ANN ARBOR – Big Tech has come to town. Billion-dollar companies are in a race to build “hyperscale” data centers to fuel their push to power artificial intelligence and cloud computing technologies.

The rural residents that would live next to these projects are marshalling future resistance to them.

Southeast Michigan communities and their elected officials are grappling with the breakneck speed at which tech giants — the likes of OpenAI, Oracle and Meta — are attempting to push data center projects towards approval. But residents are pushing back by mobilizing opposition, packing local board meetings and urging local and state officials to do anything they can to stop – or at least slow down – the momentum.

One factor frustrating residents: the tech giants powering projects stay behind the scenes of public discourse. Development teams, meanwhile, push to rezone land without publicly disclosing who would use the data centers until they decide to do so.
Developers promise community benefits, tax revenue and mitigations to negative impacts on neighbors and the environment. Many residents are not convinced.
Predominant themes of the opposition revolve around concerns about water usage and electricity rates, environmental and groundwater quality and the loss of communities’ rural characters.
In an emerging new world, local rural communities are trying different approaches to respond to the push to transform thousands of acres of Michigan’s rural landscape with warehouses for data servers and storage.

Saline Township

Saline Township is in the national spotlight as ChatGPT-creator OpenAI and multinational tech firm Oracle plan to construct a 2.2-million-square-foot data center campus off West Michigan Avenue.

Resistance has only begun, as residents berated township officials for agreeing quickly to settle a lawsuit with data center developer Related Digital and landowners instead of fighting it. Township officials there are facing heat even though they initially denied the firm’s request to rezone the land. It left township officials feeling like their hands were tied due to the cost of litigation.

Roughly 45 people from multiple south Washtenaw County townships met in a Saline Township barn Thursday evening, Nov. 20 to strategize the opposition’s path forward.
“I think it’s an uphill trudge, right?” said Jeff Rechten, one of the main residents who spoke Thursday. “But I think that there’s still a path to trudge on.”
Rechten pointed to possible legal solutions, such as hiring their own legal team, but noted it’s difficult to pursue that route without financial backing.

Rallies and protests, including one tentatively for Dec. 1 in downtown Saline, are being organized in advance of a Michigan Public Service Commission virtual hearing Wednesday, Dec. 3. It would take input on special contracts DTE plans to power the 1.4-gigawatt demand from the data center, more than the draw from a million homes.

Industry boosters brush aside those concerns, pointing to assurances from DTE Energy that the project’s big costs won’t increase utility bills, design choices that minimize water usage and a substantial influx in tax revenue and jobs from the more than $7 billion investment.
Some advocates and state regulators say the new demand could be a good thing. DTE projects hundreds of millions in affordability benefits for other customers, as it spreads the fixed costs of running the grid over a larger volume of sales.
Read more at MLIVE