(LANSING) - Michigan is becoming a hot spot for massive tech investment, as companies explore building hyperscale data centers in at least ten Lower Peninsula communities. These mega-facilities pack in thousands of servers to power cloud storage, artificial intelligence, and other high-demand computing services.
The first big project is already underway -- a $7 billion data-center campus in Saline Township, backed by Oracle, OpenAI, and Related Digital. It's expected to open in 2027. But the scale is enormous. A single hyperscale facility can cover hundreds of acres and use as much electricity as a small city. The Saline Township project alone could draw 1.4 gigawatts of power -- that's about a quarter of DTE Energy's entire system load. Michigan law offers sales-tax breaks for data centers that invest at least $250 million and create 30 high-wage jobs. Now, communities across the region are weighing environmental impacts, water demands, and major grid upgrades needed to support these electricity-hungry complexes. Utilities are negotiating contracts to handle the surge in power use without raising rates on other customers, while state regulators dig into long-term energy planning. And while these data centers create relatively few permanent jobs, developers say the projects will drive huge construction activity and pump new economic energy into the regions that land them.