Michigan township combats nuclear weapons data center by passing ban on new electrical infrastructure — 220,000-square-foot hyperscale project is backed by University of Michigan and the Los Alamos National Laboratory
Many towns, counties, and states have been passing data center moratoriums to delay these projects so that they could study their impact and create mitigations before this infrastructure even before they get off the ground. However, Ypsilanti, Michigan, is taking a different approach to this issue. Instead of putting a moratorium on data centers, the township put a temporary ban on the underlying electrical infrastructure needed to run them. According to 404 Media, the six-month delay is intended for studying the potential effects that the proposed electrical substation needed to power the project will have on noise pollution and existing customers.
“We need to make sure it’s in the right location from a planning standpoint, and we need to make sure that we have ordinances in place that require DTE or any electrical company to go through a process,” Ypsilanti Township Supervisor Brenda Stumbo said in a statement. The township will determine “the nature and scale of electrical infrastructure necessary to serve new high-energy-demand land uses […] including infrastructure associated, but not limited to hyper-scale data centers, mid-sized data centers, artificial intelligence computing facilities, and high-performance computational centers, industrial facilities, and other intensive electrical users” during the six-month period.
This move is related to the University of Michigan’s announcement that it will build a 220,000 square-foot hyperscale data center on a 144-acre plot of land on Textile Road. The data center, which costs $1.25 billion, is part of the University of Michigan and Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) work on nuclear weapons. The University said in its press release that the development “will give scientists the computing power needed to solve the world’s most complex challenges” and that it’s “not a military instillation or weapons production facility.” It also added, “No hazardous nuclear materials will be stored or used on-site, no weapons production will occur at the site, and the facility will not conduct real-time defense operations.” However, that isn’t the primary concern of many of Ypsilanti’s residents. Instead, it’s the fact that many other data center projects have caused grief to the communities that they are in.
The electricity moratorium isn’t the first one that the township took to delay the data center project. In April of this year, Ypsilanti voted yes to another moratorium — a one-year temporary ban on delivering water to hyperscale data centers as it studies the impact of the massive water demands, which was estimated to be at 500,000 gallons per day.
It’s unclear what will happen after the moratoriums that Ypsilanti set expire, but even after the first temporary ban was set, the University of Michigan still went forward with its groundbreaking. The institution also threatened to sue the township, calling its action to delay its data center project “discriminatory.” Aside from that, the federal government has historically supported data center projects that it deems crucial for its projects, like when the Department of Justice asked the court to dismiss the NAACP lawsuit against xAI’s use of unpermitted gas turbines at its Colossus data centers.
