EXCLUSIVE: Ypsilanti Township In Michigan Passes A Six-Month Moratorium On “Major Electric Utility Infrastructure” To Delay $1.2 Billion University Of Michigan-Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Data Center 🤖💥

Ypsilanti Township in Michigan passed a six-month moratorium on “major electric utility infrastructure” Tuesday night, the latest tactic in the township’s ongoing fight against a $1.2 billion data center backed by the University of Michigan and Los Alamos National Laboratories, according to 404 Media. The Township Board unanimously passed the resolution during an August 18 meeting, delaying construction of new electrical infrastructure for 180 days as local officials continue resisting the 220,000-square-foot hyperscale facility the university announced last year in partnership with LANL, the Pentagon’s nuclear weapons research lab.

Data centers of this scale demand enormous amounts of power, and Michigan’s power authority would need to build new substations within the township to supply the facility. The moratorium directs local power authorities to use the six-month delay to study noise pollution and assess how the new infrastructure would affect existing customers, and it’s specifically targeted at “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.” The dispute intensified earlier this month when the University of Michigan finalized a specific 144-acre site on Textile Road for the project. In its announcement, the university claimed the facility would have the “capacity to change the world,” while insisting it wouldn’t be a “high value target risk” in wartime, wouldn’t store hazardous nuclear material, and wasn’t a weapons production facility, even though LANL has separately confirmed the data center will be used for nuclear weapons research. Township Supervisor Brenda Stumbo called the site selection a “travesty of justice” for ignoring constituents’ environmental concerns, according to WEMU news.

Tensions over transparency boiled over during the moratorium vote itself, when the Board projected a large photograph of an electric substation to illustrate the scale of incoming infrastructure and the university’s lack of communication 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,” said Township Clerk Debbie Swanson. “That speaks to the lack of respect.” What sets this fight apart from typical data center disputes is that the local government itself is fully aligned with residents in opposition, rather than caught between community pushback and its own economic interests. “We will fight to our very last breath,” Stumbo said during a June board meeting. This latest moratorium builds on an earlier confrontation in April, when the Board voted to institute a 365-day moratorium on delivering water to data centers, a move the university responded to by threatening legal action and calling it “discriminatory.” The University of Michigan declined to comment on this story.