But building operational AI at scale requires more than just raw algorithmic power. At Fortune Brainstorm Tech this week, executives from third-party logistics giant C.H. Robinson, Gap, AI lending platform Upstart, and object storage firm MinIO argued that true enterprise success requires treating AI as a strategic partner. This involves implementing something like a digital supervisor that acts like a centralized safety layer above AI models to enforce guardrails, ensure compliance, and guarantee error-free results for enterprises.

For C.H. Robinson, this shift has rewritten their rules of logistics. The company is using AI to manage the thousands of natural-language emails customers send daily, which previously could not be automated effectively with traditional software code, according to Chief Technology Officer Mike Neill. By deploying a tool known as an AI classifier to instantly identify customer intent, C.H. Robinson has slashed response times to as little as 32 seconds, he said. This automated pipeline handles everything from booking orders to securing appointments, driving what he called massive efficiency gains.

But for AI agents to become truly production-ready, they must evolve to becoming systems with long-term memory and contextual awareness, executives said.

“AI agents must remember customer preferences,” said MinIO co-founder and co-CEO Garima Kapoor. But keeping that memory in expensive GPU hardware isn’t financially sustainable for growing companies, she said. She noted rising demand for new software that moves AI memory off expensive chips and into cheaper storage. This lets agents smoothly remember past conversations instead of resetting every time.

“Generative AI is more about prompting,” Kapoor said. ‘Where agentic workload is taking decisions based on the data that you are seeing flowing through.”

Technical infrastructure, however, is only half the battle The human element remains a steep hurdle. Sven Gerjets, chief technology officer at Gap, warned that technical training alone can backfire. Employees who received only basic prompt engineering training often experienced what he called “AI hangover,” which he described as a sharp drop in workforce confidence when the technology failed to instantly solve complex, multi-layered retail problems.

To combat this, Gap is pushing for a cultural mindset shift. Company growth succeeds only when employees stop viewing AI as a passive software tool like Excel, and begin treating it as an active digital coworker, Gerjets said.

If “you look at this as a partner,” he said, “you actually can get a lot more out of it because you’ll ask it [questions like], ‘I don’t know what to do?’”

More from the 25th annual Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference:

Anthropic’s Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code, says there are days he manages tens of thousands of AI agents at once

The AI industry spent years chasing bigger models. Now it’s chasing efficiency

‘Not an Allbirds Moment’: Xbox’s new CEO says she is grounding the console in gaming roots not AI

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The valuation surged Musk’s net worth above $1 trillion and SpaceX’s valuation to more than twice that—with the company’s market cap reaching $2.05 trillion.

The official trading start was delayed due to intense order matching activity, in which investors who refreshed brokerage accounts on Friday morning saw that SPCX was public, but there were no trades.

At noon Friday, the stock was hovering between $162 and $165. By 1PM, it soared to $175, up nearly 30% from its target price, before settling at above $169. An hour later, SpaceX traded more than 360 million shares, 10 times the total volume that 2026’s second-largest IPO, Cerebras, posted in its first day of trading.

Thirty minutes before market close, the stock remained steady at just over $162, and more than 172 million shares were traded on Nasdaq alone, taking over a record previously held by Nokia, which became the second-most active stock on the exchange.

By midafternoon, SpaceX’s merch store began selling eight new items to honor their IPO. They include a $45 tote bag and a $15 sticker reading the SPCX ticker, as well as two separate t-shirts reading “The future is public.”

Musk addresses SpaceX employees at Nasdaq before debut

Ahead of the debut, the rocket, satellite and AI company’s CEO Elon Musk addressed Nasdaq in Texas, reiterating the company’s extraterrestrial goals. “SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the moon,” Musk said. “I am confident at this point that with the incredible team that we have here at SpaceX, that we will do that for you.”

He told the crowd of SpaceX employees at Nasdaq’s Starbase, Texas location that at first, he didn’t have high hopes for the company that today, could potentially make him the world’s first trillionaire. “I gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all.”

Still, he said, after more than two decades of prototypes, failed launches and eventual success that has culminated in the Falcon 9 Block 5—the world’s most reliable rocket—Musk said that his initial out-of-this-world fascination still remains at the company.

“That’s what SpaceX is all about, is take science fiction and create an exciting, inspiring future for everyone,” Musk said. “We want to be able to take anyone who wants to go to the moon, anyone who wants to go to Mars… not just a few astronauts, I mean, you, literally you.”

“There are always problems on Earth,” he concluded, moments before Elton John’s ‘Rocket Man’ started playing. “But there also have to be things that get you excited about the future, that make you glad to wake up in the morning, because you can’t wait to see what happens next.”

At New York’s Nasdaq, SpaceX CEO Gwynne Shotwell rang the opening bell, with SpaceX employees wearing green shoes in a nod to the IPO’s “greenshoe” overallotment option. Fortune’s Shawn Tully explained how this mechanism allows underwriters to sell additional shares in an IPO to ensure stability while responding to the increase in investor demand.

Speaking at the Times Square ceremony after ringing the opening bell, Shotwell said, “Today, we make history again, and we have a history of making history. We’re about 22,000 strong, and thanks go to all of you for hanging in there, for keeping a straight spine as the doubters doubt, to achieve historic things every day.”

The offering priced Thursday afternoon—which was announced in a free-writing prospectus filed with the SEC just after 3 p.m. ET, while markets were still open—was at $135 a share for 555.6 million shares, raising the $75 billion the company targeted and valuing it at $1.77 trillion. Underwriters hold a 30-day option to purchase up to 83.3 million additional shares, which would lift the total raise to $86.25 billion.

That valuation makes it the largest IPO in stock market history: the raise is nearly triple the previous record, set when Saudi Aramco collected $25.6 billion on Riyadh’s exchange in December 2019 at a $1.71 trillion valuation. (One caveat for the record books: in inflation-adjusted terms, Aramco raised the equivalent of $33.2 billion at a $2.21 trillion valuation—so by that measure, the Saudi oil giant’s crown isn’t fully relinquished.) The offering covers only about 4% of SpaceX’s roughly 13.08 billion shares outstanding, making the company worth more today than Tesla was the day it became the world’s most valuable automaker.

The $1.77 trillion price tag instantly makes SpaceX the sixth-most valuable company in the U.S. and seventh-most valuable worldwide, ahead of Meta and Tesla—despite posting a $4.9 billion net loss in 2025 on $18.7 billion in revenue, the vast majority of it from Starlink. At the IPO price, investors are paying roughly 94 times trailing revenue for a company whose combined entity with xAI has racked up an accumulated deficit of $41.3 billion.

And unlike most newly public companies, SpaceX won’t have to wait long for index money to find it. Don’t look for it in the S&P 500: the benchmark requires sustained profitability, which SpaceX doesn’t have. But under a Nasdaq rule change that took effect in May, megacap debuts can join the Nasdaq-100 in as little as 15 trading days rather than the usual three months, and FTSE Russell and other index providers have agreed to fast-track inclusion as well—meaning trillions of dollars in passive retirement and pension money could soon hold SpaceX whether savers chose it or not.

How people are reacting to the debut

Sen. Bernie Sanders, a long time vocal opponent of the billionaire class who has sometimes publicly shared some words with the SpaceX founder, called it an “absurdity” for the world’s first trillionaire to pay the same in taxes as someone who makes less than $200,000 a year.

“Today, Elon Musk, a trillionaire, pays the same amount into Social Security as someone making $184,500,” the Vermont senator said on X, owned by Musk. “If we end that absurdity and lift the cap on taxable income, we can make Social Security solvent for 75 years and expand benefits by $2,400. My Social Security bill does that.”

Sanders’ colleague Sen. Elizabeth Warren also expressed concern with Musk’s wealth.

“Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire,” Warren wrote on X. “The typical American household would have to work more than 11 MILLION years to make Elon Musk’s level of wealth.”

Fortune was on scene outside Nasdaq before the stock opened on Friday, where supporters of Musk and the company were spotted wearing astronaut costumes and discussing their potential ownership of the stock. A few blocks away, about two dozen protesters were outside the JP Morgan Chase headquarters chanting “shame, shame, shame” at Musk’s new trillionaire status.

A16Z general partner Katherine Boyle on X repeated a line from Musk’s address to employees and added “Only in America. Congratulations to @elonmusk @SpaceX. This is the American Dream.”

The road to Wall Street

After more than a decade of fueling fanfare over the possible public offering of his company, Musk would often dangle a possible IPO just to dismiss it almost immediately afterwards. For the most part of the last 14 years, a SpaceX IPO became a running joke among investors: Musk would repeatedly promise a public offering at a later date, just for that date to arrive and for Musk to call those claims speculative at best. In 2012, he told Bloomberg there was “a good chance that SpaceX goes public next year.” A few years later, he said the company would only go public after the Mars Colonial Transporter, the precursor to Starship, began shuttling humans to Mars.

In 2019, he told SpaceX employees in an email it would “make sense to take Starlink public in about three years or so,” and in 2020, he promised again an IPO, “but only several years in the future when revenue growth is smooth and predictable. Public market does not like erratic cash flow.” Musk was still playing defense in 2024, after SpaceX ran a $112-a-share insider tender that valued the company at roughly $210 billion (up from $180 billion in a tender just months earlier). He pointed to the litigation over his Tesla pay package as a reason SpaceX should remain private, posting that “the legal load and pressure for short-term results for a public company are very high.” 

It may be that very rationale that changed his mind when reports of yet another will-he-or-won’t-he with regard to a SpaceX IPO resurfaced last year. The rise of orbital AI compute, coupled with Starship’s maturation to the point where demands for capital would dwarf whatever private markets would be able to cleanly supply, could be the reason why Musk finally chose to file an S-1 on April Fools’.

The public S-1 dropped on May 20, and the subsequent road show launched on June 4, a week earlier than expected as the SEC completed its review ahead of schedule. The roadshow—where a company’s executives and underwriters pitch their stock offering to institutional investors—drew $250 billion in orders and was underwritten by a 21-bank syndicate, led by Goldman Sachs and with Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan rounding out the top five.

There’s one big concern hanging over the debut: Starship, the vehicle at the center of SpaceX’s most ambitious projections, is currently grounded while the FAA conducts a mishap investigation into its most recent test flight.

An unconventional man whose ideas are out of this world

Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 as a means to answer what many children eventually grow out of the habit of asking: what’s out there on the red planet? Now, the IPO could make the man with extraterrestrial sights the first trillionaire in history.

Using $100 million of his PayPal proceeds, Musk visited Russia three times to buy refurbished Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) for a Mars greenhouse stunt. Upon his return, he realized rocket materials accounted for roughly 2% of a typical launch cost, and he decided to build some himself. Throughout the years, he launched several liquid-fueled rockets—some fell, and some fell flat—and would eventually call for data centers and even communes on Mars. 

However, the 300-plus-page IPO prospectus itself claims a total addressable market of $28.5 trillion, a figure the company calls the largest in human history, even as it acknowledges the speculative and “improbable” nature of its Mars timeline.

