Timeline

When the University announced Textile Road in August 2026, the story went out as though it had just been decided. More than a year of technical and real estate analysis, they said, and here we are.¹⁶

That was already the fourth location this project had been attached to, and the paperwork went back three and a half years.

Most of what follows came out through records requests — mine, other residents’, the Township’s. Almost none of it was volunteered. Every entry below is numbered to a source at the bottom of the page, so if you think I’ve put a foot wrong somewhere, go read it and tell me.

The record at a glance

Date	What happened	Source
Mar 1–2, 2023	Los Alamos and U-M sign a restricted NDA for a computing facility supporting the Advanced Simulation & Computing Program and Weapons Physics Directorate	1
Jul 28, 2023	NDA amended to add SmithGroup (architecture/engineering) and the American Center for Mobility	2
Oct 27, 2023	MEDC commits up to $400 million — for a laboratory at the American Center for Mobility campus	3
May 23, 2024	Confidentiality agreement with Willow Run Arsenal of Democracy Landholdings re: “a potential real estate transaction”	4
May 24, 2024	MEDC confidentiality agreement; Exhibit A exempts utility and water usage figures and environmental studies from disclosure	5
Sep 30, 2024	Phase I / All Appropriate Inquiry completed for 10221 Textile Road	21
Oct 2024	Regents approve purchase of ~20 acres at 10221 Textile Road	14
Oct 16, 2024	“Project L” briefed to MSF board: $135M ask, over 800 permanent jobs, ten-year minimum lease required	6 7 8
Nov 5, 2024	U-M takes ownership of the ~20-acre parcel at 10221 Textile Road	21
Nov 8, 2024	Fiscal modelling uses NAICS 541511 (software services), 3.25 job multiplier; job figure now 200	9
Nov 2024	A Zoom meeting with Township Supervisor Brenda Stumbo and State Rep. Jimmie Wilson, with U-M’s Chris Kolb attending. Stumbo says they were told 20 acres, two office buildings, 200 jobs on site. The earliest U-M contact with the Township on record — and absent from the University’s own published timeline	18
Nov 25–26, 2024	MOU #204 signed — describes the Center for HPC as a central feature of U-M’s Innovation Campus and says the parties intend to establish it near the Ann Arbor campus; ~200 LANL jobs at UM subject to NNSA funds	10
Dec 10, 2024	MSF board approves $100 million; lease term softened to “multi-year”; SPARK letter is the sole local-support evidence; $100M moved by legislative transfer that morning	11 12 13
Jun 12, 2025	Regents authorize purchase of 124 acres at 10455 & 10635 Textile Road	14
Jul 16, 2025	Sen. Jeff Irwin asks MEDC for the project documents on the Township’s behalf; routed to communications staff	13
Aug 2025	Township formally opposes the Textile Road location	15
Dec 4, 2025	Confidentiality agreement with Nexus Gas Transmission re: a high pressure gas pipeline on the property	17
Mar 18, 2026	Purchase closes; Township supervisor notified by text message afterward; holdings reach ~144 acres	14 15
Apr 22, 2026	YCUA votes a 12-month moratorium on water and sewer service to data centers	15
Aug 2026	Textile Road announced as preferred site	16
Sep 9, 2026	Town hall. “Megawatt” said once, by a resident. “Gallon” never said	18
Sep 11, 2026	Township passes 180-day moratorium on major electrical infrastructure	19
Sep 15, 2026	Rep. Dingell opposes the site; raises the EPA Superfund record and finds no federal appropriation behind the $300M	20
Oct 1, 2026	Second community town hall in Ypsilanti Township, with the same panel as September 9	22

2023: a secret before it was a project

March 2023. Los Alamos and the University sign a non-disclosure agreement. The stated purpose is a computing facility and an office building in support of the Advanced Simulation & Computing Program and the Weapons Physics Directorate — that’s the stockpile stewardship program, the simulation work that replaced nuclear testing.¹

It’s an unusual agreement. Personnel lists kept in sync between both organizations. Documents numbered and assigned by name. Locked cabinets or safes. Destruction by shredding or burning, with letters confirming it was done. And a line saying the existence of the agreement itself shouldn’t be acknowledged.¹

I’d point at one paragraph in particular. It lists what the two sides agreed to exchange: electrical power transmission and distribution, facility cooling technology capacity, supercomputer power forecasts and costs.¹ Three and a half years before a panel told a room full of us that water needs and noise levels hadn’t been determined,¹⁸ those were formal subjects of exchange.

July 2023. The agreement gets amended to add two more parties: SmithGroup, the Detroit architecture and engineering firm, and the American Center for Mobility at Willow Run.²

SmithGroup’s contribution is described as a conceptual design package — architecture, mechanical, electrical, structural, civil, fire protection, IT, a DOE security risk assessment, cost estimating.² Mechanical is where cooling lives. Electrical is where the load forecast and the generators live. That package existed, or was being built, in mid-2023.

October 27, 2023. The CEO of the Michigan Economic Development Corporation writes to Santa Ono, then the University’s president, and commits up to $400 million in state support. The letter names the location: the campus of the American Center for Mobility.³

Willow Run. Not Textile Road.

