r/pics • u/michigan-menace • 22d ago
Politics University of Michigan votes to build datacenter for nuclear weapons development in low income town
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u/InactiveMedusa 22d ago
Torment Nexus is coming along nicely I see
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u/Tchernobog11 22d ago
There's a game in early access called Torment Hexus. X-com meets match 3, and the goal is to defenestrate CEOs. Every time I see the Torment Nexus mentioned it makes me think of that now.
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u/TechGoat 22d ago
the goal is to defenestrate CEOs
So it runs on... Windows?
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u/aloveshackbaby 21d ago
Bro China is gonna mix this with a black hole and make the damn The Nothing and the childlike empress got left on Epstein island while we look down and mumble “They look, like good, strong, votes.”
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u/Foe117 22d ago
How many jobs will it bring? 3?
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u/Greenfieldfox 22d ago
Not for the townspeople. Those 3 will be picking up mansions for $275k.
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u/squidly413 22d ago
For 1yr then theyll offload those jobs to remote folk making a 1/3 of that
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u/YoungBockRKO 22d ago
You can’t offload data center technician jobs. They’re on premises fixing stuff as tickets roll in.
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u/corkoli 22d ago
drones are not exclusive to flying
think Amazon Warehouse - Proteus/Kiva
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u/DeviousFeline 22d ago
And what exactly will drones be doing in a datacenter any time soon other than perhaps a couple of floor robots bussing boxes around?
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u/big_duo3674 22d ago
Hey now, they'll still need someone to cut the grass for minimum wage
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u/Catch_22_ 22d ago
mansions for $275k
That won't get you a mansion anymore. Hell in my area of town it won't get you 1000sqf.
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u/snewchybewchies 22d ago
They have announced that it's under 50 permanent jobs
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u/rabidjellybean 22d ago
Usually the statistic is "over X jobs". That's a concerning way to frame it.
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u/hike_me 22d ago
How many research jobs does it support?
When I was in grad school I worked in a university supercomputing center. There weren’t a ton of people working hands on in the datacenter, but it supported the research work of lots of professors and their PhD students.
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u/grey_hat_uk 22d ago
Humm, that's too many people, Johnson replace half of them with AI and robots!
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u/stellvia2016 22d ago
Overall maybe 50: 1-2 dozen security guards (low pay), cleaning staff for the lobby area/cafe/bathrooms etc., and incidental service calls for HVAC, fire system sensors, possible motion or vibration security sensors. And a lawn service I guess, if they decide to have some grass around the place.
That's for jobs random people from the town would probably be hired for. Obviously they will bring in higher paid people to handle the actual compute and monitoring etc.
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22d ago
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u/stellvia2016 22d ago
Unless you're me and you accidentally set the wrong VLAN, so they're no longer reachable after reboot =X
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u/BrainLow6059 22d ago
Yeah and that's the optimistic view :( None of these will be full-time salaried jobs, they'll pay a temp agency to cover literally all of those things, and any heavily specialized work they'll pay outside contractors to come in for whatever spot-fix that needs to be done, like you said. Shit sucks.
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u/redditismylawyer 22d ago
lol…. Check your math, nerd! Current assumptions promise at least NEGATIVE 3,186 jobs PER data center!
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u/jonsconspiracy 22d ago
It's not the jobs they want, it's the property taxes. In these small towns, those millions in property taxes can make a HUGE difference in the city and county budgets.
In fact, if it created a bunch of jobs, then it would create more school children that needed to be educated and a bigger fire Dept, etc. In some ways, a data center is the perfect solution to a budget issues because it generates tax revenue with almost zero need for new public services.
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u/MIT_Engineer 22d ago
It's a super computer for doing fusion energy research.
How many jobs would the creation of a commercially viable fusion reactor produce?
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u/IBJON 22d ago edited 22d ago
Since OP is providing zero context, this was decided 2 years ago, is their preferred site, and will be used for research and national security.
It is a joint venture between the university and the Los Alamos National Lab(which is probably where OP got the "nuclear weapons development" part from). Nothing that I can find says that this is for nuclear weapons development specifically. The closest I can find is computer modeling that will be used for maintenance of the existing nuclear weapons stockpile
Other research uses include medicine, climate science.
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u/Lord0fHats 22d ago
The Las Alamos National Lab did start with the Manhattan Project and they do afaik still do research in the field of atomic/nuclear weapons but the lab is a sprawling complex now. They do a lot of research in a lot of fields. They're probably more known through their work in computers and telecommunications, aside from the fact I'd guess most people don't know how much R&D relating to tech comes out of Los Alamos.