The IPO is as unconventional as the man behind it. Usually, most companies set a price range and let the book-building process find the clearing price. In this case, SpaceX simply told investors what the stock would cost, fixing $135 a share before the roadshow even began, and making Thursday night’s pricing a formality. It also reserved roughly 30% of shares for retail investors, about three times the typical allocation for an offering of this size.

As a result, it’s close to four times oversubscribed: investors placed more than $250 billion in orders, roughly three and a half to four times the shares on offer, meaning many buyers will receive a fraction of what they requested, or nothing at all. Post-offering, Musk will retain control through a multi-class share structure that, according to a letter from New York’s state and city comptrollers and the head of CalPERS, gives him as much as 85% of voting power despite owning about 42% of the equity. As the pension officials put it, removing the company’s most powerful officer would, as a mathematical matter, require his own vote, making him effectively unfireable without his consent.

Morningstar, the market’s most prominent bear, pegs SpaceX’s fair value at $780 billion, or roughly 55% below the IPO valuation. It argued that neither a rapidly reusable Starship nor commercially competitive orbital data centers has been demonstrated, and that retail investors will likely find better entry points after listing.

History is written by the victors

The hype surrounding SpaceX’s debut left analysts wondering ahead of Friday whether the stock could possibly live up to it. Historically, among the largest public offerings on record, the odds of a company posting negative returns in its first three months are roughly a coin flip.

Take Saudi Aramco, the previous record holder: it rose 10% on its first day in December 2019, briefly pushing its valuation to about $1.88 trillion and past Apple as the world’s most valuable listed company. Within months, amid the oil crash and COVID selloff, it had fallen below its offer price. 

You can blame oil markets for that one, but the tech-growth story powering SpaceX is the same one that plagued Facebook’s May 2012 debut. The social network fell nearly 50% in its first three months and traded below its $38 offer price for more than a year before becoming one of the best-performing mega-cap IPOs ever. Internationally, SoftBank Corp dropped 14.5% on its first day in Tokyo in December 2018 and spent years below its offer price. 

Other companies thrived in the months following their IPO, and even eked out a path to secure strong market domination during some of the economy’s worst years. Six months before Lehman Brothers collapsed, Visa raised $17.9 billion in March 2008 and thrived through the Great Recession. The largest U.S. IPO previously belonged to Alibaba, which raised $21.8 billion in 2014 and earned the company a $231 billion market cap at listing. 

SpaceX is the first of a hotly anticipated “IPO summer.” Anthropic filed its confidential S-1 on June 1; OpenAI followed a week later, targeting a September debut at an $852 billion valuation. If both land before year’s end, 2026 will close as the year public markets finally had to price artificial general intelligence.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

There were more than two people in astronaut outfits, bouncing around between different press interviews; there were teenaged “retired crypto traders” with hired camera men talking about the IPO. The SpaceX IPO, the biggest in history, is a rare market event that doubles as a tourist attraction. The sidewalk outside the Nasdaq on Friday seemed to contain a microcosm of the entire psychology of this market: early money waiting for its exit window, retail money rushing in, and a broad, cheerful consensus that the company is overvalued—but it doesn’t really matter. 

“Everyone knows it’s overvalued, but do they care?” said Jasper Howard, the 19-year-old who called himself the “Clavicular of Crypto,” referring to the notorious looksmaxxing streamer. He said he was “retired” in crypto, but still streaming.

“We know in 10 years, space exploration is gonna be this huge thing,” Howard said. “AI is gonna be this huge thing. So it doesn’t really matter right now if it’s overvalued, because in the future it will be fairly valued.”

Howard said he’d sit this one out—crypto IPOs burned him—but his friends had thrown in six figures apiece, on day one. One friend had thrown in a million, he said. 

Eva Roytburg for Fortune

The biggest IPO in history

SpaceX is pricing $75 billion in stock into a market that is also expected to absorb an Anthropic IPO and, eventually, an OpenAI one. Either the money keeps coming, or everyone who’s going to buy already has. Currently, it’s trading at just over $170 a share.

What the buyers think they’re buying, increasingly, is not rockets. Asked what pushes a valued-at-$1.77 trillion company higher, Golla didn’t mention Mars. He pointed to the compute capacity deals with Anthropic and Google—worth “$20, $30 billion in the last couple of months,” by his account—and predicted SpaceX builds another three or four data centers within a year. “That’s going to increase the revenue by another five times or 10 times,” he said. 

Manchin, the prop trader, made the same case: “Nobody but xAI has computing power, and if you’re gonna find computing power right now, I’ll buy it.”

Not everyone was buying it. Some in the vicinity of the crowd told Fortune they didn’t understand the timing of the IPO, and described exit liquidity—when the function of new buyers is to let earlier investors sell. Golla could recite his lockup calender from memory: lockup restrictions start loosening 45 to 60 days out, roughly 20% at the first earnings report, staged tranches after that, everything unrestricted by day 180. Still, he’s holding.

“We are looking at very long, I mean, like, a three-to-four year period,” Golla said. “So I think it’s all going to play out well.”

By late morning the crowd had thinned. Zeke Spector, who had bought an astronaut costume in Midtown and paid FedEx $170 to print and bind the full S-1, was already planning his outfit for the Anthropic listing. “Do I dress up like a data center? Like a refrigerator?” The bit, like the market, must keep going.

“This is history,” he said, “whether you like it or not.”

Eva Roytburg for Fortune

A few blocks away, outside of JPMorgan Chase’s new headquarters on Park Ave., about two dozen protestors held a small demonstration complete with a 30-foot banner decrying Musk’s new trillionaire status.

“We’re outside the JP Morgan corporate headquarters, where they’re about to host a lavish party for Elon Musk,” a protestor announced as others chanted “shame, shame, shame.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The rocket and satellite company raised $75 billion on Thursday in the largest IPO ever after offering more than 555 million shares at $135 a piece, valuing the company at $1.77 trillion.

On Friday, shares jumped 20% to $162, propelling Musk into trillionaire status after accounting for his SpaceX options as well as his Tesla shares.

Meanwhile, his real estate portfolio is more modest. After Musk moved to Texas in 2020 and eventually brought his companies with him, he sold most of his homes in California.

He bought adjacent properties in an upscale area near Austin, for about $35 million, much to the annoyance of his neighbors. But Musk revealed in 2021 that his primary home is a $50,000 house in Boca Chica, Texas, which he rents from SpaceX, headquartered in the nearby town of Starbase, near Brownsville.

“It’s kinda awesome though,” he added.

The residence is a 20-foot-by-20-foot prefabricated home built by housing startup Boxabl, with a living room, a bedroom area, a kitchen, and a bathroom with a tub-shower, according to Chron.com.

By contrast, companies tied to Musk own at least three large houses—each measuring between 6,000 and 9,000 square feet—with swimming pools in the pricey West Lake Hills suburb of Austin, sources told the Wall Street Journal.

In 2023, Musk biographer Walter Isaacson shared a post of the interior, calling it a “spartan two-bedroom” home, where Musk would “sit at this wood table and make phone calls.”

As recently as this past March, Musk’s mother, Maye Musk, added more color to her son’s very unglamorous lifestyle, describing a visit to his house.

“There is no food in the fridge. The garage where I slept is on the right. The shower only has one towel, so I left it for Elon. That was okay with me. When I was a child, I’d spend three weeks in the Kalahari Desert without showering. Many times. There was no water. I think my parents prepared me for this luxury,” she wrote in a post on X.

Long known as a workaholic, Musk has often lived close to his companies, especially during critical periods. For example, he slept at Tesla’s California plant while the EV maker was ironing out production issues with its Model 3.

Similarly, SpaceX is at a pivotal moment as it develops the next-generation Starship rocket, which will be key to the company’s future.

The massive, fully reusable V3 looms higher than any previous version. It can carry a payload of up to 100 metric tons, a significant increase from the 35 metric tons that the V2 could carry. 

The new Starship will likely play a major role in returning astronauts to the moon in a few years as well as in Musk’s plans to put AI data centers in space. Its first test flight last month was mostly successful.

Even more upside to Musk’s wealth

As rich as Musk is now, he could expand his wealth even more if SpaceX achieves incredibly ambitious milestones. He could be awarded up to 200 million additional Class B shares if the company reaches a $7.5 trillion valuation and builds a colony on Mars with 1 million human inhabitants.

Another milestone would give Musk 60 million more shares if the valuation hits $6.6 trillion and SpaceX deploys a network of space-based data centers with 100 terawatts of computing capacity.

Musk started SpaceX in 2002 to challenge the dominance of Boeing and Lockheed Martin in the space-launch market.

Despite still being relatively new, SpaceX has taken over the market. By pioneering reusable boosters that can land autonomously, the company slashed launch costs and ramped up its launch cadence—suddenly making low earth orbit more accessible to a broad range of customers.

It accounted for more than 50% of global rocket launches last year and has roughly 10,000 Starlink satellites in orbit, providing space-based internet connectivity to businesses and militaries.

SpaceX is a top launch provider for NASA and the Pentagon, which is also looking to the company to help develop President Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile-defense shield.

Revenue grew by more than 30% last year to $18.7 billion, but the bottom line swung to a loss of $4.9 billion as xAI’s losses deepened to $6.4 billion. Starlink more than doubled its profit to $4.4 billion.

As a major disrupter in the space industry, SpaceX’s private valuation had already been soaring ahead of its public debut.

In December, it was valued at $800 billion after the sale of insider shares. Then secondary trading on private markets put it at $1.54 trillion in April and $1.7 trillion today.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

More oil clearly has begun moving through the Strait of Hormuz of late amid the ongoing Iran war—although the exact volumes are hard to parse—but Wright’s estimates surprised energy market analysts to the upside. He credited U.S. military intervention. More vessels are also taking the calculated risk by turning off their transponders and going dark. Both Wright and Wirth were speaking June 12 at a Bloomberg energy event in Houston.

With nearly 20% of the world’s global oil flows initially disrupted from the war, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are diverting more volumes via pipelines. Wright said that left about a 14 million-barrel-per-day gap in typical flows of crude oil and some petroleum products.

“Flows today are approaching half of the gap, and they’re rising,” Wright said. “Ultimately, we will restore the flows with our without [Iran].”

He said the 7 million barrels per day is a “rough estimate,” adding, “and it’s rising.”

But the Chevron CEO contented that those numbers don’t quite match what the Big Oil giant is observing.

“Our view would be it’s probably not quite that much,” Wirth said, speaking shortly after Wright. “There are ships that have been transiting out—typically with their transponders off, typically at night, and with some support from the U.S. military.

“That has helped ease the fundamentals of the physical [oil] markets,” Wirth said. “The market has been pretty remarkable in terms of how it’s adjusted—on the supply and demand sides—to buy time and address the risks that exist.”

The U.S. wants oil flowing from the Gulf while maintaining a blockade on Iranian oil until a peace deal is finalized, Secretary Wright said. “Zero” Iranian barrels are exiting, he said.

“The military protection is there. It’s actually going remarkably well,” Wright said.

Dwindling oil reserves

The global benchmark for oil futures peaked at $138 per barrel in early April just before the first ceasefire was announced—well more than double $61 at the beginning of the year—but it has since come back down to about $87 per barrel as of June 12—the lowest since early March—with hopes of a permanent peace deal on the horizon.

