What happens when a community votes no…but the #AI datacenter construction starts anyway?

That is not a hypothetical. It’s what happened in Saline Township, Michigan, when a $16 billion OpenAI-Oracle data center was rejected by the local planning commission, rejected again by the township board, and broke ground weeks later anyway. The developer sued. The town settled. They had no real choice.

Sharon Goldman has been covering the AI data center buildout for Fortune — not from boardrooms, but from township halls, planning commission meetings, and rural communities that had never imagined something like this landing in their midst. What she’s found is a story that the technology press largely isn't telling: the buildout is a bottom-up crisis dressed up as a top-down triumph.

The numbers tell part of it. Saline Township received $14 million in community benefits from a $16 billion project, against an annual budget of $1 million. In Richland Parish, Louisiana, the land where Meta's Hyperion facility now sits was once pitched for an auto plant that would have created two to three thousand permanent jobs. The data center is promising 500. The construction workers are mostly from out of state.

And the justifying ideologies — the race with China, the national security imperative — has no finish line. This race has a vague one-upsmanship and a $700 billion spend with no clear end in sight.

What Sharon sees coming, and what she thinks the press is missing, is the backlash that is quietly becoming a political force — showing up in recall elections, in governor's races, and in the kind of conspiratorial thinking that emerges when people have lost trust and no longer believe that democracy is working for them.

You can read more of Sharon's reporting here: