The Data-Center Divide, by Andrew Cockburn

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June 2026 Issue

[Letter from Washington]

The Data-Center Divide

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Why politicians are squandering the anti-AI backlash

by Andrew Cockburn ,

Community members gather during a Saline Township board meeting. All photographs from Michigan, March 2026, by Ali Lapetina for Harper’s Magazine © Ali Lapetina

The governing board of Saline Township, a farming community of some 2,200 residents in Washtenaw County, Michigan, meets on the second Wednesday of every month in a white clapboard hall down a muddy, unpaved road. On a rainy evening this March, the hall was packed with members of the public listening intently for mention of the single issue that has dominated discussion in Saline since last year: the approximately $16 billion, 1.4-gigawatt data center being developed there by Related Digital, an offshoot of the powerful New York real-estate firm Related, which is owned by the billionaire Stephen Ross. The campus, built on behalf of the software giant Oracle and OpenAI, is part of a massive AI-infrastructure project known as Stargate, which aims to bring 4.5 gigawatts of additional data-center capacity to the United States. Slated to occupy 250 acres of local farmland and to draw enough electricity from the grid to power Detroit, it is the largest economic scheme ever attempted in the state of Michigan.

At first, Saline’s five-person, nonpartisan governing board resisted the development. Last September, after outcry from locals, members voted 4–1 to deny Related Digital the rezoning permissions required for the data center’s construction. But lawyers for Related Digital and property owners of the proposed site promptly sued Saline, claiming that the company had been the victim of “exclusionary zoning” that prevented the free use of private land. The possibility of an expensive legal fight with a giant corporation had the intended effect. After consulting with its attorneys, the board conceded, accepting a settlement offer that would allow the data center to proceed with only minimal concessions from the firm.

To Robby Dube, a Minneapolis-based attorney specializing in government disputes, the lawsuit was a familiar corporate maneuver. “I’ve seen this in my cases all across the country,” he told me. “It is a shockingly similar playbook every single time.” The only difference was how quickly the board folded. In Dube’s view, the case was meritless to begin with, but Saline’s board had been terrified by threats along the lines of, “I’m going to come here and obliterate you. You will be bankrupted. I have infinite money.” The board—adopting a milder attitude than its counterpart across Lake Michigan in Port Washington, Wisconsin, where city officials had a peaceful data-center opponent violently arrested at a public meeting—justified its surrender by claiming that, while board members still opposed the project, their hands were tied.

At first, this recent turmoil was barely apparent at the March meeting, as township officials quietly deliberated on such issues as the fire-department budget and conservation easements. The edifice under construction just a few minutes’ drive away was invoked in diffident terms, as when board members discussed the small fines they had negotiated with Related Digital for construction trucks that violated local ordinances and debated whether a special post-office box would be required to receive them. But when Saline residents finally had their chance to speak, a volley of pointed questions followed. They asked about the emissions from the fossil fuels that would be used to generate power for the data center; the bright lights from the construction site shining into children’s bedrooms late at night and before dawn; and local roads that had been rendered dangerous by constant construction-related traffic. None of these impassioned complaints appeared to engender much sympathy from the board, or indeed from the three Related Digital executives who were sitting against the wall observing the proceedings.

The data-center site

A painting on the wall of Saline’s town hall

Community members leaving a board meeting

The agenda for a board meeting about the data center

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The woman who’d asked about the construction lights was Kathryn Haushalter, a Marine Corps veteran who served in Helmand province in Afghanistan. She and her husband own a farm, where she homeschools four of their five children less than three hundred yards from the data center’s construction site. Haushalter is familiar to both the Saline governing board and Related Digital: late last year, she filed a motion to defend the board’s original rejection of the rezoning proposal, alleging that the settlement had violated the Open Meetings Act. A judge summarily denied her request in February, but Haushalter wasn’t ready to give up. Although her legal bills were already in the “tens of thousands,” she was planning to fight on.

“I always...