracle Stargate AI data center campus, a $16 billion, 21 million-square-foot, 1.4-gigawatt project, has pushed its way into a farm town that tried to say no.
The township voted 4-1 against it
The story began in September 2025. Developer Related Digital sought rezoning for land in Saline Township to build a Stargate data center for OpenAI and Oracle. The five-member township board voted four against and one in favor. The lone yes vote came from township clerk Kelly Marion.
What happened after the rejection mattered more than the vote itself. Related Digital sued the township within two days, citing exclusionary zoning. A few weeks later, the township and the developer settled.
Township attorney Fred Lucas described the position bluntly: the town was between a rock and a hard place. In practice, its legal options had narrowed sharply.
The settlement brought roughly $14 million in community benefits, including $4 million to preserve 1,000 acres of farmland, with the rest going to the fire department and environmental projects. Related Digital promised 2,500 union construction jobs, 450 permanent jobs and 1,500 spillover jobs.
It was a textbook example of using litigation to route around a local democratic vote. Resident Kathryn Haushalter, a former Marine and mother of five, became the face of the opposition, but her attempts to intervene in the lawsuit and challenge construction permits did not stop the project.
The real effect spread to nearby towns
The political reaction spread faster than the construction site.
By early this year, at least 19 Michigan municipalities had passed new moratoriums on data center construction, explicitly trying to avoid Saline's path. Washtenaw County commissioners passed a March resolution supporting local moratoriums. At the state level, bipartisan lawmakers even introduced a one-year statewide construction pause, though Governor Gretchen Whitmer and House Speaker Matt Hall opposed it.
| Project metric | Figure |
|---|---|
| Investment | $16 billion, up from an initial $7 billion plan |
| Footprint | 21 million square feet |
| Power demand | 1.4 gigawatts |
| Construction jobs | 2,500 union jobs |
| Permanent jobs | 450 |
| Township vote | 4-1 against |
What does 1.4 gigawatts mean? Roughly the load of a mid-sized city. One campus would draw a large block from Michigan's power grid. Related Digital says it will use closed-loop cooling and keep water use at office-building levels. But water is not the only local concern. For farmers and residents, grid pressure, land values and community balance matter just as much.
This playbook can travel
Stargate is the $500 billion AI infrastructure plan announced earlier this year by OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank. The Saline playbook, suing a local government to push rezoning through, is likely to appear in other states.
Texas and Pennsylvania already have large data center footprints, and similar conflicts are already emerging there. The difference is whether the local grid can absorb the shock first.
The significance of Saline is not just Saline. It is a warning to small towns like it: a 4-1 local vote may not count for much against a $16 billion project.
The next question is where OpenAI's next data center goes when 19 neighboring Michigan towns start putting up walls.
Sources: A Michigan farm town voted down plans for a giant OpenAI-Oracle data center. Weeks later, construction began (Fortune), After a $16 billion Stargate AI data center was built despite being voted down, CocoLoop, Michigan towns rush to block new buildouts (Tom's Hardware), Related Digital Announces Financing for $16 Billion Oracle Data Center Project in Saline Township (Blackstone)