They Voted No, and Built Anyway

Inside Saline Township's fight against a $16 billion Stargate data center

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Last September, the planning commission and township board of Saline Township, Michigan, did what a lot of communities wish they had the nerve to do. They looked at a proposal for a 21 million square foot AI data center on farmland south of Ann Arbor, and they said no. The board's vote was 4 to 1 against rezoning the land from agricultural to industrial use.

Two days later, the developer sued.

The lawsuit that changed the outcome

Related Digital, working alongside OpenAI and Oracle as part of the Stargate initiative, alleged that Saline Township's decision amounted to exclusionary zoning, arguing the township had no land zoned for industrial use and had therefore unlawfully excluded a necessary land use altogether under Michigan law. Within weeks, the township settled. The project moved forward with some concessions attached, but the fundamental outcome, a data center on farmland that residents and their elected board had explicitly rejected, did not change.

"I feel like people don't understand what's coming."

That was Kathryn Haushalter, a Saline Township resident and Marine Corps veteran who lives across from the site, describing her fears about construction disruption and long term environmental consequences to Broadband Breakfast in May.

The numbers involved grew as the project moved forward. What was first announced as a 7 billion dollar campus is now valued above 16 billion dollars, with no public explanation offered for the increase. The site will draw roughly 1.4 gigawatts of electricity, comparable to the output of a large nuclear plant, delivered by DTE Energy using existing grid capacity supplemented by newly built battery storage.

A pattern of moving fast

Residents who watched the process unfold described it as a strategy built around speed. One resident told Forbes the apparent plan was to move as quickly as possible so that by the time anyone could mount an effective challenge, the project would already be too far along to stop. The sequence in Saline fits that account closely: a rezoning vote in September, a lawsuit within 48 hours, a settlement within weeks, and a groundbreaking ceremony the following June, attended by OpenAI's Sam Altman and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who has called the project the largest single investment in the state's history.

Residents ultimately secured around 14 million dollars in community benefits as part of the settlement, funding for the local fire department, farmland preservation commitments, and some environmental restrictions. Set against a project now valued above 16 billion dollars, the settlement amounts to less than a tenth of one percent of the total investment, a ratio that has become a rallying point for critics who argue the concession was never really a negotiation between equals.

Utility oversight became its own battleground. DTE Energy asked Michigan's Public Service Commission to approve permits tied to the project on an expedited basis, without the standard public hearing process, a request the state Attorney General's office intervened to block. DTE maintained the arrangement, including 6 billion dollars in planned infrastructure spending, would not raise rates for existing customers. Residents at protests in Saline pointed to data from other data center heavy regions suggesting rate increases of 25 to 30 percent are common in areas hosting these facilities, though the company disputes those figures apply to its specific arrangement.

Accusations in both directions

Related Digital's chairman and CEO, Jeff Blau, responded to the sustained opposition by suggesting some of it might not be organic, telling CNBC that protests appeared to be "bused in" and that it was unclear where funding for opposition groups originated, floating the possibility of foreign involvement. He offered no evidence for the claim. Residents who have spent months attending township meetings and organizing through a Facebook group called Protect Saline Township have rejected the suggestion outright, pointing to the scale and duration of their organizing as evidence the opposition is homegrown.

The Saline outcome has already reshaped politics elsewhere in Michigan. At least 19 municipalities across the state have enacted their own data center moratoriums since construction began in Saline, according to reporting from Bridge Michigan, and state legislators reintroduced a package of statewide moratorium bills in June, though Governor Whitmer has repeatedly called a statewide pause "an automatic non-starter."

What Saline actually settled

Saline Township did not lose because its concerns were wrong. It lost because Michigan's legal framework treats a data center as a use a township cannot categorically exclude once it has no industrial zoning at all, a legal vulnerability that likely exists in many other rural townships across the country that have never needed an industrial zoning category before.

A community vote should mean something more than a starting position in a negotiation. If a unanimous board decision can be reversed by a lawsuit filed within 48 hours and settled within weeks, the lesson other townships will draw is not that the process worked. It is that the process was never really theirs to control in the first place.

Sources: Data Center Dynamics, Tom's Hardware, Fortune, CNBC, Broadband Breakfast, Fox 2 Detroit, Socialist Alternative, EDRA of Michigan.