Oil prices have remained lower than feared—although still high—because of rising U.S. crude exports from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), much smaller Chinese imports, and conservation efforts in other countries. More volumes sneaking out of the Middle East via pipeline and the Gulf also are contributing.

“This crisis shows us that the industry finds a way,” said oil forecaster Dan Pickering, founder of Pickering Energy Partners consulting and research firm. “But, if the strait does not open, even if 7 million barrels a day get out, that means [another] 7 million barrels a day aren’t.”

Larger prices spikes are delayed, Pickering said, but they’ll still happen by the end of the summer or so if oil flows don’t return to normal because emergency stockpiles are rapidly depleting.

Depending on emergency reserves means the nation’s SPR is shrinking to its lowest volumes since 1983 this week.

The administration has drained 66 million barrels—as of June 5—and counting from the SPR since the war in Iran began, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Trump has authorized the overall release of 172 million barrels over several months. The companies buying the barrels are pledging to replenish them.

The SPR hit a three-year low of 349.2 million barrels on June 5, and it’s being drained by close to 9 million barrels every week. The Biden-era low was 346.7 million barrels in July 2023 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, steadily growing from there until the Iran war.

Going any lower puts the SPR at levels not seen since August 1983.

“You cannot do this forever. The longer it lasts, the less insurance you have,” Pickering said, likening oil inventories to home insurance. “Insurance is always too expensive until your house burns down.”

Wright pledged June 12 that the U.S. will not ban U.S. oil exports and may extend the Trump administration’s Jones Act waiver beyond mid-August.

The 106-year-old Jones Act, which requires cargo ships moving between U.S. ports to be U.S. built, flagged, and manned, reduces the number of vessels available to move crude oil and refined products between domestic ports.

The waiver allows more ships, for instance, to move fuel from the U.S. Gulf Coast through the Panama Canal and up to California to help alleviate shortfalls on the West Coast, especially since a couple of California refineries were shuttered in recent months.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

In an interview with CNBC, she said a megamerger “might make Elon’s life a little easier, actually.” 

“There’s no question that there’s synergies between Tesla and SpaceX in our futures, definitely. There’s a convergence of a kind of what we’re all trying to accomplish in the future,” Shotwell added in the interview.

Shotwell didn’t elaborate on the specific synergies that exist between Tesla and SpaceX, but the two companies are already collaborating in some areas, including jointly running Musk’s planned $55 billion “Terafab” facility, which will produce chips for robotics and space travel. SpaceX has also previously spent millions on Tesla technology, including $506 million worth of Tesla Megapack power cells and $103 million on Cybertrucks for SpaceX facilities.

Musk has a history of combining his companies. In 2016, Tesla shelled out $2.6 billion worth of shares to acquire SolarCity, a solar energy company run by his cousins Lyndon and Peter Rive, in which he had a 22% stake and served as chairman. Later, after buying social media website X, formerly Twitter, he merged it with his AI company xAI in a deal valued at $50 billion. In February, SpaceX acquired xAI and X. 

As SpaceX makes history with its IPO Friday, Shotwell noted that combining Musk’s two public companies may not happen in the near term: “Right now I’m focused on keeping the lights on here.”

Still, Shotwell’s comments lend more evidence that a merger between the two companies could come in the future. Some analysts already see the tie-up as inevitable. Wedbush senior equity research analyst Dan Ives claimed in a note earlier this week that merging the two companies would be a “holy grail” move that would allow Musk to control more of the AI ecosystem. 

The Tesla bull sees more than an 80% chance they will merge. Part of the reason is that the two companies have already started laying the groundwork for a potential tie-up.

In January, Tesla made a $2 billion investment in xAI. A month later, when SpaceX acquired xAI in an all-stock deal valued at $250 billion, Tesla’s $2 billion stake converted to nearly 19 million shares, noted Ives.

SpaceX debuted at a starting price of $152, and quickly rose to $173, well above the IPO price of $135. Therefore, Tesla’s stake is now worth about $3.29 billion, a roughly 64% paper gain.

“Historic moment for Musk, the markets, and SpaceX. Watershed event,” Ives added in a comment to Fortune.

Yet Tesla’s stake could rise in value in the coming days, especially as analysts predict that the company’s stock price is set to skyrocket even higher. 

Timothy Horan of investment bank and financial services firm Oppenheimer has set a price target of $190. 

Merging Tesla and SpaceX could create one of the biggest companies in the world. Already, SpaceX’s valuation of more than $2.3 trillion makes it the seventh largest company in the world by market cap and one of only 14 other companies worth more than $1 trillion. 

Tesla, for its part, is neck and neck with Meta for the title of 10th largest company in the world, with a market cap of $1.5 trillion. 

Some quick math shows that a combined SpaceX-Tesla giant could potentially be worth more than $3 trillion, leapfrogging the likes of Amazon and Microsoft to become the fourth biggest company in the world.

A merger between the two companies is unlikely to face major regulatory hurdles, experts told CNBC, partly because they operate in separate industries. Yet the complex governance issues—like deciding which company would be the parent, who would determine the price of the new company’s shares, as well as the details of a stock swap—would all need to be tackled. 

Because of Musk’s 85% voting power at SpaceX, he would not have to worry about pushback from the rocket company’s board. While Musk holds a lower 13% stake in Tesla, a giant pay package approved by shareholders in November would boost his ownership stake in the EV maker to around 25%, if he hits a series of ambitious financial and operational targets over the next decade.

According to Shotwell, Musk is the only one who can run SpaceX, but she also made clear SpaceX is independent of him. 

“The company would not collapse, obviously, without Elon, but it would by no means be the same,” she said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

But some of the biggest names in tech are suddenly very interested in what happens on this serene stretch of desert. The region once dominated by ranches and farmland will soon become a new kind of tech hub—one that’s largely unpeopled, made up of row upon row of humming, energy- and water-hungry GPU racks in gigantic AI data centers. And there’s not much locals can do about it. 

At a weekday morning hearing in early December, nearly an hour and a half away in downtown Phoenix, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors approved an amendment that would allow for the industrial rezoning of a 2,000-acre property at Hassayampa Ranch. The vote was unanimous, even though hundreds of the ranch’s neighbors had signed petitions opposing the project. 

The developer, Anita Verma-Lallian, bought this vast tract of desert in May 2025 in a $51 million deal backed by heavyweight tech investors including billionaire venture capitalist, podcast cohost, and Trump mega-donor Chamath Palihapitiya. The plan? A massive AI data center project that will likely draw a major cloud provider or Big Tech “hyperscaler” such as Meta, Google, or OpenAI. 

“We have probably six to eight large hyperscalers that are interested in looking at it,” Verma-Lallian told Fortune. In a crisp gray jacket and narrow black slacks, with a chartreuse clutch in hand, Verma-Lallian emerged victorious from the supervisors’ auditorium into the midmorning desert light. She and her team—including her lawyer, real estate agent, PR rep, personal assistant, and sister—grinned in a group photo to mark the moment. 

For this 43-year-old daughter of Indian immigrants raised in Scottsdale, the vote represented yet another milestone in her family’s American success story. Her father, Kuldip Verma, founded Vermaland—now one of Arizona’s major land and real estate companies—back in the mid-1990s, and Verma-Lallian has built a profile in her own right as a land developer with decades in the business. The Hassayampa Ranch deal, along with another 2,069-acre land parcel in nearby Buckeye that she sold in August for $136 million, has positioned her as a rising force in Arizona’s AI infrastructure race. 

The crucial Dec. 10 decision on Hassayampa Ranch means that Verma-Lallian can now submit a detailed zoning application and site plans. The giant data center will feature outsize buildings filled with aisles of GPU server racks, round-the-clock cooling systems, and 1.5 gigawatts of power—equivalent to the power needs of over a million homes. It will cost as much as $25 billion to build, Verma-Lallian and Palihapitiya have said.  

Sharon Goldman

It’s a familiar story across the country: These mega-scale data center projects, providing the computing power underpinning the AI boom and the U.S. race against China to dominate the sector, are changing landscapes, straining energy grids and water tables, and reshaping the economy. 

And those hyperscalers—including Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta, as well as fast-growing AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic—are spending hundreds of billions a year to build out the physical footprint of their AI businesses. Data center equipment and infrastructure spending is on track to rise to a trillion dollars a year by 2030. 

Data center projects are touching off tense fights among developers, environmentalists, and rural residents—many of which end up in places like the Maricopa County supervisors’ auditorium, where locals take turns at the microphone with Silicon Valley–backed developers, and local officials accustomed to approving local ordinances and budgeting for municipal departments debate the merits of multibillion-dollar projects.

A nationwide AI data center boom

For much of the past two decades, data centers were among the least visible pieces of the tech economy—plain, boxy buildings that quietly powered websites, email, and cloud computing, drawing little public notice. The rise of generative AI has changed that. Its enormous appetite for computing power has transformed once-modest server farms into sprawling mega-complexes spanning millions of square feet and consuming electricity on the scale of a midsize city, along with vast quantities of water. 

The Trump administration has made winning the AI race with China a central priority, pushing an AI Action Plan designed to accelerate data center approvals and expand the nation’s power grid—even as it has stalled renewable energy development. 

In an era when AI infrastructure investment accounts for a growing share of U.S. economic growth, both Republicans and Democrats are vying to prove they can get projects built quickly—a priority that aligns with those of deep-pocketed tech and infrastructure investors who have grown and consolidated their political influence as demand for computing power has surged. For example, Palihapitiya’s All-In podcast cohost, venture capitalist David Sacks, is now Trump’s “AI and crypto czar,” helping steer federal strategy on AI competitiveness and infrastructure. 

In 2025, AI data centers emerged as a political flash point, fueling heated debates and grassroots campaigns over power, water, land, and jobs. Critics, many from the left but also including populist Republicans such as Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, warn they are driving up electricity costs and straining scarce water supplies. Meanwhile supporters (again, from both sides of the aisle) argue they can deliver economic growth and long-sought tax revenue to struggling communities.

Graphic by Nicolas Rapp

There is Meta’s $10 billion, 2,250-acre Hyperion facility underway in northeast Louisiana, where residents have complained about increased traffic and safety risks near schools and homes. There is Dunn County, Wisconsin, where a planned data center near the small city of Menomonie has drawn statewide pushback from those opposed to building on prime farmland and concerned about a lack of transparency. And there is Coweta County, a fast-developing exurb southwest of Atlanta where residents are fighting back against planned data center proposals that could cause utility strain, noise, and light pollution. 

Verma-Lallian’s plan is no exception: Her project has already stirred alarm among community members adjacent to the land who fear the impact on the wells that offer their only access to water, as well as how their rural desert lifestyle and property values will be affected by noise, construction, and rising energy costs. It is a microcosm of the quiet but explosive conflict unfolding at the edges of America’s AI build-out.

Water, electricity, noise, and disruption

As Verma-Lallian celebrated with her team outside the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors’ auditorium, Kathy and Ron Fletcher, ages 76 and 78 respectively, stood to the side, alone. The retirees and grandparents, clad in jeans, moved from California to Arizona in 2020 to live on a one-acre residential plot next to the Hassayampa Ranch site, drawn by the beautiful desert views and sunsets. 

