Township Fights Nuclear Weapons Data Center By Passing a Moratorium on Electrical Infrastructure

Ypsilanti Township in Michigan passed a six month moratorium on “major electric utility infrastructure” on Tuesday night. The moratorium is a delaying tactic, the latest in the Township’s long fight to stop the construction of a $1.2 billion data center that’s backed by the University of Michigan and the Pentagon’s nuclear war scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL).

Last year, the university announced it was partnering with LANL on the construction of a massive 220,000 square foot hyperscale data center in Ypsilanti Township and residents have been fighting it ever since. During a meeting of the Township Board on August 18, the council unanimously passed a resolution that will delay the construction of new electrical infrastructure for 180 days.

Data centers need a lot of energy, and Michigan’s power authority will have to build new substations in the Township to power the proposed facility. The moratorium asked the local power authorities to use the six month delay to study noise pollution and how the new infrastructure would affect existing customers. 

The moratorium is narrowly focused on “the nature and scale of electrical infrastructure necessary to serve new high-energy-demand land uses [...] including infrastructure associated, but not limited to hyper-scale data centers, mid-sized data centers, artificial intelligence computing facilities, and high-performance computational centers, industrial facilities, and other intensive electrical users.”

Earlier this month, the University of Michigan announced it had settled on a specific plot of land in Ypsilanti Township — a 144-acre plot on Textile Road. In a press release about the decision, the University said the data center would have the “capacity to change the world” and insisted it would not be a “high value target risk” in a war, that it would not store any hazardous nuclear material, and was not a weapons production facility. LANL previously confirmed that the data center will be used for nuclear weapons research. Ypsilanti Township Supervisor Brenda Stumbo told WEMU news that the selection of the site was a “travesty of justice” because it ignores constituents’ concerns about environmental impact.

During the August 18 moratorium vote, the Board projected a large stock photograph of an electric substation behind its members. The photo was meant to remind people of the size of the incoming infrastructure and the lack of communication from the university about it.

“This picture’s really important to think about because U of M has been so crystal clear that they’ve been communicating to us abundantly — which is not true,” Township clerk Debbie Swanson said during the meeting. “That speaks to the lack of respect.”

Ypsilanti Township's data center fight is unique in that its board of local leaders are united with the community in opposition to the project. Township Board members have repeatedly spoken about the University's lack of respect and lack of communication. “We will fight to our very last breath,” Strumbo said during a Board meeting in June. In April, the Board voted to institute a 365 moratorium on delivering water to data centers. The University threatened legal action in response and called the move “discriminatory.” 

The University of Michigan declined to comment on this story.