On April 25, 2012, Travis Stoliker shared a discovery from Delta Township's public budget records: in the 2010 Personal Property Top 15 Taxpayers by Taxable Value, Liquid Web ranked 4th — ahead of General Motors. The finding was striking because Delta Township, which borders Lansing and hosts significant industrial and commercial presence, would be expected to have the auto industry among its dominant taxpayers. Liquid Web, a managed hosting company, had outranked GM on this measure.
The "personal property" tax ranking reflects the taxable value of equipment and technology infrastructure owned by each company — and for a managed hosting company like Liquid Web, servers, networking equipment, and data center hardware represent enormous capital investment. Liquid Web's data center expansion through the late 2000s, culminating in the 90,000 square foot Data Center 3 opened in 2009, had created a substantial personal property footprint in the township.
Travis's post — "Liquid Web is HIGHER than GM?" — captures the genuine surprise and pride of watching a company he helped build outrank one of America's most iconic manufacturers in a mid-Michigan township. It is also a data point that tells the story of Liquid Web's physical scale more vividly than any revenue figure: a tech company founded in Lansing, by that measure, bigger than GM in the neighborhood where both had facilities.