They were not surprised by the ruling, but they were frustrated. In their unincorporated rural community of Tonopah, Kathy Fletcher said, residents have little money, time, or political leverage to mount an effective opposition. (District 3 Supervisor Debbie Lesko, a former member of Congress whose district includes Tonopah, declined Fortune’s requests for comment.)

“All we can do is plead with the people here,” said Kathy Fletcher, noting that she and Ron were the only residents to drive more than an hour to the Maricopa County meeting on a weekday morning. “We’re kind of treated like the redheaded stepchild, and they just think they can throw anything they want out here,” she said. “We’re having a difficult time fighting the battle to tell people, ‘You can make a difference.’”

Sharon Goldman

The Fletchers’ next-door neighbor, Cherisse Campbell, who owns a hatchery for heritage turkeys, gathered nearly 200 signatures on a Change.org petition that focused on the environmental impact of potential light and noise pollution; traffic and infrastructure strain; and the negative impact on property values. 

Campbell, 38, was born and raised in Maricopa County, spending most of her childhood in Surprise, a northwest Phoenix suburb “back when there were only orange groves and desert and a big ostrich farm.” She spoke virtually at the meeting, where she said her free-range birds, which “exercise natural mating, nesting and young-rearing behaviors,” would face hazards with the arrival of big industry. “We don’t need or want paved roads or structures surrounded by concrete that will exacerbate the heat island effect of the summer,” she said. “Connecting a main road designed for high-volume traffic from the I-10 to this site will present a destructive nightmare for these rural residents (and my birds).” 

And Tonya Pearsall, a 51-year-old mother of five who has lived in Tonopah since 1999 and runs a small dog-breeding business, Little Loves Maltipoos, said she had spent several weekends going door-to-door to get 100 residents to sign another petition against Verma-Lallian’s project. “My main concern is water; we are all on wells out here,” she said. 

Michele Van Quathem, Verma-Lallian’s water attorney, said that once the zoning process for the data center is completed, the project would likely partner with Global Water Resources, the public service water provider for the area, or the tenant could supply its own water—which could include digging its own groundwater wells or building on-site water storage or recycling systems. Estimated water usage will be known with more certainty, she said, as site planning and user discussions progress, but she emphasized, “Water sources will need to comply with Arizona’s water laws, including strict groundwater management laws for the Phoenix Active Management Area where the project is located.”  

Verma-Lallian said the development will observe setbacks from residences and preserve washes—natural desert channels that are typically dry but carry heavy flows during monsoon rains. She understands that area residents “prefer to see homes or nothing at all, so they’re not thrilled with what we’re trying to do out there.” But, she said, “I think we’ll plan it in a very thoughtful way” with a design that’s “aesthetically appealing.”  

Verma-Lallian’s land-use attorney, Wendy Riddell, acknowledged that residents often feel a sense of attachment to open land they’ve long used for hiking, horseback riding, or off-roading—even when that land is privately owned. And she pointed out that Tonopah residents will have the chance to weigh in later in the process, during site-plan review. 

At that stage, she said, developers typically work with neighbors on issues such as building setbacks, view corridors, landscaping, and building height. “Those are very typical things we work through on a zoning application with concerned citizens,” Riddell said. 

A bottleneck for AI growth—and an opportunity

Verma-Lallian, who lives in Paradise Valley, Ariz., with her husband, son, and daughter, may have Silicon Valley ties, but she also brings a Hollywood sheen that has jarred some in the rural community. She made headlines last year for buying the Pacific Palisades home where the Friends actor Matthew Perry drowned. In 2023 she founded a film production company, Camelback Productions. And she plans to build a movie studio on another Arizona property, not far from the data center site. 

During a drive to Hassayampa Ranch, Verma-Lallian and Scott Truitt, a real estate agent who has worked with both her and her father for decades, passed parcel after parcel of land she owns. Truitt gestured toward sites on either side of the road, noting properties Verma-Lallian had bought and sold over the years that are now residential developments, warehouses, retail stores, and gas stations. 

Graphic by Nicolas Rapp

After the previous owners of the Hassayampa Ranch property had gotten residential zoning for a master planned community of thousands of homes, the market crashed in 2008 and the project stalled. But even as the market recovered, the project faced a new obstacle: Around three years ago, Arizona water regulators stopped issuing new certificates of assured water supply, a prerequisite for large-scale residential construction—making the original housing plan far harder to revive. 

That regulatory constraint did not apply to industrial uses like data centers, which are not required to obtain a certificate of assured water supply as part of the zoning process, even though their water needs can rival or exceed those of residential developments. The distinction helped open the door for Verma-Lallian to acquire the land for a different use—one that did not require proving a long-term water supply upfront.     

For Verma-Lallian, the site checked several critical boxes: It sits near the nuclear Palo Verde Generating Station. It has a natural gas pipeline close enough that a future data center could be paired with new gas-fired plants to generate power. And—most importantly—it offers scale. At roughly 2,000 acres, the property is large enough to support a massive data center campus, something Verma-Lallian said is increasingly rare in the West Valley. “There just aren’t many privately owned sites left of this size,” she said, noting that only about 17% of land in Arizona is privately held, with the rest controlled by the state, the federal government, or Native American tribes. 

The changes happening in Arizona’s West Valley seem almost inevitable as development pushes relentlessly west from Phoenix. Hassayampa Ranch is close to the 25,000-acre site that Bill Gates purchased in 2017 with plans to build Belmont, a $100 million smart city with tens of thousands of homes, self-driving cars, and high-speed digital infrastructure (though the land remains as yet undeveloped). Buckeye, the closest city to Tonopah and the Hassayampa Ranch site, has grown from a population of 91,000 residents five years ago to 130,000—gaining thousands during the pandemic. A Costco has moved in and a Target is coming soon.

While Verma-Lallian’s site has seen some community pushback, in general Arizona is pro-growth, Truitt said: “Everybody wants to do a data center here.” In the West Valley, much of the land changing hands once belonged to farmers, he added. Rising land prices and other pressures have made agriculture increasingly untenable, and many aging farm owners have no next generation willing to take over. “They’re just sitting on the land,” he said. He pointed out dairy farms, with cows visible from the road: “They’ll be pushed out eventually by development. They’ve sold a lot of their property.”  

The AI data center boom has drawn tech investors who see land and power as the next bottlenecks in the AI economy—and therefore the next big opportunity. Chamath Palihapitiya, the billionaire investor who has bragged about his easy access to the White House, said his stake in Hassayampa Ranch with Verma-Lallian is his first data center investment. The business partners met through a mutual friend, the fintech founder Ethan Agarwal, who is running as a “fiercely pro-capitalism” Democrat for governor of California. Verma-Lallian declined to comment on her own politics, but in the past she has donated to Democrats including Hillary Clinton.

“Other than owning my home, I don’t own any real estate,” Palihapitiya said. “I didn’t consider it part of my investing circle of competence until realizing the energy-plus-data-center aspect.”

He sees the massive AI infrastructure build as similar to the development of the internet and mobile technology, he explained, though in those earlier investment eras, energy was not a critical determinant of success. “In the AI generation, it is a fulcrum asset,” he said. “And the most obvious wrapper of energy is the data center. Hence my interest.” 

The “greater good”—but for whom?

While Verma-Lallian appreciates the landscape surrounding Hassayampa Ranch, (“It’s so peaceful and beautiful,” she said) she frames her development as a practical choice. 

She cited her own experience living in a condo building in Old Town Scottsdale, where a proposed high-rise would block residents’ view of Camelback Mountain. “Everyone was really upset about it, but the development moved forward,” she said. “It was a hotel that was good for the community, bringing tourism revenue to the city.” 

Of Hassayampa Ranch, she said, “You have to look at the greater good of what it does to those communities. Keeping zoning frozen in time can limit a community’s ability to adapt, grow responsibly, and plan for future demand.” Still, Verma-Lallian acknowledged that residents of Tonopah “probably see me as more of a developer, just trying to make money.”

Her ambitions extend beyond data centers. With many Hollywood productions leaving California, Verma-Lallian said she plans to develop another nearby site—located just off Interstate 10 and not far from Hassayampa Ranch—into a movie studio complex that would also include an indoor amusement park and a smaller data center.

“It’s only about four and a half hours from Burbank,” she said, adding that she now spends roughly a quarter of her time on film production. She was a producer on the 2024 film Doin’ It, which premiered at SXSW, as well as Patel, a Shakespeare reimagining that wrapped production this summer and stars Kal Penn. She also recently finished a project featuring Wicked star Cynthia Erivo in London and has two other films in the works.

AI development has moved at such breakneck speed that despite the billions pouring into new facilities, a central unknown remains: whether the sheer volume of compute now under construction will be needed on the timelines companies are betting on. If demand slows, shifts, or becomes more concentrated, the data center boom could turn into a bust. But after decades in real estate, Verma-Lallian said she is unfazed by the possibility of a data center downturn. If demand shifts, she said, the sites she has developed could be repurposed for manufacturing, distribution, or other industrial uses. “The trends do keep changing,” she said. “But the way you build these facilities is very similar.”

Still, Verma-Lallian breathed a sigh of relief after the vote. She was aware of the petitions and emails opposing her project, and while she was confident she’d prevail, it was by no means a foregone conclusion. Another AI data center project in Chandler, a bustling suburb southeast of Phoenix, was voted down by city officials this month after massive pushback from residents, even though it was backed by former Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. 

After her triumph at the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors hearing and a quick tour of Hassayampa Ranch, Verma-Lallian headed back to Los Angeles, where a meeting with Netflix and a call with an investor awaited.

Back in Tonopah, Kathy Fletcher said she bears Verma-Lallian no ill will—even as she continues to oppose the project. “I think she’s a very successful young lady,” Fletcher said. “I wish her a lot of success. I just don’t want a data center in my backyard.”

For others in the community, the sense of loss feels personal. “We used to be able to see the Milky Way—that’s why we moved out here,” said Tonya Pearsall. “I’m not anti-growth. I’m conservative. I get capitalism.” 

But to allow industrial development on this otherworldly desert, with its vibrant ecosystem of washes and saguaro? “It’s painful,” she said. “I could break down and cry.” 

This article appears in the Feburary/March 2026 issue of Fortune with the headline “The AI data center boom pits rural America against Silicon Valley billions.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Tim and Lindsey Allen were preparing over 1,600 of them with names like “Divine Swine” (smoked pork), “Righteous Rooster” (braised chicken), and “Golden Calf” (brisket), for construction workers building Meta’s massive 2,250-acre, 4-million-square-foot AI data center, Hyperion. It’s a catering order that would have been unthinkable here just a year ago.

The Allens, parents of five, had long joked about starting a taco joint called Holy Tacos. (Tim is a church administrator and children’s pastor at the First Baptist Church in the small Richland Parish town of Rayville.) When Meta announced in December 2024 that it was investing in a $10 billion facility in Richland Parish, its largest data center to date, they saw a rare opening. Thousands of construction workers, they’d heard, would soon descend on the site—an unheard-of customer base for this otherwise rural, economically depressed community.

