Stargate has another address. Detroit-based Walbridge broke ground June 1 on a $16 billion data center campus near Saline, Michigan, the largest single project in the contractor’s 110-year history.
Related Digital is developing the campus for Oracle and OpenAI as part of the Stargate program, the multi-site push to build out AI compute at a scale the industry hasn’t seen. The plan calls for a 1.4-gigawatt campus with three single-story buildings of roughly 550,000 square feet each.
What the Michigan campus adds
Stargate’s flagship is in Abilene, Texas, where eight buildings are rising toward 1.2 gigawatts. Michigan is a second anchor, and the numbers are just as large. A 1.4-GW campus needs its own substation-scale power deal, water for cooling, and a construction workforce in the thousands at peak. For a regional powerhouse like Walbridge, a job this size reorders the whole company’s backlog.
The power question is the one to watch. A campus this big draws more electricity than many cities, and Michigan’s grid has to find it. That’s the same constraint showing up at every hyperscale site now, from Texas to the data center jobs reshaping the Gulf Coast.
The bigger pattern
One developer, two states, more than $30 billion in announced data center work under a single program name. That’s the shape of AI infrastructure in 2026: a few owners committing sums that used to describe national programs, not single campuses. The contractors who can staff and power jobs at this scale are a short list, and they’re booking years of work in a matter of months. Reporting via Construction Dive.