Dive Brief:
- OpenAI, Oracle, contractor Walbridge and other partners officially broke ground Monday on a multibillion-dollar data center campus in Saline, Michigan, according to an OpenAI news release.
- The $16 billion project, dubbed The Barn, will comprise three single-story data center buildings with more than 1 gigawatt of capacity, according to a news release from Oracle.
- The campus forms part of OpenAI’s Stargate initiative, a nationwide effort to expand artificial intelligence computing infrastructure.
Dive Insight:
The groundbreaking comes as developers spend unprecedented amounts of money to build data center facilities, even as some projects fall behind completion schedules, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Supply chain hurdles and energy constraints have slowed construction timelines. Community opposition can ultimately block all activity on a site.
In Michigan, The Barn’s groundbreaking runs counter to that trend. The project ranks as the single largest economic investment in state history, according to Oracle.
In addition to OpenAI, Oracle and Detroit-based general contractor Walbridge, other partners include Related Digital and Blackstone. In April, Related Digital announced financing had been secured for the $16 billion data center campus project, according to a news release.
Walbridge helped develop what the project’s stakeholders described as a first-in-the-nation project labor agreement, executed under the National Maintenance Agreement, which covers all 14 signatory affiliated skilled trade unions. Approximately 700 union tradespeople will work on the 250-acre site.
“Walbridge has been building in Michigan for more than a century, and we’re proud to continue that legacy here in Washtenaw County,” Mike Haller, CEO of Walbridge, said in the release. “We’re excited to be part of the team delivering the advanced infrastructure that will power the next generation of AI and innovation.”
The Saline campus is also the first data center built under the memorandum of understanding between OpenAI and North America’s Building Trades Unions, according to the Oracle news release.
“Projects like this demonstrate what is possible when workforce strategy is part of project planning from the very beginning,” Sean McGarvey, president of NABTU, said in the release. “The demand for AI and data center infrastructure is growing rapidly, and the Building Trades and our contractor partners have spent decades preparing the skilled workforce, training capacity, and industry partnerships needed to build this next generation of infrastructure safely, efficiently, and at scale.”
Construction is currently underway on all three data center halls with the first 550,000-square-foot facility nearing completion, according to Oracle.
