Seven Agreements

A batch of records came to me recently, obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by another resident working on this. They go back to March 2023 — a year and a half earlier than anything we had.

I’ve posted all of them on the sources page. Read them yourself. What follows is what I think they add up to.

The short version: between March 2023 and December 2025 the University signed seven separate confidentiality agreements touching this project. And the categories one of them puts off-limits are, almost exactly, the questions this community has spent two years asking.

Start with the one that explains the silence

On May 24, 2024, the University signed the Michigan Economic Development Corporation’s standard business confidentiality form. The University is the party the form calls “Company.”³

The mechanism is spelled out in the first recital. Section 13(1)(f) of Michigan’s FOIA exempts commercial or financial information that a business hands over voluntarily if the public body promised confidentiality first. This agreement is that promise. It manufactures the exemption.

Attached is Exhibit A, listing what becomes exempt. Two entries:

Utility, water, wastewater, and gas usage needs and projected rates related to a Development Project

Environmental studies related to a Development Project prepared by the Company or its agent

Exhibit A³

The water number. The power number. The environmental assessments.

Also on the list: site plans, building dimensions and architectural drawings, real property contracts and purchase agreements, proposed site locations, the identities of business partners, and the details of private financing.³

To be fair about it: this is MEDC’s standard form, version 2024.01, used with private companies all the time. Nobody wrote it for this project and there’s nothing improper about signing it. I’m not suggesting otherwise.

But a public university signed a private-business confidentiality form, certifying that releasing its project information would cause it competitive harm. And the result is that the figures a township needs to evaluate a facility in its own backyard got filed as trade secrets.

The first agreement, and what it was for

The earliest document in the batch is a non-disclosure agreement between the University and Triad National Security, signed March 1–2, 2023.¹

Its stated purpose is discussions about a high performance computing facility and an office building in support of the Advanced Simulation & Computing Program and Weapons Physics Directorate.

That’s the plainest description of this project anywhere in the record. The ASC Program is the stockpile stewardship computing program — the simulation work that replaced nuclear testing. We’ve been told “research computing center.” Both are accurate. Only one is specific.

It’s an unusual document in other ways. Both sides keep synchronized lists of every person disclosed to. Documents get numbered and assigned by name, stored in locked cabinets or safes, destroyed by shredding or burning with letters confirming it was done. Anyone removed from the list signs a further restriction. And there’s a line saying the existence of the agreement itself is to be protected and not acknowledged.¹

What they were already trading in 2023

This is the part I keep coming back to.

The agreement lists what the two sides intended to exchange: platform costs and roadmaps, facility project costs and schedules, electrical power transmission and distribution, supercomputer and facility cooling technology capacity, and supercomputer specifications including size, power forecast, and cost. From the University’s side, site characteristics and the potential for construction and operation of a secure data center.¹

Power forecasts and cooling capacity were formal subjects of exchange in March 2023.

Three and a half years later, at the September 9 town hall, we were told water needs and noise levels hadn’t been determined.¹⁰

Those two things can both be true — early figures get revised, and a number exchanged under NDA in 2023 isn’t a final design. But “we haven’t worked that out yet” and “we’ve been exchanging power forecasts and cooling capacity under a restricted agreement since 2023” are different pictures.

There has been an architect since 2023

In July 2023 the agreement was amended to add two 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 to examine feasibility and the best design concept for the new data center — covering architecture, mechanical, electrical, structural, civil, fire protection, IT, a DOE security risk assessment, and cost estimating.²

Mechanical is where cooling and heat rejection live. Electrical is where the load forecast and the generators live. That package existed, or was being built, in mid-2023.

ACM’s contribution was background on its site, its electrical and cooling capability, and environmental assessments of that potential site location.²

And then Willow Run was out

A later letter agreement terminates that NDA and moves the obligations into the Los Alamos MOU. It records that ACM is no longer collaborating, working with the other parties, or disclosing information, and has ACM warranting that it returned or destroyed everything it held. Signed by ACM’s president and CEO on April 1, 2025.⁶

So the departure from the Willow Run site isn’t something I’m inferring from a difference between documents. There’s an executed agreement unwinding it.

Which matters, because in October 2023 the State of Michigan committed up to $400 million for a laboratory at that campus.⁹ Between then and now the site moved to Willow Run landholdings, to a computing center the signed MOU places near the Ann Arbor campus, to twenty acres in Ypsilanti Township, to 144 acres on the Huron River. Nobody has explained any of it.

