OpenAI expands Stargate to Michigan, pushing project past 8GW and $450bn

OpenAI and Oracle announced a new Stargate data-centre campus in Saline Township, Michigan, adding more than a gigawatt of planned capacity to the project. Combined with six previously announced US sites, OpenAI said Stargate had passed 8 gigawatts of planned capacity and more than $450bn in committed investment over three years — figures that have climbed steadily since the $500bn, four-year pledge OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle made in January 2025 from the White House.

The Michigan site, planned across 250 acres, is a 2.2 million square foot campus of three single-storey buildings intended to consolidate several data-centre buildings under one roof rather than spreading them across separate sites. OpenAI and local officials said the project would be the largest single investment in Michigan’s history, creating more than 2,500 union construction jobs and over 450 permanent site jobs, with construction due to begin in early 2026.

The Michigan announcement followed a run of Stargate expansions through the second half of 2025 — five further US sites with Oracle and SoftBank in September, and Korean chipmakers Samsung and SK Group joining as suppliers — each pushing the project’s stated scale upward in a pattern that made the headline gigawatt and dollar figures a running tally rather than a fixed target. As with earlier Stargate announcements, the commitments were forward-looking; how much of the capacity and financing had actually been built or contracted at any given announcement date was not independently verifiable from OpenAI’s releases.