The Invisible Trillion · Who Decides

What It Looks Like in One Place

It’s easier to see all of this at once in a single project, so take Saline Township, Michigan, which the Legal Weapons chapter described — this time watching which room each decision was actually made in.

The first decisions happened in a room sealed by confidentiality: a developer, Related Digital, assembling 575 acres of farmland through entities that didn’t carry its name, with the officials who knew bound not to say much. The residents weren’t in that room. By the time the proposal surfaced, the land was lined up and the terms were set.

The next room was the financial one, and neither the residents nor, really, the local officials were in that either. The project was one node in a national buildout financed by the capital machinery from the Bill chapter; it later emerged the site would be leased to OpenAI and Oracle under the federal “Stargate” program. The decision that there would be a data center here had effectively been made several rooms upstream, by parties the township would never meet.

What was left for the public room — the local zoning hearing, the one place residents could actually walk in and speak — was whether to ratify it. They showed up, they spoke, and the board voted four to one against. For about forty-eight hours, it looked like the open room had worked.

Then the backup opened. Related Digital sued, two days later, for “exclusionary zoning.” The township’s lawyers laid out the box: fight and probably drain the budget; fight and likely lose anyway, because the developer could route around local zoning through the University of Michigan; and a $50 million judgment against another town hanging overhead as a warning. The township settled. The data center is being built.

That is the process end to end — the substantive decisions made in sealed and financial rooms the public never entered, the one open room reduced to ratification, and a legal backstop ready for the moment ratification failed.

It doesn’t always run to completion, and the exceptions are the proof of what the whole thing depends on. In Tucson, the same kind of project — a $3.6 billion Amazon data center known throughout the process only as “Project Blue,” with local officials under NDA — broke open when a document reached a reporter early enough for the public to organize, and the city council reversed itself and killed it in 2025. The mechanisms in Tucson were identical to the ones in Saline. The only thing that differed was whether the public got into the room while the decision was still open.

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