A Michigan farm town voted down plans for a giant OpenAI-Oracle data center. Weeks later, construction began

In Saline Township, Michigan, as in most municipalities, homeowners who want to build a new house know what a complicated and lengthy process it can be: Navigating permit requirements, zoning changes, or variance requests for even a small construction project can take weeks or months. An error in the paperwork, a challenge from a neighbor, or a resistant local official can slow things even further, or kill a project entirely.

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So it surprised many in this agricultural community of red barns and dirt roads that an enormous AI data center—at 21 million square feet, the largest construction project ever undertaken in the state and one almost universally opposed by local residents—seemed to race through the process from application in late summer to groundbreaking in November.

Even more surprising: The $16 billion data center for OpenAI and Oracle’s Stargate AI infrastructure initiative, which will fundamentally reshape the area with its construction, traffic, electricity demand, and environmental impact, was flat-out rejected by both the town’s board and its planning commission in September. But those votes turned out to be only minor bumps on the project’s path: The developer quickly sued, the town settled, and the construction vehicles rolled in.

The story of how the mega AI data campus became an unstoppable inevitability—over the vocal objection of residents who picketed the vote and posted “no data center” signs outside their homes—reveals a broader dynamic of the nationwide AI data center boom: Once projects of this scale are underway, local governments often have limited leverage to block them. They are constrained by zoning laws, financial risk, and the realities of negotiating with developers backed by deep-pocketed AI companies, with formidable legal teams and plenty of political clout.

These pressures are only intensifying as the AI boom moves from software into physical infrastructure, and demand for computing capacity grows exponentially. The Trump administration has aggressively accelerated US data center construction in its effort to beat China to AI dominance, with a July 2025 executive order streamlining permitting for projects over 100 megawatts or $500 million. Big Tech’s “hyperscalers” are projected to invest roughly $630 billion to $700 billion in 2026 in AI-related infrastructure and data-centers, and capital expenditures are expected to reach $5.2 trillion by 2030.

Politicians from both sides of the aisle are embracing the build-out, trying to get a piece of the economic development it promises for the communities they represent—including Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who has been actively courting the hyperscalers building massive data centers since late 2024. At the end of October, Whitmer lauded the Saline Township project, saying the facility expected to create 2,500 union construction jobs, alongside 450 permanent jobs on-site and 1,500 more in the community.

Meanwhile, the rural communities that are increasingly being asked to absorb the environmental and economic tradeoffs of these airport-size projects landing in their midst are scrambling to find new avenues of resistance, legal and political.

“I feel like people don’t understand what’s coming,” one resident fighting Saline’s incoming data center in court told Fortune. Kathryn Haushalter, a 42-year-old former U.S. Marine and mother of five who lives in a 200-year-old farmhouse across from the data center site, noted that she has prior construction experience and her husband is in the trades. “We know what a big project this is, and what a nuisance it’s going to be, and what environmental impact it’s going to have on this area,” she said. “I’m just so nervous for everybody else that doesn’t realize.”

To Barry Lonik, a Michigan-based land preservation consultant with more than three decades of experience, the Saline Township data center project is fundamentally out of place. “No other industrial project had ever tried to come in here,” he said. “It’s all farmland.”

But that’s exactly what attracts large-scale data center projects, which require high-voltage transmission lines, as well as hundreds of contiguous acres—something rarely available in urban or industrial sites. Rural areas can offer both the space and access to utilities, Lonik said, and it’s those characteristics that make places like Saline vulnerable.

“It’s a small township—a handful of people on the board, trying to do their jobs,” he told Fortune. “And then they get hit with something like this.”

Why ‘no’ was not enough to stop the data center

Eight months ago, when Saline’s planning commission gathered in the 200-year-old white clapboard township hall to weigh arguments for and against the proposal from Related Digital to rezone 575 acres of farmland for the AI data center, the reasons for rejecting the plan looked straightforward: The land was zoned for agriculture, and much of it was considered prime farmland. The project would int