U of M data center event fails the transparency test, residents say

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The University of Michigan held an open house in Ypsilanti Township on Thursday night to share information about the planned $1.2 million data center project the university is developing with Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Township officials are seeking to move the two-facility project from a site on the south bank of the Huron River to a location at the American Center for Mobility, just east of the township’s West Willow neighborhood.

Supervisor Brenda Stumbo told Planet Detroit on Thursday that township officials continue to be shut out of negotiations over the ACM site.

“The tone and total disregard and disrespect that is given from the University of Michigan people that we have dealt with is beyond words,” Stumbo said.

U of M spokesperson Kay Jarvis previously told Planet Detroit that, following standard business practice, only the parties involved in potential real estate transactions are included in discussions, but that university representatives have kept Ypsilanti Township officials apprised of project details.

As a public university, U of M is not subject to the same local zoning approval process as other data center developers and will not pay local taxes.

Stumbo said residents and officials had been asking for a town hall for months. She said Thursday night’s open house, with poster boards and representatives from U of M, DTE Energy, and Los Alamos speaking individually with attendees, was not the kind of transparent, on-the-record event that they wanted.

Several attendees said Thursday night’s event felt more like a sales pitch than a public forum, with one-on-one conversations replacing the open discussion many residents had been requesting. They said the format limited their ability to hear questions from other residents and developers’ responses.

Attendees also raised concerns about the data center project’s impact on power bills, air and water quality, and the township’s natural areas.

In an online statement, the university said the project, which it calls a “high-performance computing facility,” will create 200 jobs and support public projects in medicine, climate science, energy, and national security. 

Ypsilanti Township residents say the project brings risk, no reward

Several Ypsilanti Township residents said the proposed data centers could create significant local impacts without delivering clear benefits to the community.

“I think there’s a lot of benefits for the University of Michigan and none for Ypsilanti Township,” said Collette Keyser, who questioned whether the project would create meaningful employment opportunities for township residents.

Township resident Pat Steffes said they are concerned that the two facilities’ power demands could lead to blackouts and brownouts, and that their water use could affect the Great Lakes watershed. Steffes said the project should be evaluated in the context of multiple data centers proposed across Michigan and the Great Lakes region.

Data centers’ large energy demands have raised concerns that costs could be passed on to other electric ratepayers and undermine the state’s climate goals. Increased demand could also trigger an “off-ramp” provision in Michigan’s climate law, allowing fossil fuel generation to remain online in the event of a capacity shortfall.

Michigan’s data center use tax incentive exemption includes ratepayer protection provisions intended to prevent electricity costs from being shifted onto other customers, but those safeguards do not apply in this case because the University of Michigan is a public institution and generally does not pay use taxes.

Steven Ceccio, a U of M professor of engineering and lead on the project, said the facilities’ maximum energy use would be 110 megawatts, phased in over 5 to 10 years – roughly equivalent to the power used by 80,000 homes. This is much smaller than projects like the 1.4-gigawatt data center planned for Saline Township.

Ceccio said biofuel-powered backup generators would provide 20% of the facility’s energy needs during shutdowns caused by power outages. He also said the project could use up to 500,000 gallons of water per day, supplied by the Ypsilanti Community Utilities Authority.

Chris Kolb, U of M vice president for government relations, said the university was still considering the Huron River and American Center for Mobility sites and expected to decide on the location in the coming weeks.

Concerns over the Los Alamos connection

When asked whether Los Alamos’ work with the Department of Homeland Security could affect community support, Kolb said the project would be operating under a different federal administration by the time it becomes operational.

A Los Alamos representative was unable to answer questions about its involvement with DHS during Thursday night’s meeting, and a webpage detailing that work has since been removed.

However, an archived version of the page from 2025 states that the lab works with federal agencies, including DHS, to “provide technical solutions for prediction and prevention of catastrophic threats” and to “improve national security.”

Los Alamos did not respond to an email requesting information on its work with DHS.

The concerns come amid heightened local tensions following reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained four people in Ypsilanti earlier this week.

Meanwhile, a petition signed by over 800 U of M employees, faculty, and students urges the university to cancel the project, citing Los Alamos’ nuclear weapons work.

Eighty-four percent of the lab’s 2026 budget request is for nuclear weapons work, according to the nonprofit Nuclear Watch New Mexico.

Not everyone at Thursday night’s meeting was opposed to the project. York Township resident Norm Fischer said he believes the project would provide some tangible benefits through original research.

“I’m far more concerned about the data centers that are profit-oriented and are sucking just an incredible amount of energy for purposes that are not quite as clear or tangible to me, ” he said, referring to Oracle and OpenAI’s Saline Township project.

Still, Steffes said widespread opposition to the project remains unanswered.

“My main concern at this point is that the community doesn’t want it and the university doesn’t seem to care at all about that,” they said.

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