Why We Oppose This Project

I live near this site. I also manage teams that run datacenter infrastructure in facilities around the world, which means I’ve spent thirty years inside buildings like the one being proposed on Textile Road.

Those two things pull in the same direction here, not opposite ones. I know why this capacity gets built. I also know what it does to the ground it sits on.

This page is my argument. The rest of the site is documentation and I’ve worked to keep it that way. Here I’m telling you what I think. The facts underneath are still cited; the conclusions are mine, and you’re free to land somewhere else.

1. We don’t get a vote, and that’s the whole thing

Ypsilanti Township can’t zone this project. Article VIII, Section 5 of the Michigan Constitution makes the Regents a body corporate with general supervision of the University’s institution, and courts have long read that as putting the University outside local land use control.

Any other developer proposing a 100-megawatt industrial facility here would sit through site plan review, public hearings, conditions, and a vote by people we elect. This one faces none of it.

That exemption exists to keep politicians out of academic decisions. It wasn’t written so a university could host a federal weapons laboratory over a township’s formal objection. And by the University’s own numbers that’s what this is: 100 megawatts for Los Alamos, 10 for the University’s non-classified research — roughly 91% federal — with Los Alamos paying $285 million in construction costs and a long-term lease anticipated.1 The FAQ describes a 240,000 square foot federal building including classified research, next to a 50,000 square foot academic one.2

Whether constitutional autonomy stretches that far has never been tested in a Michigan court. I think it’s a fair question. I think a community is entitled to ask it before the concrete goes down instead of after.

2. The signed agreement says Ann Arbor

The Memorandum of Understanding that Los Alamos and the Regents signed in November 2024 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.”9

I want to be precise here, because it’s a fair thing to push back on. The Innovation Campus is a separate University project in Ann Arbor, and the MOU treats supporting it as its own line item. But the computing center isn’t described as being anywhere else. It’s a central feature of that campus, near Ann Arbor, with Los Alamos possibly taking office space inside it.

Ypsilanti Township doesn’t appear in the document. Neither does Textile Road.

An MOU is a framework, not a site plan — it says so itself, and plans change for ordinary reasons. But the state had already been told, a year earlier, that this was going on the American Center for Mobility campus at Willow Run.10 Two documents, two locations, neither of them here. Nobody has explained how it ended up fourteen miles away on a river.

3. Ratepayers may end up paying for infrastructure that serves someone else

This needs a new DTE substation. In the 2024 state filing, two-thirds of that substation’s capacity was to serve the project and a third was described as community benefit, with $30 million contributed toward it.1 The current FAQ describes a dedicated substation that will exclusively power the facility.2 Those aren’t the same arrangement.

Who ultimately carries the cost of grid capacity built for one large customer gets decided at the Michigan Public Service Commission — not by the University, and certainly not by us. The University’s own Ford School described the general pattern in a 2025 brief: as demand climbs, utilities routinely pass infrastructure and procurement costs to residents and small businesses.3

Here’s the part that bothers me professionally. They’ve said backup generation is limited to about 10% of load.2 That’s a legitimate design choice for research computing, and it means the compute floor can be shut down on demand. Which makes this an interruptible load, not a firm one — a completely different burden on the grid. Committing to that would cost them nothing. They haven’t.

4. We’d be better off with a private developer

Michigan already exempts qualifying commercial data centers from personal property tax on their equipment. But a private operator still pays real property tax on the land and the buildings, and that money reaches our schools, our roads, our fire department.

The University pays neither. Roughly 144 acres have come off the tax rolls by purchase,45 and what replaces them will contribute nothing locally while consuming local services — roads during construction, emergency response for a site with substantial fuel storage and high-voltage equipment, municipal water and sewer capacity.

Tax-exempt universities elsewhere settled this argument decades ago and make substantial annual payments to their host cities. Nothing like that has been offered here.

5. The jobs number isn’t what it sounds like

Public materials cite more than 200 high-paying permanent research positions.2 The MOU describes the same 200 differently: subject to NNSA funding, Los Alamos anticipates about 200 LANL jobs created at UM over ten years.9 Los Alamos jobs, at the University, contingent on federal money that still hasn’t been appropriated.8

Researchers don’t work inside data centers. They submit jobs to a scheduler from a campus office, or New Mexico, or anywhere with a network connection. A position enabled by a computing facility isn’t a position located at one.

The realistic on-site number is the project’s other figure: 30 to 50 technical support roles. That squares with published staffing analysis of 0.15 to 0.35 full-time equivalents per megawatt6 and with Brookings finding data centers among the least labor-intensive structures in the economy.7 The Ford School reached the same conclusion: infrastructure projects, not job-creating businesses.3

And the bigger numbers you’ve heard? They come from a state model that treated this facility as a custom computer programming services company — a software firm — producing a 3.25 job multiplier.11 It isn’t a software firm. It’s a warehouse full of racks.

Thirty to fifty jobs isn’t nothing. It’s also not a reason to override a community.

6. The water commitments are softer than they sound

The FAQ says the facility won’t draw from or discharge into the Huron River and won’t use local groundwater. Good. It also says the University is reviewing designs to consider closed-loop cooling and reclaimed wastewater — considering, not committing — and that any municipal water would come through YCUA. It confirms direct-to-chip cooling, which is a liquid technology.2

No figure for consumptive use in gallons per day has ever been published. Until that number exists nobody can evaluate the promise.