At first, the plan was to park a taco truck at the site. But when Allen learned that the vehicle he had invested in wouldn’t be allowed inside the construction zone, he rented a small vacant building in Rayville, pulled the truck inside, and turned it into a makeshift restaurant serving “food worth praising.”

The risk paid off. Workers coming off 12-hour shifts in safety gear began to stop by for quick, to-go meals. And as Meta’s construction ramped up, the Allens landed recurring catering work with Mortenson, one of the project’s three major contractors.

“Just this month, we picked up about 10 caterings,” Allen said. Without Meta, he added, the family likely wouldn’t have taken the leap. “It’s been a huge blessing for us.”

For Allen and many other local business owners, Meta’s arrival has brought new customers, contracts, and long-deferred opportunities in a parish that had been losing population and jobs for decades.

The outcome has been very different for Katie and Logan Stewart. The couple—a nurse and a former farmer in their mid-thirties with two children—invested more than $40,000 of their life savings into Opal’s Orange Food Truck after seeing construction workers post on Facebook asking for food options near the Meta site.

It was a high-stakes bet. Logan had recently stepped away from farming land near the project, and the food truck—serving burgers, chicken, gumbo, and rice and beans—seemed like a way to build a new livelihood without leaving the community.

“I think we were like the second or third truck out there,” Katie said. “When we first started, we were doing 100 to 120 orders a day.”

But the momentum didn’t last. When one of the project’s main contractors, DPR, brought in an out-of-state catering company to feed workers on-site, much of the foot traffic Opal’s had counted on disappeared. Workers no longer needed to leave the grounds for lunch.

“You talk about supporting the local community, but then you outsource the work,” Katie said of DPR’s catering decision. “It felt like a slap in the face.”

The Stewarts couldn’t afford the $1,500 to $2,500 monthly fees charged by two new food truck parks located right across the street from the main Meta entrances, so they parked their truck on a friend’s land a short drive away. Orders fell to fewer than 40 a day. In recent weeks, foot traffic picked up after a local independent journalist wrote about Opal’s, and the Stewarts recently landed a catering job with Meta. They say they’re determined to adapt. “We’re planning on sticking it out and adjusting where we need to,” Katie said.

Stories like those of the Allens and Logans are playing out across the country, as companies such as Meta, Google, and Amazon—alongside fast-growing AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic—embark upon an unprecedented AI data center spending spree. Collectively, they are projected to invest roughly $630 billion to $700 billion in 2026 alone, a 62% jump from 2025, with total AI-related data-center capital expenditures expected to reach $5.2 trillion by 2030, driven largely by GPUs and energy infrastructure. These mega-scale projects—built to power the AI boom and bolster the U.S. race with China for technological dominance—are helping to grow the U.S. economy, and are being welcomed with open arms by local officials eager for a piece of the economic development these projects promise. A rising tide, they reason, can lift many ships.

And indeed, there’s historical precedent for this optimism: The frenzied construction of massive AI data centers across the country echoes earlier American booms—from the California Gold Rush to the early oil fields of Texas—when fortunes were made by those in the right place at the right time, selling equipment, food, and shelter to the pioneers of new industries. In those eras, local economies thrived on demand for tools, timber, meals, and rooms for laborers chasing the next big thing.

Today, though, in an era of globalization and corporate consolidation, the “pick-and-shovel” ripple spreads very differently. Many of the materials, logistics, and meals for the site are supplied by out-of-state contractors from places like Texas and Arkansas. And the specialized chips and many components that power Hyperion’s AI servers are manufactured primarily overseas as part of the global semiconductor and IT hardware supply chain.

So for many Richland Parish residents, the experience is less one of opportunity than of spectatorship: watching the bustle of progress unfold nearby—and suffering through its accompanying headaches—without being able to participate or share in its rewards.

Camille Farrah Lenain for Fortune

Reached for comment, a spokesperson for Meta said it remains “committed to supporting local resources and prioritizing local partnerships whenever possible,” including working with local food vendors to supply more than 600 meals daily. But, they explained,  “Given the scale and size of the craft workforce currently at the site, our general contractors needed to find a catering solution that could meet the scale and logistics required to feed thousands of people.”

When Fortune visited the community, residents expressed a worry that the short-term influx of construction workers will reshape their community, raise rents and tear up the countryside, leaving it spoiled when the construction phase ends and the data centers are left to hum away, consuming water and electricity and employing only a few hundred workers. The dynamic is testing long-held assumptions about who actually benefits when a mega-project arrives in town.

Several residents told Fortune the speed at which the Meta deal was made, and its lack of transparency, left them feeling sidelined. Major decisions about land use, tax incentives, and infrastructure were largely finalized before most community members fully understood the project’s scale—which has also grown into a much larger build-out than originally planned. In October 2025, Meta announced it had entered a joint venture with funds managed by Blue Owl Capital to finance, build, and operate the Hyperion data center campus—an arrangement targeting up to $27 billion in total development costs and suggesting that Hyperion is intended as a long-term, multiphase campus.

Some described the process as emblematic of a long-standing “good ol’ boys” culture in local development—one in which deals are struck by a small circle of political and business leaders, who then benefit from the result.

“The small businesses who are profiting…it’s not a fair game where the best contractor with the best price and the best qualification wins,” said Amber Perez, the local independent journalist who is also a community activist and posts regularly on Facebook about the Meta project. Instead, she said many residents believe the “winners” are those who are politically and economically connected.

But supporters of the project, including local government officials, economic development leaders, and longtime residents, argue that the Meta investment represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity for a region that has struggled with poverty, job loss, and population decline for decades. In their view, the disruption is the visible price of long-overdue capital flowing into a part of the state that has rarely attracted projects of this magnitude. Even if the number of permanent jobs ultimately proves modest compared to the construction surge, they contend that the billions in investment, new infrastructure, workforce training programs, and heightened national attention could help reposition northeast Louisiana for future industry and growth.

Camille Farrah Lenain for Fortune

A mixed blessing

Driving east on Route 80 toward the Meta site in Holly Ridge, an unincorporated rural community about 15 minutes east of Rayville—the landscape is defined by flat expanses of soybean and cotton fields, punctuated by grain silos, grazing cows, and the occasional tractor.

At Holly Ridge, however, the terrain changes abruptly. Generations of sharecroppers farmed the land, called the Franklin Farms megasite, until 2006, when the Franklin family sold it to the state of Louisiana, which then hoped to attract an auto plant. That was not to be, but Meta entered a long-term lease for the site in 2024 and purchased it in 2025. Since the company broke ground in early 2025, the farmland has been scraped and leveled into a construction site so disorientingly vast, it resembles the early stages of a city rising from the dirt. At five miles long and 1 mile wide at some points, steel frames jut from the ground. Heavy machinery operates around the clock. An endless stream of trucks pours in before sunrise, feeding a project where thousands of workers move through the site in hardhats and neon vests. Residents complain about damage to their vehicles because of rocks kicked up by the trucks hurtling to and from the Meta site.

Something enormous and unfamiliar has landed, seemingly all at once.

A newly-built road leading into Meta’s Hyperion site carries a prescient name: Far Far Away Lane. The nod to Star Wars is intentional, and the landscape does seem like a new frontier—representing not just Meta’s stratospheric AI ambitions, but the financial, energy-hungry reality of building the infrastructure that underpins the AI boom.

Camille Farrah Lenain for Fortune

Before Meta came to town, the biggest claim to fame of Richland Parish, a community where a quarter of residents live under the poverty line, was arguably that country music artist Tim McGraw was born and raised there. Now, residents are living through a seismic shift that has brought new jobs and excitement to some, and stress and disappointment to others—as well as heavier traffic on rural roads, rising rents, and mounting pressure on housing, utilities, and daily routines in communities unaccustomed to rapid growth. Beyond those immediate disruptions, whether the short-term gains of massive construction translate into lasting opportunity remains an open question.

Meta says the project has already created hundreds of construction jobs and will support thousands more over the buildout, along with a much smaller number of permanent roles once the data center is operational—the original announcement said 500. The company has also partnered with a local community college to launch a construction and workforce-training program aimed at preparing residents for jobs tied to the site and future industrial development.

And indeed at Meta’s Hyperion site, as thousands of temporary workers have descended on Richland Parish, taking space in hotels, short-term rentals and newly-built RV parks, there are clear examples of individual businesses booming. GrowNELA, the regional economic development authority for northeast Louisiana, pointed Fortune to companies like ServiceMaster Action Cleaning, a Monroe-based facilities maintenance firm that has doubled its workforce since Meta arrived, and Copeland Electric, another Monroe company that says the project has driven a roughly 40% increase in hiring.

The arrival of the Meta project was a catalyst for Chris Holyfield, the owner of Holy Dippers, a company created specifically to serve the construction project. He supplies septic services and eco-friendly restroom facilities for Meta workers—58 units so far, with more to be added as construction ramps up.

Holyfield wanted to take advantage of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, after leaders from the construction companies working on the Meta project told Holyfield that “this area’s about to explode,” he said. “No one believed it at first,” he explained. “Now we’re all feeling the difference.”

Holyfield also owns three restaurants in Monroe that do catering work for Meta’s large contracting companies, as well as a seven-story office building in Monroe where Meta leased space before the data center announcement was made.

Rob Cleveland, president and CEO of GrowNELA, who arrived in Louisiana in July 2024 after eight years in a similar role in Michigan, dismissed complaints about the level of local job creation as “silly.” He emphasized that several thousand new jobs have already arrived in the rural Richland Parish community—both working on the Meta site and for businesses servicing the site. Jobs are jobs, he argues—and the pragmatic reality is there aren’t many options for a community like Richland Parish.

“Constant naysayers say they’re short-term jobs, that there will be only 500 long-term jobs, why aren’t you recruiting automotive plants with 3000 long-term jobs,” Cleveland said. “Well, those projects don’t really exist anymore, and we don’t have the labor to support those projects.” 

Where will they all live?

The influx of workers has created an immediate, practical problem in Richland Parish: housing. Currently, there are about 3,700 workers connected to the site, with an estimated peak in a couple of months of 5,000 (though locals say they have heard numbers as high as 8,000).

To accommodate the influx of construction workers, a patchwork of RV parks, or “man camps”—both large and small—has sprung up across the area. One of Meta’s three primary construction firms, DPR, hired subcontractor Mammoth Industries to build a sprawling, 130-acre workforce housing complex that includes more than 300 full-service RV sites near the Meta project.

And smaller, family-run RV parks are emerging as well. Kayla Caskey, the owner of South Stuart RV Park, about 25 minutes from the Meta site, grew up on the land where the park now sits. “We’ve had it for a couple of generations—it was passed down from my grandparents,” she said. “I got married and moved away, but my family still lives there—my mom and my brother—and we decided to take advantage of this opportunity.”

South Stuart RV Park has room for just 12 RVs, and Caskey said getting it up and running required navigating zoning rules and installing proper facilities, including showers and bathrooms. “We learned a lot along the way,” she said. “But we hope, in the end, this will be something good for our family.” The park filled quickly after opening, she added, and she continues to receive daily inquiries.

