The contract closed and the dirt moved the same week. On June 1, Detroit-based Walbridge broke ground on The Barn, a $16 billion data center campus in Saline Township, Michigan, about ten miles southwest of Ann Arbor. It’s the single largest project in the contractor’s 110-year history.
The numbers are hard to parse at first. The 250-acre campus will hold three single-story buildings of roughly 550,000 square feet each, engineered for more than a gigawatt of computing capacity at a 1.4-GW scale. Related Digital is developing it for Oracle and OpenAI as part of Stargate, the nationwide push to stand up AI compute. Governor Gretchen Whitmer called it the largest economic investment in Michigan’s history.
Why a single data center costs $16 billion
Most of that money isn’t the building. It’s the power, the cooling, and the silicon. A gigawatt-class campus needs generation and transmission that rival a mid-size city’s, plus liquid cooling sized for racks that run hot enough to cook a conventional server room. The shell is almost the easy part. That’s the pattern across the sector, from Meta’s $10B Indiana campus to the grid-constrained pipeline now testing utilities nationwide.
The bet under the build
For Walbridge, a job this size is a decade-defining win and a concentration risk wrapped in one client and one very young industry. For Michigan, it’s jobs and tax base tied to AI demand staying on its current curve. The campus is named, almost cheekily, The Barn. There’s nothing modest about it. Whether 2026’s data center spending looks visionary or overbuilt in five years, this much steel and copper is going in the ground now.