The jobs number was 800

On October 16, 2024, MEDC staff briefed the Michigan Strategic Fund board on “Project L.” The ask was $135 million. The memo told the board to expect over 800 direct permanent jobs over ten years, averaging near $200,000.⁷

By the fiscal modelling of November 8, and the final memo of December 10, it was 200.⁸

Three weeks. A 75% cut in the project’s central economic claim, and nothing released explains it. The 200 figure is what the board voted on and what we’ve been told ever since.

The same November modelling is where the bigger numbers come from, and it states its assumption outright: the industry modelled is NAICS 541511, Custom Computer Programming Services — a software development firm — producing a job multiplier of 3.25 and about 650 total jobs.⁸

It isn’t a software firm. It’s a warehouse full of racks.

The Township asked a senator, fourteen months ago

On July 16, 2025, State Senator Jeff Irwin wrote to MEDC’s vice president for legislative and external affairs. He said Ypsilanti Township had asked him to obtain the documents Los Alamos and the University sent MEDC to pitch the project, along with any contracts or development agreements — especially anything covering job commitments, investment commitments, or conditions on the state subsidy.¹¹

The request was forwarded to three MEDC communications staff. The note attached to it read: “FYI- let’s discuss our approach.”¹¹

That was the same month Township officials say they first understood the project’s full scope. Whatever “our approach” turned out to be is itself a public record, and I’ve asked for it.

The part that matters most

Count them: the 2023 Los Alamos NDA and its amendment, the Willow Run landholdings agreement, the MEDC form, the confidentiality clause inside the MOU, the termination-and-transition letter, and the Nexus pipeline agreement. Seven instruments governing disclosure on a publicly funded project, spanning March 2023 to December 2025.

Not one of them stops the University from answering a records request.

Every agreement that addresses the question says the opposite. The MEDC form contains a separately negotiated paragraph — formatted differently from the text around it, which tells you it went in late — stating that the University, as a Michigan constitutional corporation, could be required to disclose by operation of law including FOIA, and that doing so is not a breach.³ The Willow Run agreement says the same.⁴ So does the Nexus one.⁵

Somebody at the University made sure of that, deliberately, in agreement after agreement.

So when the answer to a question about water or power is that the information is commercially sensitive, that’s a choice. The paperwork these documents describe doesn’t require it.

What I’m asking for

1. The SmithGroup conceptual design package and the subcontract behind it. The mechanical and electrical sections answer the cooling and load questions directly.
2. Why the job projection went from 800 to 200 between October 16 and December 10, 2024.
3. The site selection analysis — what was evaluated, on what criteria, and why the American Center for Mobility campus was set aside for undeveloped land on the river.
4. MEDC’s response to Senator Irwin, and the internal discussion about how to handle it.
5. A waiver. The University could tell MEDC today that it does not assert confidentiality over the water and utility figures in Exhibit A. That would take one letter.

None of what’s in these documents is illegal. Most of it is how large projects get put together, and I’d expect confidentiality agreements on a deal involving a federal laboratory.

What I’d ask you to sit with is the sequence. By the time anyone here was told anything, the site had been bought, the money had been approved, and the answers had already been designated 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) — adds SmithGroup and the American Center for Mobility
3. MEDC confidentiality agreement, May 24, 2024 (PDF) — see Exhibit A
4. Confidentiality agreement, U-M and Willow Run Arsenal of Democracy Landholdings, May 2024 (PDF)
5. Mutual confidentiality agreement, Nexus Gas Transmission and the Regents, December 4, 2025 (PDF)
6. Letter agreement terminating RSNDA-23-0076 and transitioning obligations (PDF)
7. Project L briefing memo to the MSF Board, October 2024 (PDF)
8. National Research Lab fiscal impact estimates, November 8, 2024 (PDF)
9. Letter from MEDC CEO Quentin L. Messer, Jr. to Dr. Santa Ono, October 27, 2023 (PDF) · my analysis
10. Public recording of the September 9, 2026 town hall. youtube.com · my account, with timestamps
11. MEDC FOIA release R000125-040726 (PDF) — contains the July 2025 Irwin correspondence and the State Budget Office transfer letter

Every document above is also on the sources page, and the full chronology is on the timeline. If I’ve got something wrong here, tell me and I’ll fix it and say that I did.