On a recent evening at American Coney Island — a Detroit institution serving chili dogs for more than a century — something unusual navigated the checkered floor. A Keenon service robot delivered food between tables. No tip required. No sick days. No benefits. I saw this same scene three years ago in Taiwan at one of Taipei’s most popular restaurants. What was a novelty there is emerging infrastructure here, and once built elsewhere, does not easily relocate. That robot doesn’t run on magic. It runs on artificial intelligence — and AI runs on data centers. The question Michigan refuses to answer urgently is: where will those data centers be built?
JLL’s Year-End 2025 North America Data Center Report is not subtle. It describes an industry that has “entered hyperdrive.” More than 35 gigawatts of capacity is under construction across North America — equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of the United Kingdom. Vacancy sits at a record low 1% for the second consecutive year, and 92% of that construction pipeline is already pre-committed. Rents rose 9% in 2025. This is not a bubble. It is the most pre-sold infrastructure buildout in modern American history, and total global investment over the next five years could approach $3 billion.
The geography of this buildout should alarm every Michigan policymaker. Texas is positioned to overtake Northern Virginia as the world’s largest data center market by 2030. Georgia’s Atlanta market doubled since 2023 and is on pace to double again in 2026. Tennessee, Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana are what JLL calls “frontier markets,” states that cleared regulatory paths, secured power commitments and said yes to investment. Wisconsin and Ohio, with economic profiles not unlike Michigan’s, are now capturing billions in hyperscalers’ capital. Illinois, on the other hand, offers a cautionary counterpoint: one privacy law, JLL reports, pushed $100 billion of investment into neighboring states. One law. $100 billion. Gone.
Michigan does not appear in JLL’s frontier market analysis. Not in the top tier. Not in the second tier. Virginia has over six gigawatts of operational data center capacity. Michigan has effectively zero. This is not an oversight. It is a verdict. When hyperscale developers approached Michigan communities — including Lyon Township in Oakland County — they encountered the full apparatus of local resistance: zoning challenges, environmental reviews weaponized as delay tactics and community opposition driven by misinformation. The same playbook that slowed solar farms and battery plants is being run against data centers. Meanwhile, the commitments being signed today will define the industrial geography of artificial intelligence for a generation.
The implications are not abstract. Each gigawatt of data center capacity generates approximately $10 billion in annual construction activity and tens of millions in annual property tax revenue. Michigan went from the 8th highest per capita income state in 1950 to 39th today. That decline was the accumulated consequence of decisions — or failures to decide — made over the last seventy years. A serious data center development program targeting 16 gigawatts by 2030 would be one of the largest economic development initiatives in the state’s postwar history. These are 40-year assets, not film subsidies. They anchor investment, attract supply chains and signal to every technology investor that a region is serious.
Michigan has every natural advantage: abundant freshwater for cooling, available land, a competitive grid and a workforce that built the most sophisticated manufacturing infrastructure in American history. What it lacks is urgency. Michigan needs a state-level permitting fast track matching what Texas and Ohio have already implemented. It needs utility commitments with realistic timelines — four years is the national average; Michigan should target two. And it needs political leadership willing to tell skeptical communities the truth: the alternative to a data center in your township is not pristine countryside. It is economic stagnation.
Elon Musk has projected two million humanoid robots in production within years. The companies building those robots are right now signing long-term leases for data center capacity — in Texas, Ohio and Georgia. The robot at American Coney Island will keep making its rounds. The data centers powering the next generation of those machines are being built right now, in states that choose to compete. Michigan can still join them. But not by watching.
John Rakolta Jr. is Chairman of Walbridge, one of the nation’s leading construction firms. He previously served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates from 2019 to 2021.
