Why I Built This Site — and What I’ll Be Asking on Thursday

There’s a lot going on in this township right now. Facebook groups, group texts, email chains, town halls, records requests, legislation moving in Lansing. A lot of people doing a lot of work in a lot of different places.

I built this site to put it in one place, so people could do their own reading and reach their own conclusions instead of taking anyone’s word for it — mine included.

I’ve tried to be fair about it. When information doesn’t come out, people fill the gap, and some of what our community has said about this project isn’t accurate. I’ve called those out. The University and Los Alamos haven’t been forthcoming either, and they’re running a real communications effort to shape how this gets understood. I’ve called that out too.

There’s a town hall on Thursday. Here’s where I’ve landed.

Ninety percent of this isn’t theirs

Ask the University what this facility is for and you’ll hear about cancer research, dementia, space weather. Things that pull at you. It sounds like this whole building is going to help cure the ills of our time.

What doesn’t come up is that about 90% of it won’t belong to them. It belongs to Los Alamos National Laboratory.

That’s not my estimate. The University told the State of Michigan: 100 megawatts of capacity for Los Alamos, and a separate 10-megawatt academic center for the University’s non-classified research.¹ Their own FAQ describes a 240,000 square foot federal building against a 50,000 square foot academic one.² And when a resident asked about the split at the September town hall, the project leader confirmed it out loud — roughly 90/10.³

Los Alamos does a lot of things. Its director describes the lab as first and foremost a national security laboratory, founded during the Manhattan Project, and says its work spans energy, materials, climate, infrastructure and medicine.⁴ I take him at his word on all of that. But national security is the primary mission, and 90% of this building is theirs.

In March 2023 the University and Los Alamos signed a non-disclosure agreement. The purpose written into it: a high performance computing facility and an office building in support of the Advanced Simulation & Computing Program and Weapons Physics Directorate.⁵

That’s what it was for, from the beginning. Twenty months later, according to Supervisor Stumbo, who was in the meeting, the project was described to township officials as twenty acres, two office buildings, and two hundred jobs on site at $200,000 a year, doing medical research.³

It’s a data center

The University calls it a high-performance computing center. That’s not wrong, but it’s a careful choice of words — it describes the equipment inside rather than the building itself, and it puts distance between this and the thing everybody’s worried about.

Federal law settles it. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, now at 42 U.S.C. § 17112, defines a data center as any facility that primarily contains electronic equipment used to process, store, and transmit digital information.⁶

This is a data center.

You’ll also hear that it’ll use a tenth of the power of a hyperscale facility. Again — not inaccurate, and again, carefully chosen. Compared to the largest AI campuses being built right now, sure, this is smaller. But that’s a selective comparison. Measured against the bulk of data centers built in this country to date, this one is at the top end.

These facilities get measured in megawatts. This one is around 100 at full operation. To put that in terms that mean something here: 100 megawatts running continuously is roughly the electricity used by 80,000 homes.⁷ Ypsilanti Township has about 23,500 households.⁸

One facility. More than three times the electricity of the entire township.

What it’s like to live next to one

That’s the rub, and I want to be careful here because the easy version of this argument is wrong.

These buildings shouldn’t go up this close to homes. But they increasingly do. Virginia’s own legislative audit found nearly a third of that state’s data centers sit within 200 feet of residentially zoned land, and those communities are living with it right now.⁹

So we’re not an outlier. We’re next in a pattern.

What’s here is a school less than a mile away, housing across the road, and a watershed on the property. What’s coming is a fully industrial building — heat, continuous mechanical noise, backup generators that have to be tested, and a dedicated substation and switchyard on the site. That last part tells you the scale as clearly as any number they’ve given us.

What actually worries me

The unknown.

We’ve been asking for details for more than a year and haven’t got them. We’re being asked to trust them without much reason to. We know a little about what’s going on the twenty-acre piece, and even that has changed considerably in two years.

What about the rest? The University holds roughly 118 more acres next to it.¹⁰ They say they intend to keep most of it natural. That’s not in writing. It isn’t a deed restriction or a conservation easement. It isn’t enforceable by anyone, and they’re already exempt from our zoning.

So what happens in a few years when they want to expand? What else goes on that land, with this township having no say?

What I’d tell another community

Fight for what you know is right. The laws that let these things go up this fast get justified with economic incentives and promises of growth and jobs that often don’t materialize. If one is coming to your area, ask the hard questions — and when they promise you economic benefit, make them put it in writing, and make it enforceable.

And this is the hard part. This is genuinely painful for people living where these get built. But emotional appeals don’t move institutions. Accountability does. File the records requests. Call your representatives. Show up.

A lot of us working on this know the legislation we’re pushing may not change what happens here. It might change what happens to the next township.

To the University

We asked why here. The answer was that the site has everything the project needs — that it’s the best suited location.

What it doesn’t have is the support of the people who live here. Doesn’t that count for anything?

If you’re living the values you publish, you wouldn’t be doing it this way. You wouldn’t be working behind seven confidentiality agreements on a publicly funded project.¹¹

You’d put the community benefits in writing.
You’d put the preservation of the remaining land in writing.
You’d put the commitment not to draw from the Huron River in writing.

None of it is. None of it is enforceable. They’re promises from an institution that has lost this community’s trust.

Be responsible to Ypsilanti Township instead of taking advantage of it.

We can have data center growth and be responsible to the communities that host them. It is not a binary choice.

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The town hall is Thursday, October 1. If you go, ask one question and ask for a number. The full documentary record is on the timeline.

Sources

1. MEDC memorandum to the Michigan Strategic Fund Board, December 10, 2024. Board packet (PDF)
2. University of Michigan Office of the Vice President for Research, LANL FAQ. research.umich.edu
3. Public recording of the September 9, 2026 town hall. youtube.com · my account, with timestamps
4. Thom Mason, Director, Los Alamos National Laboratory, letter to the Ypsilanti Township community, September 2026. The University Record
5. Non-disclosure agreement RSNDA-23-0076, March 2023 (PDF)
6. Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, § 453(a)(1), codified at 42 U.S.C. § 17112(a)(1). uscode.house.gov
7. Calculated from U.S. Energy Information Administration average annual household electricity consumption. eia.gov
8. U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts, Ypsilanti charter township, Washtenaw County, Michigan — 23,521 households. census.gov
9. Environmental and Energy Study Institute, citing the 2024 Virginia Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission report. eesi.org
10. Baseline Environmental Assessment for 10455 and 10635 Textile Road, filed with EGLE March 26, 2026, giving the two parcels as 118.474 acres.
11. Seven Agreements — the confidentiality instruments signed between March 2023 and December 2025, all linked on the sources page.

This page is my opinion. The facts behind it are cited above. If I’ve got something wrong, tell me and I’ll fix it and say that I did.