Stateside Episode 2 with Mark Anderson

Mark Anderson (0:08)

And welcome to the second round, the second edition of Stateside. I'm your roving reporter, Mark Anderson for UK Column. And I have done extensive traveling lately. I mentioned that in the first round to Stateside. And that continued, Eastern Michigan, Western Ohio, across Indiana, through the boot heel of Missouri, through Arkansas, through the Ozarks, down to Texas. Talked to lots of people, saw lots of things, lots of ideas coming up. And one of my stops, as promised in the first Stateside, was Saline Township, Michigan. It's about 25 miles south of Ann Arbor in the greater Detroit area. And that, of course, was to see Godzilla.

But of course, that's a metaphor for the Saline Township data center that's going up. And it's been called the barn. And is it Bain or Boone, that barn, right? That's the question to ask. Anyway, it's a $16 billion facility, as I mentioned, and it has a estimated demand of 1.4 gigawatts. That's a power requirement. And it's supposed to house what is reportedly called the Stargate Project. And that of course is a cooperative thing between three-time Bilderberg attendee Sam Altman and his OpenAI and Larry Ellison's Oracle Company. And it is a massive, massive thing. My wife and I, Angie and I, finally rolled into the Saline area. And we were wondering exactly where the construction site is for this monster. 250-acre footprint, up to 700 acres. There might be some land set aside, as I had mentioned before, for kind of a natural setting to appease or sue the natives, the peasants. And at any rate, as we get into town, beautiful day, beautiful town, a quintessential American middle-class town. Middle-sized, you might say. We get into town, and as soon as I get into the main drag, main street that goes through the middle of it, here come the cement trucks, here come the gravel trucks. I knew right where to go. I didn't have to ask hardly anyone, except I talked to some people at the gas station there, the speedway, to try and get their take on things. And a lot of the people I talked to are ambivalent. On the one hand, they're kind of hoping, maybe even vainly so, that this thing will bring some need of jobs in a higher paying range. And yet they sense that something very unprecedented and somewhat hard to understand is happening. At any rate, I gather some opinions and I finally head west out of town following these large cement and gravel hauling trucks. At about four miles west of town, there it is, this massive piece of land. And residents, of course, are mad about the aggressive construction schedule. These trucks make quite a bit of noise, they stir up quite a bit of dust. And there's ongoing water and electrical capacity concerns, of course, we've heard about this. And I talked last time about something on the other side of the state in the town of Duwajak, operational noise once these things are up and running. And that one on the west side of the state, this one being on the east side, was, is, rather, a smaller data center. So you can imagine the noise that the larger ones may make. At any rate, here is a video clip of me on the scene. You can hear me, but can't see me, but just to get kind of a feel for the size and scope of this thing at the construction site.

And this is Mark Anderson, UK Column, on the last day of July 2026 Finally made it to what you can see is the Saline Township AI Data Center that's under construction, The Barn. That's to have three 550,000 square foot buildings and 250 acres minimum, up to 700 acres. Some of that supposedly will be set aside for a nature reserve type thing, or keeping things in a natural state as much as possible. I've seen lots of cement trucks going back and forth, and gravel hauling trucks. You can see that in this video.

And that is a good idea of what it looks like at this point in time, as August 1st comes around.

So you can see, it covers quite a bit of land, and that was a latter July, early August. So you can imagine how much it's progressed by now when things are being built at that pace. Now, one of the upsides of this is you have many conservatives and independents joining the political liberals in questioning, not just power capacity and noise and possible water pollution, but to some extent, and maybe not enough, looking at the larger philosophical questions regarding these data centers, regarding questions of surveillance, regarding questions of privacy, regarding questions of whether these things will become an authority onto themselves. And when I talk to people about those sorts of questions, they're not quite as familiar with them. They don't seem to be thinking about those things quite as much, but a lot of people tell me that they are concerned and that sometimes that does come to mind. And at any rate, it does bring about some unity among people that would otherwise be political opponents. And of course, the powers that be don't want to see too much of that.