OpenAI broke ground on The Barn, a 1GW data center campus in Saline, Michigan, alongside Governor Gretchen Whitmer and partners Oracle, Related Digital, and Walbridge (Open AI news). The project is designed to use a closed-loop cooling system and will not pass infrastructure or energy costs to local ratepayers (Open AI news). The Barn is expected to create more than 2,500 union construction jobs in addition to 450 permanent onsite jobs, 1,500 county-wide jobs, and an additional 1,000 indirect jobs (Open AI news).
The project is projected to generate $1 billion in tax revenue over the lease term (Open AI news) and is part of OpenAI's Stargate program, a long-term effort to build infrastructure for advanced AI at scale. For commerce practitioners, this represents a major expansion of US compute capacity that will support better AI models, lower delivery costs, and broader availability of advanced AI services. OpenAI is also making up to $45 million in Codex credits available to more than 400,000 eligible Michigan college and trade school students during the 2026–2027 academic year (Open AI news), signaling a focus on workforce readiness for the AI economy.
This initiative reflects OpenAI's strategy to position infrastructure development as a driver of American reindustrialization, with Michigan's engineering talent and construction expertise playing a central role in the next phase of AI capability deployment.