Worth knowing: in May 2024 the University signed MEDC’s confidentiality form, and the attached exhibit designates “utility, water, wastewater, and gas usage needs and projected rates” as exempt from disclosure.12 The exact category of number we’ve been asking for, marked confidential right about when we started asking.

7. It keeps getting bigger and the story keeps changing

In December 2024 the University told the State it would build on a 20-acre property here.1 Its holdings on Textile Road are now about 144 acres.4 The substation went from two-thirds project use to exclusive use. The capacity reads as 100 plus 10 in one document and a maximum of 100 in another. The permanent job projection was over 800 in October 2024 and 200 by November.11

Any one of those has an innocent explanation. Together they describe a project whose public account hasn’t kept up with its actual scope — and a community that keeps finding out afterward.

8. None of it is enforceable

Read the commitments and notice what form they take. Renewable fuel for the generators. Solar procurement — for the academic load only.2 Most of the 144 acres left as natural space.8 Noise no louder than a household air conditioner at the property line.

Every one of those is a sentence on a web page. Not a deed restriction. Not a conservation easement. Not a community benefits agreement, a tariff condition, or a permit term. And the one body that would normally turn promises into conditions is the local government, which has been exempted out of the room.

A promise from an institution nobody can hold to it is worth what it cost to make.

9. It can’t be undone

Construction runs two or three years. The facility is meant to run for decades. The land, the substation, the transmission, the traffic — permanent on any timescale that matters to the people living next to it. There’s no published decommissioning plan and no financial assurance for restoring the site.

Decisions that durable deserve a process the affected community actually takes part in. That’s the objection under all the others.

What I’m not arguing

Being precise matters here, because imprecision is how good arguments get thrown out.

  • I’m not against data centers. The capacity is genuinely needed and it has to go somewhere. I’ve spent my career keeping the equipment inside them running.
  • I’m not against scientific research, high-performance computing, or the University of Michigan.
  • I’m not against the construction jobs. Roughly 300 union trades jobs on a build this size are real, they’ll largely go to Michigan workers, and those workers have earned them. I support labor standards on this project and every project like it.
  • I’m not claiming nuclear materials will be stored here. The University says no hazardous nuclear materials will be stored or used on site, no weapons production will happen, and no real-time defense operations will be conducted.8 I have no basis to dispute that and I don’t.
  • I’m not saying the backup generator design is deceptive. Sizing backup at roughly 10% of load is sound engineering for research computing. My point is what it implies about curtailment, not that it’s wrong.

What would change my mind

I’m not asking for the impossible, and I’d rather say out loud what would actually satisfy me. Every item here is something the University could do without abandoning the project.

  1. A binding community benefits agreement with Ypsilanti Township, negotiated in public and enforceable in court, including an annual payment in lieu of taxes.
  2. A curtailable or interruptible arrangement filed with and enforceable through the Public Service Commission, requiring load reduction during grid stress events.
  3. Full cost responsibility for the substation and all associated grid infrastructure, directly assigned and not recovered from other DTE customers.
  4. Closed-loop cooling as a commitment rather than a consideration, with a published cap on consumptive water use in gallons per day.
  5. A recorded conservation easement over the land they say will stay natural, and a recorded cap on total developed capacity.
  6. A decommissioning plan with financial assurance sufficient to restore the site.
  7. Publication of the operating numbers: substation design rating, total interconnection request, projected consumptive water use, generator count and fuel storage volume, and how many of the 200 positions will have a duty station in this township.

None of that needs new legislation. It needs the University to accept, voluntarily, the sorts of conditions any other developer here would face as a matter of course.

Until then I oppose this project at this location, and I’ll use every lawful process open to me: the Public Service Commission, EGLE permitting, municipal utility service decisions, the Legislature, and the fact that the Regents of the University of Michigan stand for election statewide.

Sources

  1. MEDC memorandum to the Michigan Strategic Fund Board, December 10, 2024, and MSF Resolution 2024-176. Board packet (PDF)
  2. University of Michigan Office of the Vice President for Research, LANL FAQ. research.umich.edu
  3. Terry Nguyen and Ben Green, What Happens When Data Centers Come to Town?, Science, Technology and Public Policy Program, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan, with the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition, July 2025. PDF
  4. The Michigan Daily, on the closing of the Textile Road purchase. michigandaily.com
  5. Charter Township of Ypsilanti, Data Center Information archive. ypsitownship.org
  6. Hamm Institute for American Energy, Data Center Employment Forecast Analysis, November 2025. PDF
  7. Bahar and Wright, “New evidence on data center employment effects,” Brookings Institution. brookings.edu
  8. The University Record, August 2026 site announcement. record.umich.edu · Letter from Rep. Debbie Dingell, September 15, 2026. PDF
  9. Memorandum of Understanding #204, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Regents, signed November 25–26, 2024 (PDF)
  10. Letter from MEDC CEO Quentin L. Messer, Jr. to Dr. Santa Ono, October 27, 2023 (PDF)
  11. National Research Lab fiscal impact estimates, November 8, 2024 (PDF) · Project L briefing memo, October 2024 (PDF)
  12. MEDC confidentiality agreement, May 24, 2024 (PDF) — see Exhibit A

Last updated September 2026. This page is my opinion; the facts behind it are cited above and documented across the rest of the site. If I’ve got something wrong, tell me and I’ll fix it and say that I did.

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