A $16 billion data center campus in Saline Township, Michigan, that Oracle plans to use to run OpenAI workloads has closed its financing, capping a months-long process and adding another anchor to the U.S. AI infrastructure boom. Developer Related Digital announced the deal on April 24, 2026, and bond markets cleared the debt portion the same week.
A capital stack built for hyperscale
The financing combines long-term debt with equity from Related Digital and Blackstone-affiliated funds. According to Bloomberg, Bank of America arranged roughly $14 billion in bonds through a private 144A offering aimed at large institutional buyers. The notes mature in 2045, were priced at 98.75 cents on the dollar, and carry a 7.5% coupon.
PIMCO-managed funds anchored the debt with approximately $10 billion in commitments, while Blackstone contributed about $2 billion in equity. Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo joined Bank of America as financial advisors on the deal. DTE Energy will supply power to the campus, and Oracle is financing the battery storage infrastructure.
What gets built
The project, internally nicknamed 'The Barn,' consists of three single-story buildings with more than 1 gigawatt of total capacity. Related Digital says the campus will be LEED certified and uses a closed-loop cooling system designed to limit local water draw — a sensitive issue for several communities pushing back on hyperscale AI sites elsewhere in the country.
The developer also disclosed community commitments tied to the project: more than 2,500 union construction jobs, 450-plus permanent onsite positions, around 1,500 jobs across the broader county, $14 million in direct fire department and community investment, and roughly $300 million in projected DTE customer savings. About 750 acres of open space are being preserved on the site.
A validation of the model
In a press statement, Related Companies CEO Jeff Blau said 'the strength of this financing validates' the model Related Digital has been building for AI-grade infrastructure. The Saline Township project was first announced in October 2025 by OpenAI, Oracle and Related Digital as part of an effort to expand U.S. AI infrastructure capacity.
Why this deal matters
This is one in a string of mega-financings supporting Oracle's role as a key compute supplier for OpenAI. Bloomberg notes Oracle has previously arranged a $38 billion debt deal for sites in Texas and Wisconsin, and $18 billion for a New Mexico facility. Across the hyperscaler ecosystem, Bloomberg estimates roughly $290 billion of debt financing has been arranged for AI projects since last year.
The Michigan close matters for three reasons. First, it shows institutional credit markets — through PIMCO's anchor order — are still willing to underwrite very long-dated bets on AI demand at coupons in the 7%+ range, even after recent volatility around model economics. Second, it confirms Oracle's position as OpenAI's preferred non-Microsoft compute partner at the gigawatt scale, complementing Microsoft Azure and reducing OpenAI's single-vendor exposure. Third, for OpenAI, every gigawatt that closes is one less constraint on its frontier training and inference roadmap.
Implications
For regional economies, the Saline Township campus joins a wave of multi-billion-dollar AI builds reshaping power markets, construction labor demand, and grid planning across the Midwest and Sun Belt. For investors, the success of the 144A tranche may set a template for how future hyperscaler debt deals are sized, priced, and syndicated. And for the broader AI industry, the financing reinforces a pattern that has defined 2026: the bottleneck is not algorithms or talent, but megawatts, transformers, and the willingness of bond buyers to fund them.
— Michael Ouroumis