2024: the year it moved

May 2024. Two confidentiality agreements a day apart. One with a Willow Run landholding partnership about “a potential real estate transaction.”⁴ One with MEDC.⁵

The MEDC one is worth understanding, because it explains a lot of the silence since. It’s the state’s standard business confidentiality form, and the University signed it as “Company.” Attached is a list of what becomes exempt from disclosure. Two items on that list: utility, water, wastewater, and gas usage needs and projected rates, and environmental studies.⁵

The water number. The power number. The environmental assessments. All designated confidential in May 2024, which is about when people around here started asking for them.

October 16, 2024. MEDC staff brief the Michigan Strategic Fund board on something called Project L. The ask is $135 million. The memo tells the board to expect over 800 direct permanent jobs over ten years, at an average salary near $200,000.⁶

A draft term sheet goes with it. To get the biggest chunk of money, the University would have to produce a fully executed lease with Los Alamos — ten years minimum.⁷

November 8, 2024. MEDC runs the economic model. And here’s where the jobs numbers you’ve heard come from.

The slide states its assumption plainly: the industry modelled is NAICS 541511, Custom Computer Programming Services. That’s the classification for a software development company — a business whose product is people writing code. Feed that in and you get a job multiplier of 3.25, which turns direct jobs into 650 total jobs across the region.⁹

I’ve spent thirty years around these buildings. A data center is not a software company. It’s a warehouse full of racks with a few dozen people keeping it alive. Model one as the other and the answer comes out wrong in a very particular direction.

The same slide also shows the job figure had already dropped to 200.⁹ Three weeks after the board was told 800. Nothing released explains why.

November 2024. Somewhere in here is the first time anyone from the University talked to this township about it.

Supervisor Stumbo described it at the September town hall. A Zoom meeting — her, State Representative Jimmie Wilson, and Chris Kolb from the University. What they were told, in her account: twenty acres, two office buildings, two hundred jobs on site at $200,000 a year, and research that would speed up work on cancer, dementia, Alzheimer’s and sickle cell.¹⁸

By then the University already owned the first twenty acres, having closed on November 5.

That meeting doesn’t appear in the University’s published timeline. Their version starts the community engagement story with an open house on campus in September 2025, and the first one held in Ypsilanti Township in January 2026.

November 25–26, 2024. The Memorandum of Understanding is signed — by Thomas Mason for Los Alamos and, for the Regents, by the president.

One section covers the computing center specifically. It says the Center for HPC is “currently planned to be a central feature of the Innovation Campus,” and that the parties intend to work toward approvals, design, funding and “eventually establishing a Center for HPC near UM’s Ann Arbor campus.”¹⁰

The Innovation Campus is a separate U-M initiative, in Ann Arbor, and the MOU lists supporting it as its own area of cooperation. But the computing center isn’t described as being somewhere else — it’s described as a central feature of that campus, with Los Alamos possibly taking office space within it.

Ypsilanti Township isn’t in the document. Not once.

The same document says that, subject to NNSA funding, Los Alamos anticipates about 200 LANL jobs created at UM over ten years.¹⁰ Los Alamos jobs. At the University. Depending on federal money that, as of a year later, still hadn’t been appropriated.²⁰

December 10, 2024. The board meets at 9:00 in the morning. The grant on the agenda is $100 million, not $135 million.¹¹ The ten-year lease requirement has become “a multi-year term.”¹²

The one piece of evidence in the packet that local people wanted this is a letter from Ann Arbor SPARK. Read the board list down the side of that letterhead: the chair is a University of Michigan officer. The University’s vice president for government relations is on it. So is Ypsilanti Township’s supervisor — whose township has opposed this from the start, and who I have no reason to think had anything to do with the letter.¹²

There’s no letter from Ypsilanti Township anywhere in the packet. Nobody asked us.

The money itself needed a legislative transfer that same morning. SOAR was showing nothing available for new approvals;¹² the State Budget Director wrote to the Appropriations chairs at 11:17 a.m. moving $100 million into the program. The announcement went out at 4:14 that afternoon.¹³

2025: the land, and the silence

June 12, 2025. The Regents authorize buying 124 acres at 10455 and 10635 Textile Road, at $65,000 per developable acre. They already owned about 20 acres nearby, approved by the Regents in October 2024 and closed on November 5.¹⁴²¹

July 2025. Township officials say this is when they finally understood the scale of it — two computing centers, one of them for a federal weapons laboratory.¹⁹

That same month, the Township asked State Senator Jeff Irwin to get the documents for them. He wrote to MEDC on July 16 asking for whatever Los Alamos and the University had sent to pitch the project, and any agreements covering job commitments, investment commitments, or conditions on the subsidy. MEDC’s vice president for legislative affairs forwarded it to three communications staff. Her note said: “FYI- let’s discuss our approach.”¹³

August 2025. The Township formally opposes the Textile Road location.¹⁵

December 4, 2025. The University signs a confidentiality agreement with Nexus Gas Transmission, an Enbridge company. The purpose, in the document’s own words, is discussions about a high pressure natural gas pipeline owned by Nexus and sitting on the property the University is under contract to buy — so the University can evaluate construction conditions.¹⁷

Hold onto that one. It comes back.