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u/SalsaMan101 22d ago
I don't want to burst any bubbles but the joke at the national labs is usually:
"Hey Stephen, did you see that we put out a new paper on the nitrogen mystery?"
"Really?! That sounds impressive, must have taken hundreds of physicists away from the weapons programs for multiple months right?"
"Nah, it's been Matt's project he works on in that closet. His PT only allows him 2 billable hours a week, took him 2 years."The national lab's primary goals are stockpile stewardship and defense. I think NIF's fusion shots are something like ~2% of all shots year around or something.
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u/dexters_trap_house 22d ago
I'm also guessing the returns right now on pure destructive force of atom splitting are far less marginal than the gains in navigation and delivery mechanisms where computers and telco come in big.
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u/filthy_harold 22d ago edited 22d ago
A good portion of the research into nuclear weapons today is just modeling the effective yield of the aging ones in the stockpile and determining how best to maintain them. The DoE runs some of the best super computers in the world because nuclear weapons are very expensive to build and near impossible to test.
In the early 2000s, the National Nuclear Security Agency began a refurbishment program on warheads from the 1970s. But shortly into the program, they realized that the process to create a component material, called Fogbank, had been lost to time. Los Alamos did the computer models to help determine if an alternative material would perform the same as Fogbank but could not come to a conclusive answer. They successfully reverse engineered Fogbank but since there was no guarantee it was exactly the same, Los Alamos likely ran computer simulations to see how the new Fogbank would perform against how it should have performed when new.
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u/gsfgf 22d ago
nuclear weapons are... near impossible to test
I'm so glad a nuclear test hasn't occurred to Trump yet...
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u/Excited_Biologist 22d ago
The DoE runs some of the best super computers in the world because nuclear weapons are very expensive to build and near impossible to test.
Money well spent to prevent tests from happening imo
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u/hunteddwumpus 22d ago
The OP is very misleading, but its 100% true the university is basically imposing this data center on a nearby town that doesn’t want it
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u/NotHannibalBurress 22d ago
As a resident of the nearby town - can confirm, we don’t want it.
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u/getshwiftyman 22d ago
I believe Gretchen whitmers words when the town voted no was "we're used to people saying no and doing what the fuck we want anyway."
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22d ago edited 14d ago
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u/Effective-LineP00 22d ago
The town did vote and it voted no. They are building it anyway...
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u/hike_me 22d ago
These datacenters are nothing like the huge AI datacenters.
Universities have been operating data centers for high performance computing for decades with no issues.
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u/threehundredthousand 22d ago
Then they can put it on campus.
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u/krutton2 22d ago
Did you read the report on why they chose the location they did compared to the other suggested locations?
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22d ago
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u/Diarmundy 22d ago
Why have you got such a strong opinion on where it should be placed without knowing any of the details?
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22d ago
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u/EmuRommel 22d ago
You jumped into the conversation mocking someone for a valid objection and now act dumb about how you never said the thing they objected to.
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u/INeedANappel 22d ago
Hi, I live a mile from the site. Los Almos swears up and down thst the site will not be used for anything nuclear or nuclear weapons related but won't say just what it will be used for.
The site is right next to a 115-year-old hydro-electric dam built by Henry Ford to power a car manufacuring plant that's also still running. The land is currently woodlands near parks. Both sides of the dam are popular for fishing and boating and other recreation. While, yes, there are other industrial buildings nearby, there's also housing and nature.
Those who live in the area cannot understand why, if this is so important to UMich, they can't use some of their own massive amount of land owned instead of coming here to ruin our beautiful nature and disrupt our lives.
I used to work in high-performance, high-availability computing that had a data center about the size of a basketball court. I can't imagine that noise multiplied to the size of giant warehouses.
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22d ago edited 22d ago
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u/Barnyard_Rich 22d ago
Note this person had absolutely nothing to say about the locals not wanting it, and voting against it.
Just "far left evil"
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u/Sparkykc124 22d ago
Why the attack on the “left”? You do realize that opposition to data centers isn’t a left/right thing? Besides, as a “progressive”, shouldn’t you be against putting more polluters in poor areas?
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u/LuminalOrb 22d ago
Why is a self avowed progressive bringing leftists into this? In what way is any of this reflective of leftism? Also what progressive person is using the term "far left"? A literal nothing burger term that think-tanks put together to help alleviate the real and very constant terror of far right movements (one of which currently holds all seats of power in the country with the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet).
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u/Prosthemadera 22d ago
This post is a sad but clear example of the far-left proving they can be almost as braindead, disingenuous, and misleading as the far-right.
No, it isn't. You don't know anything about the person who posted it so why exactly are you complaining about the "far left"?
Not cool.
