Saline Michigan Data Center Development

The data center campus under construction in Saline Township, Washtenaw County — often referred to locally as "The Barn," for a historic barn preserved at the site entrance — is, by several published accounts, the largest single construction project in Michigan's history.

The basics

• Developer: Related Digital, building the campus for Oracle, with OpenAI as the compute customer under its Stargate initiative
• General contractor: Walbridge (Detroit)
• Scale: three data halls, roughly 550,000 sq ft each (~1.65 million sq ft total), on a 250-acre campus
• Workforce: a project labor agreement covering 2,500+ union tradespeople across 14 signatory unions — reportedly the first data center built under a national OpenAI–NABTU agreement
• Groundbreaking: June 2026, with construction having started earlier in the year and continuing through at least 2029

A contested approval process

The project wasn't uncontested. Saline Township's board initially voted against it before a legal settlement allowed construction to proceed. Power for the facility is supplied through special contracts between the developer and DTE Electric, approved by the Michigan Public Service Commission in December 2025 — an approval that Michigan's Attorney General has since appealed, citing concerns about the potential cost impact on other electricity ratepayers.

What this means for the local construction and field-services market

A project of this scale, running multiple years, generates sustained demand for the trades already reported as working the site — including named electrical and mechanical contractors — and for the technology-adjacent field work that supports a project like this from groundbreaking through commissioning and beyond. Fieldbench is not currently an established vendor on this project; we're noting it here as the clearest evidence of why a dedicated data center field-services company makes sense in this market right now, not as a claim of involvement we don't have.