2026: the year we found out

March 18, 2026. The purchase closes. Supervisor Stumbo learns about it by text message, after the fact.¹⁴ The Township now has roughly 144 acres of University land on Textile Road and no say over any of it.

April 22, 2026. YCUA — the water authority the Township and the City run together — votes a twelve-month moratorium on water and sewer service to data centers and AI computing facilities.¹⁵

August 2026. Textile Road is announced as the preferred site.¹⁶

September 9, 2026. The town hall. Every household got a postcard inviting them; registration had been waitlisted for weeks by the time those arrived.

Nearly three hours. The word “megawatt” was said exactly once, by me. The word “gallon” was never said at all. When someone asked how many permanent jobs would go to Township residents, the answer started with the panel not being sure they could legally say any would.¹⁸

And when a resident raised the gas pipeline — the one the University signed an agreement about nine months earlier — the moderator said it was the first he’d heard of it.¹⁸

September 11, 2026. The Township passes a 180-day moratorium on major electrical infrastructure.¹⁹

September 15, 2026. Congresswoman Debbie Dingell writes to the community opposing the Textile Road site, and reveals two things nobody here knew: there’s an EPA Superfund record for this site, and her inquiries turned up no federal appropriation behind the $300 million attributed to Los Alamos.²⁰

What the shape of it tells you

Line it up and a few things stand out.

The site moved from Willow Run, to a landholding partnership at Willow Run, to Ann Arbor in the signed agreement, to twenty acres in Ypsilanti Township, to 144 acres on the Huron River. Nobody has explained any of those moves.

The state went from $400 million to $135 million to $100 million. The jobs went from 800 to 200. The lease requirement went from ten years to “multi-year.” Every one of those changes made the deal worse, and every one happened before anyone outside the room knew there was a deal.

And the questions we keep asking — how many megawatts, how many gallons — turn out to be the exact categories somebody wrote onto a confidentiality exhibit in May 2024.

None of that is illegal. Most of it is how big projects get done. But it’s worth being honest about what it adds up to: by the time this community was told anything, the site was bought, the money was spent, and the answers were already classified as commercially sensitive.

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Sources

1. Non-disclosure agreement RSNDA-23-0076, Triad National Security and the Regents, March 2023 (PDF)
2. First amendment, NDA-23-0173, July 2023 (PDF)
3. Letter from Quentin L. Messer, Jr., MEDC, to Dr. Santa Ono, October 27, 2023 (PDF)
4. Confidentiality agreement, U-M and Willow Run Arsenal of Democracy Landholdings, May 2024 (PDF)
5. MEDC confidentiality agreement, May 24, 2024 (PDF) — see Exhibit A
6. Project L briefing memo to the MSF Board, October 2024 (PDF)
7. Project L draft term sheet, October 2024 (PDF)
8. MEDC circulation email, October 16, 2024 (PDF)
9. National Research Lab fiscal impact estimates, November 8, 2024 (PDF)
10. Memorandum of Understanding #204, signed November 25–26, 2024 (PDF)
11. MSF Board meeting agenda, December 10, 2024 (PDF)
12. December 2024 MSF Board packet (PDF) · Ann Arbor SPARK letter (PDF) · budget summary (PDF)
13. MEDC FOIA release R000125-040726 (PDF) — contains MSF Resolution 2024-176 and the executed term sheet, State Budget Office Legislative Transfer Letter 2025-3 of December 10, 2024, and the July 16, 2025 inquiry from Sen. Jeff Irwin with MEDC’s internal forwarding. See also R000127 and R000129.
14. The Michigan Daily, on the Regents’ authorization and the closing of the Textile Road purchase. michigandaily.com · Planet Detroit, on the notification by text message. planetdetroit.org
15. Charter Township of Ypsilanti, Data Center Information timeline and document archive. ypsitownship.org
16. The University Record, “University of Michigan selects Textile Road as preferred site,” August 2026. record.umich.edu
17. Mutual confidentiality agreement, Nexus Gas Transmission and the Regents, December 4, 2025 (PDF)
18. Public recording of the September 9, 2026 town hall. youtube.com · our account, with timestamps
19. WDET, “Ypsilanti Township fight over U-M computing center intensifies with moratorium,” September 11, 2026. wdet.org
20. Letter from Rep. Debbie Dingell to Ypsilanti Township, September 15, 2026 (PDF)
21. Public recording of the October 1, 2026 town hall in Ypsilanti Township, with the same panel as September 9. youtube.com
22. Baseline Environmental Assessments filed with EGLE by the Regents of the University of Michigan: submittal 81000971-BEA-1 for 10221 Textile Road, filed January 13, 2025, and submittal 81000985-BEA-1 for 10455 and 10635 Textile Road, filed March 26, 2026. Obtained from EGLE through the Freedom of Information Act. Both record that the property is a “facility” as defined by Section 20101(1)(s) of Part 201.

Last updated September 2026. Found an error? Tell me and I’ll fix it and say that I did.