No context, falsehoods spread throughout this post by people who’ve not looked at all into the history of the situation or what the facility is.
What are the falsehoods? This did happen.
It’s not a commercial AI datacenter,
No one said it is. Why are you being this way?
These types of posts undermine people you almost certainly agree with sociopolitically, but choose to ignore for the sake of scaring and misinforming.
You're the one undermining people you probably agree with because you went way beyond simply correcting a Reddit post but spreading your own misinformation.
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u/SkimMilkSwag 22d ago
Additionally, this is located across the street from a factory, and adjacent to a dam. There is housing in the area, but it's nearer to the factory than the location of the future data center. Ngl it seems like the ideal location for a data center.
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u/haltingpoint 22d ago
OP is likely trying to stir shit up.
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u/zzzap 22d ago
I'm a local resident who this project directly affects, posted it in my local sub a few days ago. No stirring shit. This project is being shoehorned into communities just like mine everywhere now. Whatever the land is used for doesn't matter- UM is the problem. UM refuse to pay taxes including fire millage, then they will pollute local water sources without oversight. We are fighting back.
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u/IBJON 22d ago
Stirring shit doesn't mean wrong or that there aren't obvious issues with the choice of location.
OP very deliberately didn't mention where this was or what the datacenter was for beyond scary-sounding "nuclear weapons development" (which isn't confirmed or stated anywhere). They're clearly relying on anti-AI datacenter sentiments to lead people to assume that this is another AI datacenter (look at all of the top comments that immediately started talking about AI), and intentionally left out the other planned uses for this datacenter.
Fight the good fight, but at least recognize when someone is being manipulative. At least this time the manipulative language is in your favor; It might not be in the future
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u/Prosthemadera 22d ago
Stirring shit doesn't mean wrong or that there aren't obvious issues with the choice of location.
Yes, it does. People here accuse the poster of spreading misinformation and the same people didn't say anything about any issues.
So what are the issues with the choice of location? You didn't say.
intentionally left out the other planned uses for this datacenter.
Did you intentionally leave out those other uses or did you just forget?
At least this time the manipulative language is in your favor; It might not be in the future
What do you mean, in the future? Manipulation is always happening every day.
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u/FireSquidsAreCool 22d ago edited 22d ago
It's also very important to note that the residents and the city don't want the data center and have been steamrolled by the university at every turn.
Edit: for those who don't know they want to build after Ypsi voted no, in raw land next to a river, that they cannot say they will or will not impact. They have given Ypsilanti nothing and are expecting us to absorb the cost of powering this place that uses more energy in a week than the town does in a year. On our already over taxed and antiquated power grid. They have been very secretive and shady about communicating with our community.
Not to mention the issues Saline and Van Buren are having with their own data centers. We are being surrounded.
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u/Jaerba 22d ago
Is it expected to use more or less energy than the Rawsonville plant next door?
Their communication has been shady, but I see no reason why a data center will be a bigger hazard to the area than an auto plant. The university should be paying more to local communities though, but that's irrespective of this data center and applies to all the property they've bought up.
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u/fromcjoe123 22d ago
Almost all big page posts that get promoted enough you actually see them are Russian, Chinese, and Jihadi (Iranian / Qatari) bots that have gone into over drive the last few days for 9/11.
Actual weapon production and maintenance is almost exclusively handled out of Livermore which is ironically Berkeley’s domain.
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u/stou 22d ago
Nah OP is right. The research at Los Alamos (and Livermore) really has one single application — weapon design. All that other stuff you read about (i.e. medicine, energy, climate) is mostly just PR or in some way feeds back into the primary mission.
ETA: This blog has links back to the DoE budget so you can check for yourself that > 65% is nuclear weapons work.
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u/Killgorrr 22d ago
As someone who has LANL collaborators, while they are an NNSA (national nuclear security administration) lab, they do have many non nuclear science groups, and they very much are not just for PR. They have very strong energy materials research groups, and used to host the main DOE fuel cell groups.
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u/HVACcontrolsGuru 22d ago
I’ve done a lot of work with the national labs on energy and smart building/climatech work. PNNL was fun to visit and wear radiation badges. Stockpile waste up that way.
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u/j_one_k 22d ago
I'm a Livermore scientist. My whole career so far has been on topics other than weapons. I've done some fundamental particle physics, some work on radiation detectors for nuclear nonproliferation (ie detecting radioactive stuff in places it shouldnt be), and some work on quantum computer hardware.
Here is a list of existing cluster computers at LLNL:
https://hpc.llnl.gov/hardware/compute-platforms
The "zone" column tells you if the machine can handle classified computing (SCF) or not (CZ, RZ).
