Data centers in Washtenaw County, Michigan: 3 projects mapped

Imagery: Esri, Maxar

Saline Township's board voted to deny the rezoning for a large Oracle-and-OpenAI data center campus; the developer, Related Digital, and the landowners sued, arguing the refusal was illegal exclusionary zoning, and the township settled by consent judgment filed October 15, 2025, letting the roughly $7 billion project proceed. A trustee called the settlement the lesser of two evils. The project, reported at both 1,383 and 1,400 megawatts in different accounts, is now under construction.

In exchange, the judgment bars the operator from expanding the site, sets a noise limit, bans solar farms there, and requires closed-loop rather than water-intensive cooling. The developer is paying $2 million to the township for farmland preservation and $2 million into a community fund, with $7 million more to the Saline Area Fire Department. Its local tax break came in nine times smaller than requested. A resident's Open Meetings Act challenge to the deal, and a request to slow construction, were both rejected by a judge in February 2026.

Elsewhere in the county, Augusta Township voters overturned a rezoning for Thor Equities' proposed $1 billion data center by about 90% in an August 2026 ballot vote, blocking it. In Ypsilanti, the University of Michigan and Los Alamos National Laboratory are still proposing a $1.2 billion data center that Los Alamos has confirmed would support nuclear weapons research, drawing protests over the site.

Every project above is drawn from public records, filings and local reporting. Each row links to what it is based on. Statuses change, so check the source date before you rely on one. Found something wrong? Write to [email protected] and it gets fixed.