OpenAI opens Stargate's Michigan data centre
OpenAI and Oracle broke ground on a 1-gigawatt campus in Saline Township, with Michigan's governor citing $1bn in projected tax revenue and 2,500-plus construction jobs.
- Compute & infrastructure
- Minor
OpenAI, Oracle, developer Related Digital and Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer held a groundbreaking ceremony for a Stargate data-centre campus in Saline Township, Michigan, part of the roughly $500 billion Stargate infrastructure programme OpenAI announced with Oracle and SoftBank in 2025. The site is planned as a 1-gigawatt hyperscale campus.
OpenAI said the project would bring more than 2,500 union construction jobs and 450 permanent onsite roles, with local officials citing a projected $1 billion in tax revenue over the lease term. OpenAI also pledged up to $45 million in Codex credits for Michigan college and trade-school students, and said the site’s power and cooling costs would be paid for by the project rather than passed on to local ratepayers — a response to the political backlash data-centre buildouts have drawn elsewhere over electricity prices and water use. The company described the cooling system as closed-loop, using roughly as much water as a typical office building.
The Michigan campus is one of several US Stargate sites under construction alongside those in Texas, New Mexico and elsewhere, part of a compute build-out that has made data-centre siting, power procurement and local politics as central to frontier-AI competition as model releases themselves.