OpenAI breaks ground on The Barn, a 1 GW Stargate data center campus in Saline, Michigan

OpenAI broke ground on June 1, 2026 on a 1 gigawatt data center campus called The Barn in Saline, Michigan, the first publicly disclosed Stargate site east of Texas. Governor Gretchen Whitmer attended the announcement alongside OpenAI and its construction partners Oracle, Related Digital, and Walbridge. The buildout package pairs the data center with hard community commitments, including roughly $1 billion in projected tax revenue over the lease term and $45 million in Codex credits for Michigan college, community-college, and trade-school students.

What's new

• 1 GW campus in Saline, Michigan, called The Barn, broken ground June 1, 2026 with Governor Whitmer, Oracle, Related Digital, and Walbridge.
• Jobs: more than 2,500 union construction jobs, 450 permanent onsite jobs, 1,500 county-wide jobs, and an additional 1,000 indirect jobs, by OpenAI's stated projection.
• Tax revenue: projected at roughly $1 billion over the lease term, with proceeds flowing to local, county, and state schools and services.
• Community investment: $10 million directed to upgrades at the Saline Recreation Center, funded jointly by OpenAI, Related Digital, Oracle, Walbridge, and Blackstone.
• Codex-for-students program: up to $45 million in Codex credits available to more than 400,000 eligible Michigan students aged 18 and older during the 2026 to 2027 academic year, accessed at chatgpt.com/features/codex-for-michigan-college-students/.
• Energy and water: OpenAI says project infrastructure costs will not be passed to local ratepayers, and that the campus uses a closed-loop cooling system consuming roughly the water of a typical office building.
• Workforce pipeline: partnership with the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity and participating community colleges on AI-literacy and workforce-training programs.

Context

Stargate, OpenAI's multi-site capex program, has so far been associated with Texas; The Barn is the first announced campus outside that footprint to be confirmed in public. Earlier in 2026, OpenAI announced a partnership with North America's Building Trades Unions (NABTU) to feed registered apprenticeship programs into the AI infrastructure buildout; Saline is the first site to operationalize that template at scale. The announcement also slots into Governor Whitmer's broader Michigan strategy on workforce-relevant skills.

Why it matters

Most of the public conversation around Stargate to date has been about raw power demand and supply-chain risk. Saline matters because it puts numbers on the political compact OpenAI is now using to land these projects: union labor commitments, a rec-center cheque, ratepayer protection language, and a separately funded student-credits program tied directly to the host state. Future AI infrastructure projects, whether OpenAI's, Microsoft's, Amazon's, or Google's, are likely to be measured against this package, particularly the no-cost-to-ratepayers commitment and the closed-loop water claim. The $45 million Codex-credits program is also one of the larger university-direct AI funding moves announced this year, and it ties product distribution to siting decisions in a way regulators in other states will study before approving their own deals.