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.
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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 ch
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