Data Centers. A buzzword for a phenomenon that is affecting many communities across the Great Lakes Region, these “centers” are warehouse-sized computers that consume enormous amounts of energy and water, disturb local ecologies and economies, and are a new front of the assault on a livable planet.
Data is a term that is static. These new developments are not for storing data, they are engines of computational power. As a result, they consume far more energy than traditional data centers and are designed to be constantly running. This means that many have diesel generators for when the utility can’t maintain the power needed by the facility. Gas turbine generators or small modular nuclear reactors to power these facilities behind the meter is a very real possibility. These facilities consume energy on the scale of cities, but concentrated in a facility the size of a Costco or three.
On Halloween, 10/31/2025, DTE submitted a request to the Michigan congress to quickly approve its deal with OpenAI to build a 2.2 million square foot center in Saline, Michigan. It will consume 1.4 Gigawatts of power. The city was initially against the deal but bowed to a 14 million dollar investment pledge as part of a settlement after they were sued for rejecting the proposal. The fact that OpenAI was the company behind the development was not disclosed until after the settlement was reached. Another part of this settlement was to use a “closed loop cooling system” which uses chemical coolant in place of water evaporation.
Gretchen Whitmer issued a statement in support of the development, which is in line with the massive tax break she and the state congress passed in December 2024. These tax breaks are estimated to reduce state and local tax revenue by up to 90 million dollars through 2065.
Elsewhere in Washtenaw county, the University of Michigan is partnering with Los Alamos National Laboratories (the national lab that brought you the atomic bomb) to build their massive supercomputing facility in Ypsilanti. This project, like many of the similar tech oligarch funded projects across the region, is being resisted by the local community. It is far from a certainty that the project will be constructed.
Along with the masking off of American fascism in our current political moment, capital is rushing into a new industry, ballooning it at a breathtaking rate. Some frame it as a new cold-war style arms race with China. Some view it as the singularity, an inevitable and mysterious new frontier of human progress. Some see it as an existential threat.
This is the first wave of data center development in Michigan. So long as the bubble continues to inflate, expect more of these projects across the state. There are lessons to be learned from people resisting these developments in other parts of the Great Lakes Region. Monitor your local government’s development committee to know if these projects are being proposed. Zoning commissions are places where your local government can be convinced to not rezone agricultural land for industrial use. Push resolutions against these centers in your town hall before any project is proposed. Organize against the construction of the centers once they get approval. Data centers are incentivized to follow the path of least resistance. So resist.
