Security1 publisher3 min readPublished
Los Alamos conceded in a letter that its $1.2bn Michigan build would be used for weapons research
The University of Michigan sent a faculty director and its lead engineer into a hostile Ypsilanti Township town hall on Wednesday night. Its Los Alamos partner sent a letter, and the letter put nuclear weapons research back on the record.
The Watch · Security desk
What happened
- The University of Michigan and Los Alamos National Laboratories want to build a $1.2 billion hyperscale data center in Ypsilanti Township, Michigan.
- The university hosted a town hall on Wednesday night to ease residents' anger and, by 404 Media's account of the footage, deepened it instead.
- Residents objected to electricity costs, water use and noise, and township citizens and leaders objected to the project furthering nuclear weapons research.
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Why it matters
- contradiction The letter's two sentences point different ways: no plutonium and no weapons built in Ypsilanti, but weapons research running on the machines. Which sentence a resident weights decides whether the lab answered the question or dodged it.
- constraint The university's own comparison slide is now spent as an argument. A resident with data center experience turned the 1/20th ratio into evidence that the build sits at the top of the American size bracket, so the next filing needs absolute megawatts and gallons.
- decision Consent from a township board is the gate this compute has to pass, and the partner whose mission generates the opposition chose to be represented by mail.
- exposure Siting a load of this class beside schools and apartments puts generators, emissions and noise into the permitting record as operating conditions residents will contest, not as design details.
The size comparison is where the university lost the room. Steven Ceccio, the project's lead engineer, set the build against The Barn, the $56 billion, 1.4 gigawatt OpenAI project in nearby Saline Township [10], and said "The project is tremendously smaller in scope and size than these commercial data centers" [9]. A resident named Andy, who said he had worked in data centers all around the country [11], used the slide against him. "I think it's convenient that this is 1/20th the size of a data center when you're comparing it to The Barn that's going over in Saline. That's an aberration. That's not a normal sized data center. When you compare the data center that you're about to build to the average data center in the United States, you're at the very top of that bracket," Andy said [12].
Take the two numbers on the slide. One twentieth of 1.4 gigawatts is about 70 megawatts [1]. On capital, $1.2 billion against $56 billion is closer to one forty-seventh [2]. The 404 Media account does not say which measure the slide used. Andy's second point was about what a load that size runs on: "They don't belong in residential areas next to schools and apartments. When you go to these facilities they're in the middle of nowhere because that's where they belong," he said [13].
University staff avoided the words "data center" all evening [14]. "The biggest difference besides its size is its purpose. It's really a scientific computing center, it's not a commercial activity," Ceccio said [15]. Faculty director Patricia Hurn read a prepared statement over shouting, listing cancer care, the power grid, drug discovery and sustainable computing as uses [7]. When she said "Many of us are interested in finding the generalized cure for cancer," the crowd laughed and mocked her [8].
Los Alamos sent nobody [16]. "If Los Alamos cared so much why aren't they here?" a woman named Jamie asked [17]. The lab sent a letter to be read in its place [18]. It said supercomputing "allows researchers to model, analyze, and test complex systems, and it powers discovery faster and with more precision than our Manhattan project founders could have thought possible" [19]. It said there would be no plutonium on site and no weapons produced there [20]. It also conceded that the facility would be used as part of nuclear weapons research [21].
Both statements sit in the same letter, and the township asked about the second one [5]. Residents say the university has condescended to them, lied, and ignored them through the whole process [6]. The 404 Media account reports no protest that stopped work and no date for a zoning decision [23]. The schedule risk in this project sits with a township that says it was lied to, and with a national laboratory that did not show up.
What to watch
- A township zoning or site-plan vote, and whether the university files absolute load and water figures instead of size ratios.
- Whether Los Alamos staff appear in person at the next Ypsilanti Township meeting.
- Whether an interconnection request to the utility puts a megawatt number for the project on the public record.