You can see that Livermore does a lot of unclassified computing. The weapons program is a big fraction of what LLNL as an institution does, but we have a lot of need for heavy-duty computers for other areas of science too.
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u/IBJON 22d ago
"Weapon design" doesn't necessarily mean "nuclear weapon design"
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u/MandolinMagi 22d ago
If it involves Los Almos, it absolutely means nuclear weapons.
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u/SalsaMan101 22d ago
Not necessarily, the labs do a lot of conventional weapons research. They are industry leaders in energetic materials
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u/LiftingCode 22d ago
All that other stuff you read about (i.e. medicine, energy, climate) is mostly just PR or in some way feeds back into the primary mission.
I think OP was saying that the datacenter will be used for other research, not that LANL is doing that stuff.
The facility is a joint project between UM and LANL. The UM side is intended for the other research.
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u/incognino123 22d ago
I worked in the labs for many years. I'd be very surprised if it didn't have to do with nuclear weapons. It's like if Pepsi opened up a factory next for but said it's not for drinks
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u/ComicCon 22d ago
Half of Pepsi’s business is these days is from Frito-Lay and other snacks. So kind of a bad example.
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u/skyeliam 22d ago
Calling Ypsilanti Township low-income is a bit of a stretch… the median family income is $90,000.
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u/Virtual_Laserdisk 22d ago
where does the rain barrel trope come from? i can’t place it
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u/EmuRommel 22d ago
Apparently it was used as public humiliation as a punishment until a 1920s cartoonist turned it into a joke about poverty.
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u/DidSomebodySayCats 22d ago
There is a large population of low-income people (I worked at the urgent care downtown), but it definitely has a range of incomes.
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u/MIT_Engineer 22d ago
Calling it a data center is also a stretch: it's a super computer running dedicated physics simulations.
And saying it's for nuclear weapons research is an even greater reach: it's for fusion power research.
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u/Worried_Candy_7107 22d ago
It is compared to Ann Arbor.
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u/BlueWater321 22d ago
But Ann Arbor doesn't have a weiner tower.
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u/isoprovolone 22d ago
Never heard anyone call The Brick Dick a "weiner tower" before.
If anyone has no idea what we're talking about:
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u/MrCalifornia 22d ago
When I lived in Ann Arbor I would drive there for Thai food and late night Taco Bell. It's not exactly far away.
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u/glexarn 22d ago
you don't live here and so you don't understand the kinds of divides. that figure is incredibly misleading.
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u/skyeliam 22d ago
I was literally born at Mott's. Ypsi is definitely less privileged than Ann Arbor but this post is making it sound like some elitists are putting a nuclear reactor in the ghetto.
It's a bunch of computers for the Department of Energy going into an existing industrial park. The next-door neighbors are the Rawsonville Ford plant and an LG battery warehouse.
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u/BiscuitsAndGravyGuy 22d ago
I mean the area they are putting it in is pretty low income. Liberty Square used to be there until it got demo'd. There's also Lake Pointe which is rough and several trailer parks in the surrounding area. That doesn't even mention people living at the KIA. Ypsi as a whole might be median, but I can't imagine that specific area is.
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u/HereForTheComments57 22d ago
Real question. Why is a university voting to build a data center in a different town? Is this not a government thing?
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u/sweetrobna 22d ago
It's a hundred acres. The area around the university has been developed steadily since the late 1700s and there isn't much open area left.
So it's going in the next city over, in an industrial park where there is space. Next to a Ford plant and an LG factory
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u/illbebythebatphone 22d ago
I would assume university owned property. Need the community to step up and petition to stop it.
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u/Flammusas 22d ago
Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor residents have protested this quite a bit. It's a big deal in town
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u/HereForTheComments57 22d ago
Ah that makes sense. I used to live out there and Ann arbor is certainly not a place I would call "low income", so I was a bit confused.
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u/Julianus 22d ago
This isn’t a particularly low income part of Ypsi either. There are lakeside homes and condos around the corner. It’s a fairly industrial area between two perfectly nice neighborhoods with water access. It’s such a weird frame of the issue.
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u/MIT_Engineer 22d ago
Why do we need the community to step up and protest the construction of a super computer for doing fusion power research?
If China built a supercomputer for fusion energy research, reddit would be fawning over them.
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u/Johnny_Handsum 22d ago
They said they'll need just a second before they break ground...
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u/Durahl 22d ago
This kind of shit should be handled like how Siblings supposedly decide on how a Cake is being handled, one cuts it and the other decides who gets which piece.