Caskey is realistic about the park’s future once construction winds down. “It may just be land out there again,” she said. “But hopefully, over the next couple of years, it’ll pay off while the workers are still here.”

But for others, the rapid spread of RV parks in the area has felt disruptive and overwhelming. For example, Fortune visited one mile-long dead-end road that until recently was lined with just eight homes. Now, two large RV parks—together expected to add up to 700 hookups—are under construction on the street, many directly next to or across the street from the few single-family homes.

Other area residents say they are being priced out of the area, or even facing attempted eviction, because of the influx of workers. Erika James, a 34-year-old mother of two who grew up in Richland Parish and now lives in a mobile home park in Monroe, a small regional hub about 30 minutes west of the Meta site, says her rent increased several times over the past six months. Earlier this month she received an eviction notice after paying her rent just one day late, saying her family had just five days to vacate.

Camille Farrah Lenain for Fortune

“I panicked and my husband immediately called the property owner and was told it had nothing to do with rent,” she said. “In fact, he said he didn’t even agree with the decision but it came from ‘above him’ because ‘they needed to make room for other tenants.’”

After agreeing to pay an “eviction fee,” James was able to stay, but she recently received a text saying no leases are being renewed — and hers runs out in April.

“Meanwhile, there is literally a sign outside welcoming Meta workers while local families are left wondering where they’re supposed to go,” she said. “We are now having to entertain the idea of leaving the area completely. There is nowhere to go if you can’t pay triple prices.”

“It breaks your heart to even think about having to leave here,” she said. “But it’s getting more expensive every day.”

The Meta project has promised transformation, explained Perez. But she added many residents of Richland Parish have little clarity about what that transformation will actually look like in the end.

“Transform, how?” she said. “That’s what people are on the edge of their seats trying to figure out, because right now you’re in the chaos phase where you don’t know which way to look, and when the dust settles, what’s left?”

Perez had heard that some people are “waiting it out” because they want to see if they can sell their property when it becomes more valuable. “Others just want the heck out because they want their quiet life back, and this is not what they signed up for,” she said. “And then there’s others who are just stuck.”

A rural Louisiana parish’s fervid campaign to bring Big Tech to its back roads

In Louisiana, the effort to court Meta for the Richland Parish site began early. According to reporting by the Times Picayune, Entergy Louisiana economic development executive Ed Jimenez and CEO Philip May hosted roughly half a dozen Meta executives at Entergy’s headquarters in New Orleans in early 2024, after May learned the company was searching for a Southern location to build a data center.

This is not unusual: Across the nation, consortia of state governments, utilities, and economic development groups are actively competing to attract tech companies to build AI data centers. For example, OpenAI said it and its partners reviewed more than 300 proposals from over 30 states before selecting five additional sites for its Stargate data center program, following the launch of its flagship facility in Abilene, Texas.

Over dinner, the Meta folks told Entergy that they would consider Louisiana but that the state would have to move fast to come up with a deal. Entergy executives worked with recently-elected Governor Jeff Landry to forge agreements with legislative leaders, cabinet secretaries and local government officials.

Meta ultimately secured significant tax incentives for the project, including a sales tax exemption on the billions of dollars it will spend on servers and equipment. But Meta emphasized that Richland Parish would also reap tax revenue and economic development.

Camille Farrah Lenain for Fortune

“Richland Parish receives both a portion of sales tax from our construction materials along with a PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes), based on jobs and capital investment,” a Meta spokesperson said.

These PILOT agreements—common in large data center deals—allow companies to pay a negotiated annual fee instead of full property taxes, with the amount tied to how much they invest and how many jobs they create. Public details of the Richland Parish agreement are limited, but a state contract reviewed by WIRED last year confirmed Meta’s payments and tax breaks are structured around hitting specific investment and hiring thresholds. The Meta spokesperson said the company has invested over $300 million to date in roads, water, and other local infrastructure.

While Louisiana also offers broad sales tax exemptions for data center equipment, local governments can still collect revenue from construction-related spending, because the state’s “sales and use tax” system applies taxes based on where materials are ultimately used. The result is a complex mix of long-term tax relief for the company paired with more limited, often temporary, revenue streams for the parish.

Meanwhile, the Hyperion project is already getting even bigger. Even as residents grapple with the disruption of the current buildout, Meta has quietly acquired roughly 1,400 additional acres adjacent to the existing 2,250-acre Hyperion site, according to people affiliated with companies working on or around the project, paving the way for a second phase of expansion. In reporting this story, Fortune observed active work underway on the newly acquired land.

A temporary boom is better than no boom at all

Some local leaders push back on residents’ complaints that the disruption outweighs the opportunity. GrowNELA’s Cleveland said complaints about traffic and housing are “completely valid and understandable,” adding that “it’s happening very quickly and it’s happening exponentially.” But he pointed out that the land used for the Meta site has been marketed as industrial for more than two decades and the state had long hoped for development to come. Those efforts coming to fruition is something to celebrate, not complain about, he argued: “We’ve hit the gold rush.”

Monroe Mayor Friday Ellis, who was elected to a second term in 2024 and sits on GrowNELA’s board, argues that the challenges now surfacing around housing, traffic, and infrastructure are not unique to the Meta project—but reflect the challenges of building on a “hyper” scale in a region that has long lacked investment.

Camille Farrah Lenain for Fortune

Ellis also says he understands why people are skeptical of the promises Meta and local politicians are making about the development bringing economic opportunity. He grew up in Richland Parish, and was raised by a single father who sharecropped on the land. He said skepticism toward the project is rooted in a history of broken promises.  “For years, they’ve been ignored,” he said. “They don’t believe this is a real opportunity.”

Still, Ellis is unapologetically bullish. He argues that large projects like Meta’s offer a rare chance to change the community’s trajectory. “This region has a lot of poverty, and poverty exists because there’s no opportunity,” he said. “Opportunity and education lift people out of poverty. Our job right now is to connect as many people as possible to opportunity.”

Ellis has described the region as a budding “Silicon Bayou,” and said increased attention—from investors, contractors, and state leaders—has already begun to unlock new economic activity. “What gives me hope,” he said, “is that more people are paying attention to this part of the world.”

The Silicon Bayou label may not be hyperbole for northern Louisiana. The entire northern part of the state is increasingly being marketed as an AI infrastructure hub. In addition to Meta’s Hyperion expansion, Amazon recently announced plans to invest $12 billion in northwest Louisiana to build data center campuses.

And GrowNELA’s Cleveland said that more tech investment is coming to Richland Parish: “We are actively working on a diverse mix of projects for Richland Parish and the entire region,” he said. “That mix includes data centers, manufacturing, warehouses and suppliers of the Meta and Amazon data centers.”

But Richland Parish resident Dewanna Sanders, who owns a small food business and lives about three miles from the Meta site, said she was saddened by the changes to the landscape when she leaves her home before sunrise.

“It’s lit up like New York City,” she said of the site, describing it as a “halo” she can see from her front steps.

Camille Farrah Lenain for Fortune

While Sanders acknowledges that the data center will likely be good for the area in the long run—and that both her business and her husband’s have benefited—she said she cried when it was announced.

“It’s not the country anymore,” she said. “Everything is going to change here. Nothing’s going to be the same again.”

Sanders said she has received several offers on her 600-acre property and initially thought she might want to leave. “But where are you going to go?” she said. “This is home.”

Even Tim Allen, whose Holy Tacos business has benefited greatly from the Meta project, acknowledges how overwhelming the scale of the construction has been for many in what was once a quiet farming community. “Now it’s lights and noise, day and night,” he says. Still, as a pastor and father, Allen sees the project as a chance for something the region has long lacked. “There was nothing here for our kids,” he said. “They were growing up and moving away.”The Meta site, he believes, offers an opportunity for families to stay—and for the community to adapt. “It’s not going anywhere,” he said. “So we’re trying to meet it with empathy, figure out how to help the people who are struggling, and ask how we can grow and benefit together.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

So it surprised many in this agricultural community of red barns and dirt roads that an enormous AI data center—at 21 million square feet, the largest construction project ever undertaken in the state and one almost universally opposed by local residents—seemed to race through the process from application in late summer to groundbreaking in November.

Even more surprising: The $16 billion data center for OpenAI and Oracle’s Stargate AI infrastructure initiative, which will fundamentally reshape the area with its construction, traffic, electricity demand, and environmental impact, was flat-out rejected by both the town’s board and its planning commission in September. But those votes turned out to be only minor bumps on the project’s path: The developer quickly sued, the town settled, and the construction vehicles rolled in.

The story of how the mega AI data campus became an unstoppable inevitability—over the vocal objection of residents who picketed the vote and posted “no data center” signs outside their homes—reveals a broader dynamic of the nationwide AI data center boom: Once projects of this scale are underway, local governments often have limited leverage to block them. They are constrained by zoning laws, financial risk, and the realities of negotiating with developers backed by deep-pocketed AI companies, with formidable legal teams and plenty of political clout.

These pressures are only intensifying as the AI boom moves from software into physical infrastructure, and demand for computing capacity grows exponentially. The Trump administration has aggressively accelerated US data center construction in its effort to beat China to AI dominance, with a July 2025 executive order streamlining permitting for projects over 100 megawatts or $500 million. Big Tech’s “hyperscalers” are projected to invest roughly $630 billion to $700 billion in 2026 in AI-related infrastructure and data-centers, and capital expenditures are expected to reach $5.2 trillion by 2030.

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Politicians from both sides of the aisle are embracing the build-out, trying to get a piece of the economic development it promises for the communities they represent—including Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who has been actively courting the hyperscalers building massive data centers since late 2024. At the end of October, Whitmer lauded the Saline Township project, saying the facility expected to create 2,500 union construction jobs, alongside 450 permanent jobs on-site and 1,500 more in the community.

Meanwhile, the rural communities that are increasingly being asked to absorb the environmental and economic tradeoffs of these airport-size projects landing in their midst are scrambling to find new avenues of resistance, legal and political.

“I feel like people don’t understand what’s coming,” one resident fighting Saline’s incoming data center in court told Fortune. Kathryn Haushalter, a 42-year-old former U.S. Marine and mother of five who lives in a 200-year-old farmhouse across from the data center site, noted that she has prior construction experience and her husband is in the trades. “We know what a big project this is, and what a nuisance it’s going to be, and what environmental impact it’s going to have on this area,” she said. “I’m just so nervous for everybody else that doesn’t realize.”

To Barry Lonik, a Michigan-based land preservation consultant with more than three decades of experience, the Saline Township data center project is fundamentally out of place. “No other industrial project had ever tried to come in here,” he said. “It’s all farmland.”

But that’s exactly what attracts large-scale data center projects, which require high-voltage transmission lines, as well as hundreds of contiguous acres—something rarely available in urban or industrial sites. Rural areas can offer both the space and access to utilities, Lonik said, and it’s those characteristics that make places like Saline vulnerable.

“It’s a small township—a handful of people on the board, trying to do their jobs,” he told Fortune. “And then they get hit with something like this.”

