Community members gathered in the Ford School of Public Policy Monday morning to attend “AI, nuclear politics and the Los Alamos data center,” a panel featuring professors, policy experts and local activists. Panelists discussed the potential environmental, political and community impacts of the University of Michigan’s planned data center in collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratory. The University recently purchased a parcel for the project along the Huron River in Ypsilanti Township.
Panelist Chris Gilmer-Hill, policy manager of the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition, said he began advocating against the data center when the Michigan Legislature granted data centers major tax exemptions in December 2025.
“I got involved in the data center fight — mostly at the state level through work — when they were trying to pass these tax exemptions through land,” said Gilmer-Hill. “I’ve gotten really involved in organizing across the state, locally, where I live in Detroit and all these communities, trying to get people more informed that we really do have the power at the state level, at the local level, to just not go along with what’s happening.”
Public Policy student Rebecca Coyne and Environment and Sustainability student Cooper Sykes, the panel’s moderators, opened up the discussion by asking panelists about the most significant environmental impacts of data centers. Panelist Ben Green, assistant professor of information and public policy, said he believes the rapid growth of artificial intelligence is actively weakening climate commitments across political parties.
“It’s very hard to think of a data center economy that is sustainable,” Green said. “Even liberals who have in the past, at times, said that they were champions of environmentalism are now showing just how malleable those commitments are, that if we have this need for AI, suddenly, well ‘Maybe we can put that aside,’ or ‘We shouldn’t impose these water use restrictions on these data centers because that would hurt our competitiveness with China.’”
Panelist Dave Zeglen, international studies lecturer, said while he views AI as fundamentally oppressive, the Māori people provide an example of how communities can reclaim the technology to restore their culture by having control over the language models they use.
“They’re using these language models to restore pre-colonial Māori that has not been affected by other vernaculars,” Zeglen said. “It’s been a real lifeline for literacy in their pre-colonial language. That being said, it’s because they’re running all of their language models off of independent servers. … So they have control over it. It’s a real democratic Indigenous project.”
Rackham student Shreya Chowdhary said she attended the panel because she wanted to hear about data centers from multiple perspectives.
“One of my biggest takeaways is that, because the data center is located at the center of multiple systems — like financial speculation around AI, the University’s relationship to Ypsilanti, the University’s broader connections to the military industrial complex resisting — it needs to take multiple forms of action along multiple terrains,” Chowdhary said. “Most of all, it’s possible to resist. I think that was a very compelling takeaway from the panel.”
Daily Staff Reporter Caroline Wroldsen can be reached at cwrold@umich.edu.