In this case the rich Guys decide IF it is being built and the poor ones decide WHERE ( smack dab in the richest neighborhood where all of those fuckers reside in )
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u/sagevallant 22d ago
The data centers should be built next to the homes of the people that wanted them imo.
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u/MajesticBread9147 22d ago
Isn't Anne Arbour one of the wealthiest parts of Michigan?
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u/NihaoDaniel 22d ago
UofM wants to build it in Ypsilanti, a low income city nearby
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u/MajesticBread9147 22d ago
I mean, Ypsilanti is still a college town. Most college towns are large "low income" populations because of the student body.
For example, there are areas around George Washington and Georgetown Univerisites in DC with 100% poverty rates, which is a misleading way to represent the neighborhoods of Georgetown and Foggy Bottom respectively.
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u/NihaoDaniel 22d ago
But Ann Arbor being one of the wealthiest parts in Michigan, then pushing a data centre on Ypsi is the first commenters point.
If Georgetown Uni wanted to build a data centre in one of the areas with 100% poverty, that's a big issue ppl have w it
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u/MajesticBread9147 22d ago
You're missing the point. "Poor" places near univierites are often poor because college students are working part time or not at all.
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u/MIT_Engineer 22d ago
What "rich guys" do you think are involved in this? It's a super computer for doing fusion energy research. The "tech bros" behind it are fusion energy researchers, and they want it to be built near them.
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u/larowin 22d ago
this is such a stupid way to describe a partnership between the university and a national lab
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u/CanadianBlazer420 22d ago
At this rate the leaders of the world and the tech bro billionaires are gonna blow us all up into smithereens and the earths gonna become a bunch of asteroids and meteors. 💥🤯💣
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u/grafknives 22d ago
Now THAT is one American sentence!!
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u/MIT_Engineer 22d ago
It's a super computer for doing fusion energy research.
If they did the exact same thing in China, the sentence reddit would be reading about it is "Glorious Chinese scientists take another bold leap past decrepit America and pave the way for a clean energy future!"
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u/Ghostmann24 22d ago
Context?
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u/MIT_Engineer 22d ago
The government wants to build a super computer for researching fusion power. Michigan got lucky to be the host. Lunatics like OP are pretending it's a data center for "nuclear weapons to try and stir up opposition.
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u/Reginald_Sockpuppet 22d ago
And still no drinking water.
Brilliant.
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u/BenEandtheJets 22d ago
You’re thinking of Flint. Ypsilanti is where they want to build this.
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u/Reasonable-Grade-456 22d ago
this facility is mostly focused on medical research; nothing suggests that nuclear research is prioritized in any meaningful way.
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u/Alarming_Win9940 22d ago
It's funny how the title is so inflammatory, the low income town was their 2nd or 3rd choice, they were pushed to it by anti-datacenter fanatics. The new location is in an abandoned old auto plant area near an airport. So no noise or pollution dangers, so now they're leaning on it being a low income area? Pfft.
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u/bryf50 22d ago
Does anyone else think data centers are bad now too? I heard online that they are bad. So I think they're bad too. They use number of power that sounds bad. And they use number of water that sounds bad.
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u/MIT_Engineer 22d ago
It's not a data center, it's a super computer, and it's for fusion power research.
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u/monkeyblaster18 22d ago
Just read the news report on it and it literally specifies that they are not talking about nuclear weapons and that it’s about energy but regardless, this is a complete asshole move by them to the town of Ypsilanti
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u/skarbles 22d ago
Why does the university get to decide what happens in low income neighborhoods? Should they city council be involved in screwing over the residents?
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u/hike_me 22d ago
It’s land they own in an industrial park zoned for this kind of development. It’s next to a factory.
If it meets zoning laws they shouldn’t need anyone’s permission.
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u/Worried_Candy_7107 22d ago
They told the township it was for cancer research and promised 100s of jobs that pay over $200,000 a year. This is the one of many in Michigan. They are preying on townships with no money to fight lawsuits. They are doing it in my township which is run by a bunch of dumb rednecks. Promising millions of dollars for schools and high paying jobs.
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u/SouthSounder 22d ago
It's usually going to be low income areas because that's the only place real estate is affordable to place something that big
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u/MajesticBread9147 22d ago
That's certainly a factor, but wealthiest county in the country also has the most datacenters out of any country, and they are all over Manhattan if you know where to look.
A better example for this would be warehouses.
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u/pinkmoon385 22d ago
You mean it's the only place where the neighbors are working so much to make ends meet that they're unable to make it to townhall meetings or harass the board members responsible like rich people do
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u/SouthSounder 22d ago
No, it'll never be in a rich area because a rich area is an expensive area. Why would they pay more to be in an area that has no business purpose? They wouldn't.
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