Why ‘no’ was not enough to stop the data center

Eight months ago, when Saline’s planning commission gathered in the 200-year-old white clapboard township hall to weigh arguments for and against the proposal from Related Digital to rezone 575 acres of farmland for the AI data center, the reasons for rejecting the plan looked straightforward: The land was zoned for agriculture, and much of it was considered prime farmland. The project would introduce industrial noise and environmental stress into a rural landscape and place new demands on emergency responders. It also conflicted with the township’s long-standing master plan, which envisioned development elsewhere.

And the residents the commission represented largely hated the idea of a data center, and let that be known with signs and impassioned pleas during the public comments. “If you polled everyone on the township board, they would have said the same thing: They didn’t want a data center there,” Fred Lucas, the township’s attorney, told Fortune. “We didn’t invite them, we didn’t encourage them.”

Jim West—UCG/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

The commission rejected the plan to rezone the farmland. The township board followed suit, voting 4–1 to deny it. But locals quickly discovered that amid the frenzied AI infrastructure gold rush, “no” does not always mean no.

Two days later, on Sept. 12, Saline Township was sued by Related Digital and the site’s landowners. Their lawsuit alleged “exclusionary zoning”—that the community had unreasonably barred a legitimate land use under Michigan law, and it hinged on the fact that Saline Township had no land zoned for industrial use, and that a data center qualified as a “necessary” use that could not be excluded altogether.

The lawsuit underscored the township’s limited leverage. Even if officials had fought it, their lawyers advised them, the project could likely have moved forward via other avenues, such as partnering with an institution like the nearby University of Michigan, which can build projects that are not subject to local zoning in the same way as private developments. Meanwhile, a prolonged legal battle against well-resourced developers risked significant costs for the township, without securing concessions.

Lucas, the town’s attorney, says the township board had little choice and did its best to be transparent. It was “between a rock and a hard place,” he said. “I’m not sure there were any good solutions.” Within weeks, the township had settled: It signed a court-approved agreement allowing the project to proceed, and construction began soon after.

In exchange, the township secured roughly $14 million in community benefits—a relatively small sum in the context of a multibillion-dollar project, but more than 10 times its roughly $1 million annual budget. It includes funding for farmland preservation, local projects, and fire departments; along with a series of environmental and operational limits: restrictions on water use, noise caps, preserved agricultural land, and limits on expansion.

Just seven weeks later OpenAI and Oracle would announce the site as part of their global Stargate initiative. And after several months of construction activity, with hundreds of trucks hauling dirt to and from the site, Related Digital said in April that it had secured financing for what is now a $16 billion mega AI data center campus.

Months before Saline saw the proposal, Michigan was courting the AI boom

It wasn’t just money that the Saline Township was up against; it was also months of planning and behind-the-scenes dealmaking, from Lansing to Silicon Valley, that made this massive facility in a quiet farming community all but a foregone conclusion.

Michigan, like other Midwestern states such as Indiana and Ohio, is emerging as a focal point of this AI data center boom, thanks to its combination of available land, access to fresh water, and existing power infrastructure. Developers have identified at least 16 potential data center sites across 10 counties in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula.

An OpenAI spokesperson told Fortune that Governor Whitmer’s office had reached out to the startup in February 2025, following the initial announcement of its Stargate initiative to build AI infrastructure, right after President Trump’s inauguration. She wanted to discuss opportunities for a Stargate site in Michigan.

“The governor’s team and other stakeholders involved in the project had a series of conversations with OpenAI, including a meeting in the spring between Governor Whitmer and [CEO] Sam Altman,” said the spokesperson, who noted the meeting was virtual and included representatives from Midwestern energy company DTE and Related Digital.

Whitmer’s office declined to comment on what was discussed at the meeting, and there is no evidence that Saline Township was specifically identified. But in the spring of 2025, a Related Digital spokesperson said the company evaluated four potential sites in Michigan with DTE and Detroit-based construction firm Walbridge—including the Saline Township location.

Saline was selected partly for its access to power, and existing transmission lines with the excess capacity to serve a data center, said the Related Digital spokesperson, adding that states like Michigan want to be able to attract these types of projects. “There was a clear national imperative to keep us competitive,” she said. “This is a project in support of American technology companies.”

Courtesy of Related Digital

A DTE Energy spokesperson confirmed that it was engaged with Related Digital in the spring of 2025 to help evaluate a site for its potential for connecting to the electrical system. The company will supply roughly 1.4 gigawatts of electricity to the Saline Township site—an amount of power comparable to that of a nuclear plant. (Now, regulators and consumer advocates are pushing back on special contracts between DTE Energy and data center developers, warning they could shift costs onto other ratepayers and strain the grid.)

By May of 2025, still months before the proposal made its way to Saline Township hall, Related Digital had made a deal to purchase the site from three local landowners, descendants of farmers who said they had no intention of farming again. In a letter to a local paper, the sellers said that if the site were not used for a data center, they might have sold it to a solar power operator or for large-scale housing, uses that didn’t require a zoning change. Alan Greene, an attorney who represented the landowners, attributed some of the resistance to the project to general anti-AI sentiment. (In addition, the data center builder purchased 475 acres in nearby Bridgewater Township—expected to remain undeveloped.)

Asked by Fortune about her involvement in negotiating the deal for a Stargate site in Michigan, Whitmer’s office released a statement asserting that she welcomes such projects, as long as they’re done in an environmentally responsible way. “Governor Whitmer has worked very hard to attract new high-tech companies to Michigan in an effort to create good-paying jobs and diversify our economy,” the statement said. “Whether it’s a semiconductor chip fab, AI, or the auto industry, we want to bring jobs and supply chains back home from overseas. At the same time, we also want to make sure that Michigan is only welcoming companies that are going to be good neighbors.”

Residents say the township caved. Officials say they had little choice

The speed of the project’s approval—and the township’s seeming inability to stop it—left residents shocked and angry. Some locals who oppose the project argue that township officials did not do enough to fight it, that they caved too easily. That frustration has now turned into political action: One resident, E. Frederick Gall, has launched a recall effort targeting three members of the township board, including Kelly Marion, the lone official who voted in favor of the proposal. “My issue is that I don’t think they fought hard enough for us,” Gall said in local reporting. “We need someone different.”

David Landry, the attorney who represented Saline Township in the Related Digital lawsuit, told Fortune that he stands by his recommendation that the board settle with the developer. “The zoning power of any municipality—a township, a city, a village—is not absolute,” he explained. “In this case, exclusionary zoning was substantive—the municipality has to have a reason to say no. They just can’t say, ‘We don’t want it.’”

Sarah Mills, a professor at the University of Michigan who studies land use planning, agreed that the town had few good options once the lawsuit was filed. “States determine how much authority local governments have in zoning, and those systems vary widely,” she said. “What local governments can do through zoning is highly controlled and regulated by the state.” Local governments are also often strapped for cash, making it difficult to defend against zoning challenges, she added.

Marion, the township clerk and sole board member who voted in favor of the proposal, said this reality was on her mind when she voted yes. It wasn’t because she favored a data center, she said, but because she did not believe the town could win in a showdown with Related Digital. “They were doing studies,” she said. “They were pulling permits.” Township attorneys and consultants had warned that a denial could trigger a lawsuit—an outcome Marion said felt intimidating. “Everything was drafted and filed with the county within two days of the meeting,” she said of the lawsuit. “They had this all prepared.”

If the township had continued to fight and lost the lawsuit, Marion said, homeowners could have been on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars in tax assessments to pay for the legal battle. “The insurance company was only going to pay for an attorney to defend us up to so much money if we decided to fight it,” she said.

For some residents who oppose the project, the sense of being outmatched extends beyond the township hall or the courtroom. They point to the scale of the companies and powerful people involved—and their perceived connections—as further evidence of the imbalance.

Related Digital’s parent, Related Companies, for example, was founded by billionaire Stephen Ross, an alumnus and major donor to the University of Michigan, whose business school bears his name. And a vice president at Related, Ryan Friedrichs, is married to Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who is running for governor. (Friedrichs said recently he would recuse himself from any projects before the state if Benson is elected governor in 2026.)

Across the road from the bulldozers, one mother keeps fighting

Not everyone in Saline Township accepts that the data center is inevitable. Haushalter, the former U.S. Marine and mother of five, and her husband bought their 60-acre property and renovated the farmhouse on it after she returned from Afghanistan in 2012. She plants about 150 native trees on her property each year, part of an effort to preserve the land for her children, ranging in age from 5 to 13. Now, she’s not sure how long she’ll want to stay. She says she can see the bright lights of the construction site from her bedroom window before sunrise and hear backup alarms from trucks throughout the day.

In December, Haushalter took the unusual step of trying to insert herself into the lawsuit against Saline Township—as a defendant alongside the municipality that had already settled the case. Because she lived close enough to the site to have standing, she sought to challenge the settlement that allowed the data center to move forward. She argued that township officials approved the agreement without doing so properly in a public meeting, as required under Michigan law, and that as a nearby landowner, she should have had an opportunity to weigh in.

“Maybe I’m just stubborn,” she explained. “Maybe it’s because I was a Marine. But this is wrong—and the way it was done is wrong.”

Sharon Goldman

Separately, Haushalter and several other residents filed an appeal with the township’s zoning board, arguing that permits had been issued improperly because the land remains zoned for agriculture. Under Michigan law, such an appeal can trigger an automatic stay on construction until the board makes a final decision. Haushalter said that despite this, residents have not been given a hearing before the zoning board, and construction has continued. Her lawyer, Robert Dube, said Saline Township is trying to get the case dismissed.  (Lucas, the township’s lawyer, confirmed this, saying that the Saline Township has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.)

Related Digital has been “moving dirt” in Saline Township since November, said Joshua LeBaron, another resident involved in the group opposing the project. “I think the plan was to move as fast as possible—so by the time anyone challenged it, they could say it was too far along to stop.”

And indeed, in February a Washtenaw County judge rejected Haushalter’s motion, citing its late timing and the difficulty of undoing a deal already in motion. The judge also pointed to video showing the vote occurred in an open meeting, despite conflicting meeting minutes. A request for reconsideration was denied, and Haushalter is now planning an appeal.

“I feel like I’m playing by a different rule book,” Haushalter said. “Like I’m playing baseball and they’re playing football.”

Haushalter’s dispute centers in part on process. Under Michigan law, rezoning land for industrial use can trigger a public referendum, giving residents a chance to challenge the decision at the ballot box. In this case, critics argue, the township approved the project through a court settlement without formally changing the zoning—effectively sidestepping that part of the process.

During a recent visit by Fortune, Haushalter trudged through her muddy post-rain fields in high rubber boots. Water is one of her biggest concerns, she said: Covering hundreds of acres with buildings and pavement changes how water moves through the land. Rain that once filtered into soil could instead run off into surrounding areas, increasing the risk of flooding and putting pressure on nearby waterways.

And in an area where she and others rely on private wells, with no municipal water system, residents worry that a data center drawing large amounts of groundwater could affect supply over time. Groundwater contamination is another worry that keeps her up at night: “I don’t feel like there’s going to be any warning label,” she said. “If something gets into the water, you’re not going to know. It’ll just be a surprise.”

