SALINE TWP., MI — A rural township board grappling with pushback over the controversial “The Barn” hyperscale data center has made a major change to its approval of a tax break for the $43 billion project in order to avoid another lawsuit.
Earlier this week, the Saline Township Board of Trustees had approved a smaller-than-requested tax abatement, capping the data center’s valuation at a previous estimate of $4.8 billion for the purposes of the tax abatement.
The controversial hyperscale data center is already under construction for Oracle, a cloud computing giant, and OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, off West Michigan Avenue in the township south of Ann Arbor…