Stargate Michigan

Under construction

Also called The Barn.

Saline Township, Washtenaw County

Ground has been broken on the site.

The project

Electrical demand: 1,383 MWcontracted
Contracted demand in an approved MPSC special contract
Developer: Related Digital, with Blackstone
End user: Oracle, contracting through Green Chile Ventures LLC, for the OpenAI Stargate programme
Serving utility: DTE Electric
Building area: 2,200,000 sq ft
Expected online: Phased from 2027
Grid, generation or storage: A separate energy storage agreement running 15 years accompanies the roughly 19-year power supply agreement, with an option for the customer to extend supply by a further 20 years.
Water: The October 2025 consent judgment bars the facility from using municipal cooling water. It is to run on its own well and waste treatment system, and is held to a 55-decibel noise limit, with roughly 200 acres of wetland and agricultural land preserved and no expansion permitted.

Last checked September 1, 2026. Every field above has been confirmed against the sources listed.

What has happened

Every entry carries the source it came from. Where the record gives no date, the entry says so rather than being placed by guesswork.

September 10, 2025The township board denied the rezoning 4–1. Planet Detroit
September 12, 2025Related Digital sued the township, alleging exclusionary zoning. Planet Detroit
October 15, 2025The parties entered a consent judgment in Washtenaw County Circuit Court that let the project proceed with binding conditions and roughly $14 million committed to farmland preservation, community investment and fire services. Planet Detroit
November 2025Ground was broken and site work began, weeks after the consent judgment. Fortune
December 18, 2025The Commission approved DTE's special contracts. Michigan Public Service Commission
January 8, 2026Attorney General Nessel filed a petition for rehearing in U-21990, challenging the Commission's authority to approve the contracts without a contested case hearing and questioning whether the conditions it imposed are enforceable. Michigan Department of Attorney General
March 27, 2026The Commission unanimously denied the Attorney General's motion to reopen and her separate petition for rehearing in U-21990, and denied her request for a contested case on the battery storage contracts supporting the project. Michigan Department of Attorney General
April 17, 2026Attorney General Nessel filed a claim of appeal in the Michigan Court of Appeals, seeking to invalidate the Commission's ex parte approval of the two special contracts and remand the matter for a contested case hearing. Michigan Department of Attorney General
April 25, 2026The developers reported financing secured and major construction underway on a campus they value at $16 billion. Michigan Public
June 1, 2026The project team and Governor Whitmer held a ceremony celebrating construction of the campus, by then already underway with more than 700 tradespeople on site, and announced a further $10 million to expand the Saline Recreation Center. Oracle (press release)

Where the sources disagree

Reported capacity is quoted variously as 1.4 GW, 1,383 MW, 1,000 MW and “more than a gigawatt”. 1,383 MW is used here because it is the contracted demand in the approved MPSC contract rather than a rounded announcement figure. Note also that reporting has described the load as about 25% of DTE’s current peak capacity — a different comparison from the one computed on this page, which measures against residential sales only and is therefore a larger percentage of a smaller denominator. Both can be true; they are not the same ratio. Note finally that several outlets framed the 1 June 2026 ceremony as the start of construction. It was not, and this table said so too until 25 August 2026. Oracle’s own announcement that day describes a campus already under construction with more than 700 tradespeople on it; the township’s advisory committee log records complaints about dirt tracked onto US 12 from site approaches on 7 January 2026, concrete for building foundations on 4 February, and finished Compute 1 pylons on 18 March; and reporting places the groundbreaking in November 2025. The June date is carried here as the ceremony it was.

Published rather than resolved. Picking a favourite number and printing it alone is how a tracker becomes an opinion.

How this compares to the load DTE Electric already serves

Running at 1,383 MW for a year at 85% capacity factor works out to roughly 10,298 GWh a year. Every household DTE Electric serves used 15,132 GWh between them in 2024. This one site is therefore about 68% of what every home in the territory uses.

Computed, not quoted. No filing states this figure. The denominator is residential sales only — DTE Electric’s total system load, including commercial and industrial customers, is considerably larger, so this is not a share of the whole grid. The capacity factor is an assumption. The arithmetic is 1,383 MW × 8,760 hours × 0.85, against 2024 EIA-861 residential sales.