Then there’s the question of energy use: As well as the concern that a facility using as much electricity as a small city will drive up residents’ utility bills, she pointed out that data centers require a constant power supply, and when outages occur—and they often do in a rural area like Saline Township—backup systems often rely on diesel generators that can run continuously.

“If the power goes out, they don’t just shut it down,” Haushalter said. “They bring in generators and run them around the clock. My kids are going to be outside breathing that.”

As three of her children bounced on a nearby trampoline, Haushalter looked across the fallow winter cornfields that she leases out. Trucks hauling dirt and bulldozers and backhoes tearing into the earth were visible across the two-lane road that separates her from the data center site.

She has considered leaving, she said—selling the property and moving somewhere where her family won’t be living in the shadow of a gigantic tech facility. “It would have been the easiest thing for me to sell my farm and go somewhere so it doesn’t affect me,” she said. “But would that really benefit my neighbor down the road—the farmer who’s been here for 100 years?”

The companies behind the project say fears about water, noise, and costs are overblown

A spokesperson for Related Digital disputed some characterizations of the Saline Township project, saying there has been “misinformation” about its impact—particularly around water use, cooling systems, and noise—and noted that the project has drawn support from some nearby residents and local organizations. (Residents retorted that the few supporters are mostly related to the sellers or benefiting financially in some way.)

The spokesperson particularly pushed back on concerns about the project’s water use, saying the facility would rely on a closed-loop cooling system that does not consume large amounts of water. Instead, she said, ongoing water use would be limited to levels comparable to a standard office building. The system would not use evaporative cooling or discharge wastewater through so-called blowdown, she added, and she said the project includes stormwater management improvements designed to better control runoff than current conditions. On a website referring to the Saline Township data center project as “the Barn”—after a classic red barn on the property—Related Digital also says that the project will pay fully for its energy usage, “with no costs passed on to Michigan families.”

When reached for comment, an Oracle spokesperson said the company “is committed to being a responsible partner to Saline Township,” and made similar points about its limited water consumption, as well as pointing out that approximately two-thirds of the 1,000-acre campus will be preserved “for open space, farmland, wetlands, and natural woods.”

With the project underway, residents turn to farmland preservation

Since the Saline project broke ground, county officials in Michigan have begun to respond to area pushback against AI data centers: In Washtenaw County, where Saline Township is located, leaders are calling for more time before additional projects move forward, citing unanswered questions about land use, water, traffic, and long-term community impact. This month, the county’s Board of Commissioners approved a resolution supporting local municipalities considering temporary moratoriums on new data center development.

In Saline Township, that ship has already sailed. At a local council meeting in March that Fortune attended, Haushalter, her husband, and their five children filed into Saline Township Hall, joining a packed room of residents who had spent months protesting the project.

There was a palpable feeling of defeat. Officials offered only brief updates. The project, they said, was moving forward. Questions from the audience focused less on whether the project could be stopped and more on what it would mean in the short term: the steady stream of trucks, the noise, the dust, the strain on local roads.

Outside the meeting, those impacts were already visible. Heavy trucks full of gravel rattled through downtown Saline—the neighboring city distinct from the more rural Saline Township where the project is sited—prompting complaints about speeding, debris, and damage to newly repaved streets. (Related Digital says it has taken steps to address those concerns with traffic regulations and rules for its vehicles. The company also said it briefly paused work to address complaints about mud and debris, adding additional street cleaning and truck washing measures.)

But residents were at the meeting in part because there’s still more land to protect—especially given that data center projects across the nation have tended to balloon in size after they get a foothold. That evening’s guest speaker was Lonik, the land preservation consultant, who had been invited to talk about one of the few tools residents still have: conservation easements. Lonik has helped protect thousands of acres by placing legal restrictions on development—an approach some in Saline Township now see as a way to guard against future data center projects.

Over breakfast the next day at a nearby diner, Lonik said that if enough landowners acted together, they could still draw a line—placing restrictions on their property to prevent future industrial development and preserve what remained of the township’s farmland. “They’re not just NIMBYs,” he told Fortune. “This is a community that regularly updates its master plan and zoning and decides what it wants to be. And then something like this comes in and just blows everything out of the water.” As for concerns about environmental pollution, plus water and electricity use, Lonik said, “there’s a lot we still don’t know. But people are right to be asking these questions.”

The Saline project has brought at least one positive outcome. The settlement includes roughly $4 million for farmland preservation—a sum that may seem tiny given the project’s scale, but could help protect open land: some 1,000 acres via preservation agreements such as conservation easements, that might otherwise be lost.

“It’s ironic—[the money] is only there because the data center came in,” said Lonik, who pointed out that until now the township had not moved to preserve its farmland in this way. Still, he admitted that even preservation efforts like conservation easements, while they offer additional hurdles for developers, can’t guarantee more industry won’t come Saline Township’s way. Zoning rules, he said, are temporary, and can be changed by new administrations.

The next AI data center fight

Saline will almost certainly not be the last Michigan AI data center. Across southeast Michigan, similar projects are already in motion: Anthropic is the intended end user of a proposed hyperscale data center in Lyon Township, an hour northeast of Saline Township, while Google is considering a one-gigawatt campus in Van Buren Township, near the Detroit airport.

Resident Joshua LeBaron said that he and the rest of the opposition group know that their options to fight data centers have become very limited. “An AI stock market crash is probably the only thing that could stop it now—which is not out of the realm of possibility,” he said.

For Haushalter, that possibility is cold comfort as she watches the development rise and continues to appeal her case. She wishes more people were paying attention.

“It’s a very complicated situation and a lot to take in,” she said. “I’ve had to learn more about ordinances and state law and zoning than I ever thought I would want to. But now I realize how important these nitty-gritty, seemingly boring things really are. They can upend your whole community.”

This article is part of the May 6 2026, Special Digital Issue of  Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

By July of 2025, Asymmetric’s liquid fund had lost significant value, leading McCann to funnel investors into a new venture that failed to pan out. Then, in April, reports emerged that McCann’s fiancée, the influencer Ashly Robinson, had died while on vacation with McCann at a luxury resort in Tanzania. Robinson’s death was initially attributed to suicide, but the police reportedly seized McCann’s passport and questioned him as part of an investigation.

In June, Tanzanian police announced that they determined that Robinson had hung herself in her hotel room, according to a Facebook post from the agency. “I miss Ashly every moment of every day and the pain of being without her will never go away,” said McCann on X after Tanzanian authorities released their statement. “A sudden loss of this magnitude is not something I can simply get over.”

McCann and a young influencer

Robinson, who goes by Ashlee Jenae online, took up with McCann in November 2024, one of her Instagram posts suggests. At that time, McCann’s crypto firm was at the zenith of its success. McCann, who did not return multiple text messages seeking comment, had previously been married in 2018 to Shea Jackson, a woman 10 years his junior who worked in marketing. The pair eventually split, and two founders who took venture investments from Asymmetric’s venture fund told Fortune that some of McCann’s stake had been transferred to Jackson. Jackson did not return a request for comment. McCann also has a daughter, according to his X posts.

McCann began bringing Robinson, who was 15 years his junior, to crypto events, and she began posting images of him on her social media accounts. Robinson’s online profiles show her and McCann jetsetting among exotic locations as Robinson embraced the “soft life,” a self-care focused social media trend. “Chapter 31 and I’m exactly where i need to be,” read her final Instagram post, which showed her feeding a giraffe in Tanzania. Two days earlier, the 30-year-old had posted a video of McCann, 45, proposing to her as a lion stalked forward in the foreground. 

According to a report from local police, the pair checked into the luxury Zuri Zanzibar hotel on April 6 but, following a disagreement, hotel staff reportedly moved McCann to a room separate from Robinson’s. On April 8, Robinson was found unconscious in her room by a room service attendant and rushed to the hospital. Tanzanian police initially attributed her death to suicide, and in June, confirmed their findings.

McCann, who has not been formally accused of wrongdoing, had his passport withheld by local authorities and was questioned by police, according to the police report. Robinson’s family called her death suspicious in a statement. The family hasn’t updated its Instagram after Tanzanian police cleared McCann in June and didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

A crack-up at McCann’s crypto firm

Joe McCann made a career out of doing things his way.

Born in 1980, McCann attended Portland State University, where he studied philosophy, particularly enjoying Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. He spent the first decade-plus of his career in tech and finance, eventually becoming CEO of a software company that was acquired in 2019. After a stint at Microsoft, McCann became a CEO once again after launching a crypto fund—telling himself he would do things “a little bit different this time,” according to a 2024 podcast interview.

McCann liked to portray Asymmetric, which had both a venture and a liquid arm, as financially responsible but culturally hip. “I was a DJ and threw raves and had a couple record labels and my brother and I had a clothing line together … I was the CTO at one of the top ad agencies in New York City” before founding Asymmetric, McCann said on the podcast, calling his exposure to the “creative side of humanity” an edge in crypto investing. 

In interviews, McCann boasted of notching huge returns on a flash-in-the-pan memecoin called BONK. He boosted his cultural cred by hanging out with the rapper Iggy Azalea and cheerleading that artist’s ill-fated crypto project. He briefly advertised an Asymmetric-themed merch line, with an expensive looking promotional video to boot.

For a while, all of this translated to healthy returns. In 2024, the value of Asymmetric’s liquid book swelled from roughly $195 million to $395 million, a person familiar with the firm’s finances told Fortune. Asymmetric’s numbers still lagged Bitcoin’s 121% return that year, however.

Despite the outsize returns, there was discontent inside Asymmetric. Founding member and key trader Chris Cecere quit the firm despite Asymmetric’s blowout returns in 2024, according to a person who spoke with Cecere. Cecere did not return a request for comment.

As Asymmetric began to struggle in 2025, McCann latched onto a crypto fad known as digital asset treasury companies, popularized by Michael Saylor’s Strategy, formerly Microstrategy. In a July note, he informed investors that “shifting market dynamics” meant Asymmetric would drop its active trading strategy and plow its remaining resources into building a treasury of the cryptocurrency Solana.

Investors were invited to an information session for the company on July 22 but, the same day, an unhappy limited partner posted the firm’s nearly 80% year-to-date loss on X. Soon after, the Solana scheme was scrapped. One former Asymmetric investor told Fortune that as the liquid fund wound down, the return they received from the fund was less than the principal they had invested. Today, Asymmetric’s website lists two venture funds and a special purpose vehicle for Circle equity. The “Team” page on Asymmetric’s website has been taken down, and an Asymmetric general partner did not return a request for comment.

Even as Asymmetric floundered, McCann remained active in the crypto world, often posting several times a day to his more than 100,000 X followers. In March of this year, the crypto firm MG Stover acquired Asymmetric Information, a crypto analytics firm founded by McCann.

But following his catastrophic trip to Tanzania, McCann’s problems run much deeper than his crypto fortunes. In a podcast appearance right in the middle of Joe McCann’s banner 2024, the Asymmetric chief made the case for one key risk all traders need to manage: the risk of losing everything.

“Seeking asymmetry—like, asymmetric upside, limited to no downside—should be coupled with avoiding the risk of ruin,” McCann said.

Update, June 12, 2026: Clarified that, in June, almost two months after the publication of this article, Tanzanian authorities concluded Robinson died by suicide after further investigation from the police.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com