The tiny city of Ypsilanti, Michigan, is worried about being a target for drone strikes thanks to a planned datacenter that the University of Michigan is building to support nuclear weapons research According to Douglas Winters, the city\u2019s attorney, the University and Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) \u201chave put a big bulls eye target on this entire township [\u2026] I believe it\u2019s the truth.\u201dWinters delivered a report to the town\u2019s Board of Trustees about the proposed datacenter during a public meeting on Tuesday. \u201cLos Alamos, which produces the nuclear weapons, is a high value target,\u201d he said. He pointed to America\u2019s war in Iran as proof that the datacenter would be a target, noting that Iran\u2019s drones had disabled AWS servers in the Middle East. \u201cThis is not a commercial datacenter. A Los Alamos datacenter is going to be the brains of the operation for nuclear modeling, nuclear weaponry.\u201d<\/p>\n
The university and LANL first announced their plan to build a $1.25 billion datacenter in 2024. The university picked nearby Ypsilanti\u2014population of about 20,000\u2014as the location for the datacenter and residents have been fighting it ever since. Concerns from the community are typical for people fighting against a datacenter: water, rising electricity bills, pollution, and noise.Unique to the Ypsilanti datacenter fight, however, is its role in the production of nuclear weapons. The datacenter would service LANL, the birthplace of the atomic bomb and home to America\u2019s nuclear weapons scientists. In January, LANL confirmed that the datacenter would, indeed, be used in nuclear weapons research.\u00a0To hear the university tell it, the datacenter will be one of the most advanced computing systems in the world. \u201cWe were told at the very beginning by U of M\u2019s Vice President of public relations [\u2026] that they were going to build, in his words, the biggest, baddest, fastest computers in the world,\u201d Winters said at the public meeting. \u201cThat, in of itself, is what makes these datacenters high value targets [\u2026] these data centers constitute power. Artificial intelligence is power. Supercomputers are power. And when something becomes that important, it becomes a target.\u201dWinters questioned the American military\u2019s ability to protect targets from the threat of drone attacks on its own soil. \u201cThe drone capability is not a joke, folks,\u201d he said. \u201cThe United States and Israel, in spite of all their high technology they\u2019re bringing to bear in their war on Iran, they\u2019ve actually had to request that Ukraine send their top advisors to help them understand how to best detect and destroy these drone attacks.\u201dHe also questioned U of M\u2019s values. Following a demand from the White House, the university eliminated its DEI programs in 2025. In February, again at the behest of the federal government, it announced the end of the PhD Project which helped people from underrepresented backgrounds get PhDs. \u201cYou have a situation now where the University of Michigan [\u2026] has cut a deal with the Department of War under Trump,\u201d Winters said. \u201cThat\u2019s what the University of Michigan has turned into by basically selling their soul to the Department of War.\u201dJay Coghlan, the executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, told 404 Media, \u201cThat LANL datacenter is going to be the brains for nuclear modeling and nuclear weaponry. Ultimately that’s what it\u2019s all about. Beware, a recent study found that in war games artificial intelligence went to escalation and nuclear war 95 percent of the time.\u201d\u00a0According to Coghlan, the construction of the datacenter followed a familiar pattern. \u201cThe Lab has colonized brown people for eight decades here just like it\u2019s now trying to do in Ypsilanti (New Mexico is 50 percent Hispanic and 12 percent Native American). But what the brown people in Ypsilanti have that they don\u2019t have here is lots of water,\u201d he told 404 Media.\u00a0Another topic of discussion at the Tuesday meeting was how to stop the construction of the datacenter. Winters and others explained that it\u2019s been difficult to get the university, county, and other government powers to engage with them. Interested parties plead ignorance or recuse themselves because of financial involvement with U of M. \u201cThey\u2019ve acted like The Godfather, making you an offer that you can\u2019t refuse,\u201d Winters said.Trustee Karen Lovejoy Roe questioned why LANL wanted to build a datacenter 1,500 miles away from its home. \u201cWhy don\u2019t you do that datacenter where you’re going to build the plutonium pits? One\u2019s in South Carolina, one\u2019s in New Mexico. Tell me why?\u201d Roe said during the meeting. \u201cThey thought that we would be an easy target [\u2026] that we\u2019re just a bunch of poor brown and black and dumb hillbillies.\u201dBut the Township isn\u2019t completely powerless. \u201cU of M is totally above the law, but is DTE?\u201d Sarah, an Ypsilanti resident said during public comments. DTE is the local power company. Datacenters are electricity hungry buildings and DTE will need to build substations to service LANL\u2019s supercomputers.\u00a0\u201cWhat if we had a moratorium on substations until we learned about the harmonics of the electricity and how that\u2019s impacted by datacenters?\u201d Sarah said. \u201cHaving a moratorium on heavy construction on the roads, you know, heavy construction equipment on the roads leading to the datacenter site [\u2026] it\u2019s going to be scary and hard to stand up to the University of Michigan. It\u2019s true: they\u2019re very powerful and we just need to be creative and we need to be strong and we need to block them at every step of the way.\u201dHolly, another resident, suggested another plan of attack. \u201cU of M\u2019s vulnerability is in their reputation,\u201d Holly said. \u201cWe need to continue to make them look as bad as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"