What DTE Electric customers pay, before and now

Residential rate, 2019

16.11¢

Residential rate, 2024

20.13¢

Change over that period

+25%

Those figures are DTE Electric’s own EIA-861 filings and they cover the whole territory. This page does not attribute any part of that change to Stargate Michigan. It could not honestly: the change spans years in which this project did not exist, rates move for generation costs, storm recovery, tree trimming and approved return on equity all at once, and the large-load terms the Commission has approved are written specifically to keep these costs off other customers’ bills. Whether they succeed is an open question in front of the Commission, not a settled fact this site can assert.

What actually did change DTE Electric rates, case by case →

The terms a large load takes service under here

DTE Electric operates under U-21990, approved December 18, 2025. Approved special contracts for electric service to the Saline Township data center, with conditions — a contract-by-contract approval rather than a general tariff.

Contracted demand: Roughly 1,383 MW.
Contract length: A power supply agreement of roughly 19 years, extendable by the customer for a further 20, plus a separate 15-year energy storage agreement.
Conditions imposed: Cost allocation and rate design proposals ensuring future large-load interconnection customers pay their own interconnection costs, plus an administrative fee for further large loads.

The Attorney General's motion to reopen and her separate petition for rehearing were both denied on 27 March 2026. On 17 April 2026 she filed a claim of appeal in the Michigan Court of Appeals, seeking to invalidate the approval as an unlawful ex parte order and to remand the matter for a contested case hearing. The proceeding is not closed.

Related MPSC dockets

U-21990Decided · March 27, 2026
ORDER
The Commission reviewed DTE Electric's request to approve two special contracts with Green Chile Ventures LLC, an Oracle subsidiary, to supply electricity and energy storage for a 1.383 gigawatt data center in Saline Township. In December 2025 the Commission approved those contracts subject to conditions, and in the March 27, 2026 orders it denied requests from the Attorney General and other groups to rehear, reopen, or hold a contested hearing on the matter, and separately approved three company-owned battery storage projects and their supply and construction contracts. These orders do not set or change retail electric rates, so they do not by themselves change a residential customer's monthly bill. Any cost recovery tied to the data center or the storage projects would be examined in a future rate case.
Read the filing

Sources

Everything above traces to one of these. Local agendas and FAQ pages get replaced in place rather than archived, so each carries the date it was read.

[1] Tech giants announce $7B data center, Michigan’s first hyperscale campus — Bridge Michigan, read August 21, 2026
[2] Saline Township data center: “major construction” underway, financing secured — Michigan Public, read August 21, 2026
[3] MPSC approves DTE Electric energy contracts for data center with conditions to strengthen protections for other customers — Michigan Public Service Commission (primary document), read August 21, 2026
[4] Saline Township settles with data center developer: ‘Lesser of two evils’ — Planet Detroit, read August 21, 2026
[5] Data center updates — Saline Township (primary document), read August 21, 2026
[6] A Michigan farm town voted down plans for a giant OpenAI-Oracle data center. Weeks later, construction began — Fortune, read August 25, 2026
[7] Oracle, Related Digital, Blackstone, OpenAI, Walbridge and Governor Whitmer Celebrate Construction of Stargate Campus in Saline Township — Oracle (press release) (primary document), read August 25, 2026
[8] Attorney General’s Efforts to Review DTE Data Center Contracts Rejected Again At MPSC — Michigan Department of Attorney General (primary document), read August 25, 2026
[9] AG Nessel Files Appeal of MPSC Approval of DTE’s Saline Data Center Contracts — Michigan Department of Attorney General (primary document), read August 25, 2026
[10] Attorney General Petitions MPSC for Rehearing on DTE Data Center Special Contracts. Published 9 January 2026; describes the petition as filed the previous day. — Michigan Department of Attorney General (primary document), read August 25, 2026

Watch the docket this project runs through

Large-load contracts, tariff changes and the cases contesting them all arrive as DTE Electric filings. Alerts go out when one is filed and when a comment deadline is set — which is the only window in which a comment counts for anything.