What is a data center — and what does a gigawatt mean?
The filings shaping Michigan's landscape are written in megawatts, servers, and racks — a language almost no one speaks. Start here: what these buildings actually are, and what those power numbers translate to in homes, hospitals, and the whole state grid.
What is a data center, really?
Strip away the jargon and it's simple: a data center is a warehouse full of computers that run for other people. Here's the plain-language version of the words you'll see in every filing.
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What one of these buildings actually holds
Servers run 24 hours a day, every day — they never sleep, never dim. And every watt of computing turns into heat, so for roughly every 2 watts of servers you need about 1 more watt just to cool them.
A traditional server rack drew ~5–10 kW. Racks built for AI training draw 40–120 kW each — up to 10× denser. That is why campuses that used to ask for tens of megawatts now ask for hundreds or thousands.
From a light bulb to a data campus
Power draw spans an enormous range, so this chart uses a logarithmic scale — each gridline to the right is ten times the one before it. That's the only way a light bulb and a data campus fit on the same page.
One campus could power a city
At 1,400 MW, the single largest disclosed project draws about as much electricity as roughly 1.1 million Michigan homes — running around the clock, every day.
The disclosed pipeline vs. Michigan's summer peak
The 2.9 GW that developers have disclosed equals about 16% of the entire state's peak demand — and that's only the 6 of 20 tracked projects that have named a number.
Where Michigan's electricity comes from
A snapshot of what's on the grid right now — and how much Michigan has to import from its neighbors. New data-center load lands on top of everything below.
All conversions are rounded for readability. Where a figure is illustrative rather than measured, it is labeled as such and paired with a link to the primary live source. Corrections: tips@michigandatacentertracker.com.
