Overview:

  • Michigan’s second hyperscale data center is poised to be built after a metro Detroit township’s vote Wednesday night.
  • Google expects the 1-gigawatt data center in Van Buren Township to start drawing power by late 2027.
  • Boosters call the facility a welcome addition, while neighbors say they’re already being affected by construction noise and dust.

This story was originally published by Bridge Michigan, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news organization. To get regular coverage from Bridge Michigan, sign up for a free Bridge Michigan newsletter here.

Local officials on Wednesday approved the final site plan for Google’s proposed data center near the Detroit Metro Airport, paving the way for construction of Michigan’s second hyperscale facility.

The Van Buren Township Planning Commission’s 5-1 vote followed nearly an hour of public comment from fans and foes of the development, capping a local approval process that began last year.

Google has also secured electricity for the data center through a 20-year contract with DTE Energy that state utility regulators approved on Oct. 1. In August, state environmental regulators approved wetland permits for the project.

Several commission members lauded Google’s willingness to work with the township to limit noise emanating from the facility’s vast computing warehouses and take other steps to alleviate community concerns. 

“If a data center is coming to Van Buren Township, I personally would want Google,” Commissioner Medina Atchinson said ahead of the vote. 

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But residents living near the facility railed against the project, saying early construction activities are already lowering their quality of life.

“Crews are behind our homes from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m, six to seven days a week,” said Ashley Shukait, who lives in a subdivision adjacent to the data center property. “Dust has been coming into our homes since August and only getting worse. Children with asthma and people on oxygen can’t go in their backyards now. Our houses shake.”

Google officials say they expect the development dubbed Project Cannoli will begin drawing electricity by late 2027.

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Land, energy, water use

Sandwiched between interstates 94 and 275 to the north and south and Haggerty and Hannan roads to the west and east, the property just west of the Detroit airport has long been zoned for industrial use. That gave development company Pannatoni an easier path to local approval.

Site plans call for six buildings, parking lots, a substation and equipment yards spread across 150 of the site’s 282 acres, with the remainder left as open space.

Detroit-based construction giant Walbridge, the lead contractor on Oracle and OpenAI’s Stargate data center in Washtenaw County’s Saline Township, is set to build the Google site, too. 

The facility’s 1-gigawatt of energy demand amounts to the energy equivalent of 750,000 homes. It’s expected to start drawing power by December 2027 and ramp up to 1 GW within a year. 

Earlier this month, the Michigan Public Service Commission approved special contracts for DTE Energy to power the facility, concluding that the arrangement would not raise residential customers’ rates and may instead save them money.

The contract commits Google to pay for the build-out of 480-megawatts of energy storage, 1.6 GW of renewable energy and 300 MW of other power capacity. Google says no new fossil fuel energy plants would be built or expanded to serve the facility.

In a measure designed to insulate other customers from the prospect of a popped AI “bubble,” the contract also requires Google to pay for no less than 80% of the power it claims to need (even if actual demand is less) and imposes steep penalties for prematurely terminating the contract. 

On the water side, the facility will draw up to 3.6 million gallons per day from the Great Lakes Water Authority, which has 706 million gallons per day of surplus capacity in its system. The authority draws its water from Lake Huron and the Detroit River.

Tax breaks, revenue

Google is expected to take advantage of a 2024 law that exempts qualifying data centers from Michigan’s 6% sales and use tax — a perk likely worth millions if not tens of millions annually.

Township and Wayne County officials have also agreed to charge the facility half-price on local taxes, worth an estimated $125 million over 12 years.

In exchange, Google will separately pay the township $15.4 million for local infrastructure projects and guarantee at least 51 full-time jobs at the data center, among other vows.

Pannatoni Data Centers President Adam Kramer called the project “an incredible generational investment from one of the best companies in the world into this community.”

Where else are data centers planned?

In addition to the Saline Township and Van Buren Township facilities, developers have floated dozens of proposals in communities across the state — some more seriously than others. 

DTE and Consumers, which have monopoly control over the power sector in most of the state, report being in advanced talks with multiple developers representing a combined 3-plus-gigawatts of power.

Projects where land has been secured include Microsoft’s proposed data centers in west Michigan’s Gaines and Lowell townships and Project Flex, a facility intended for tech giant Anthropic in Oakland County’s Lyon Township.

While tax breaks and available space on Michigan’s grid have created a data center prospecting rush in Michigan, experts expect demand to slow once the first few projects come online.

“We’re not going to have like a dozen hyperscale data centers,” said Eric Dennis, research associate at Citizens Research Council of Michigan who has studied the state’s data center rush. “We’ll probably have, if they get approved, five or six.”

What does the public think?

Public pushback against data centers is mounting in Michigan and nationwide, further clouding the industry’s future.

“It’s become kind of a social phenomenon,” said Dennis. “I think there’s a lot of frustration and anger with the tech companies more generally. A lot of socioeconomic anxiety around what artificial intelligence is going to do to us.”

Nationally, polls show 7-in-10 US residents oppose data centers in their communities. That kind of opposition has prompted dozens of Michigan communities to press pause on data center developments, while fueling a wave of recall efforts targeting local officials viewed as too friendly to data center developers.

That opposition is slowing data center proposals across the nation, including in Michigan, where several data center proposals have been put on hold following intense local backlash.

The furor has become a key issue in Michigan’s gubernatorial campaign, with both major party candidates calling for tighter guardrails on data center development while attempting to case their opponent as too cozy with the industry.

Opposition to the Van Buren Township project has sparked a recall effort targeting the entire township board.

Lawmakers in Lansing are also weighing multiple bills that would curtail data center development, with proposals ranging from stricter energy and labor rules to a repeal of the tax breaks that have lured the industry to Michigan.

This article first appeared on Bridge Michigan and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Avatar photo by Brian Allnutt