The Michigan Daily sat down with Chris Kolb, the University of Michigan vice president for government relations, and Steve Ceccio, data center project lead, to discuss the University’s planned data center in Ypsilanti Township. University Spokesperson Kay Jarvis was also present during the meeting. The interview took place the day before the University’s Dec. 29, 2025 open house on the project, and questions were not provided to the interviewees beforehand. This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The Michigan Daily: The University of Michigan wants to build something in Ypsilanti Township, but there has been some disagreement over what exactly to call it. News outlets, government officials in Ypsilanti and many township residents call it a “data center.” The University calls it a “high-performance computational facility.” Can you tell us what the difference between the two is, and why is the University and Los Alamos National Laboratory’s project one and not the other?
Steve Ceccio: If you look at the commercial data centers, like the kind they’re building all over the country, those are commercial activities that are used for e-commerce, web services, streaming, training models — all the kinds of commercial activities that we talk about today around these data centers. What a high-performance computing facility is meant to do is research. When we entered into this collaboration with Los Alamos, the idea is we’re going to be building computational resources to do research and development. I should also add that, when folks think about data centers, typically they’re thinking of the very large ones that are causing a lot of conversation around the country. The one in Saline, for example, has 1.4 gigawatt power draw at its maximum. The Michigan project, at its maximum, is 100 megawatts, so it’s less than one-tenth the size and all the other things scale with that. The footprint scales, too; using Saline as a template, there are about 250 acres that they’re going to be building this very large complex on. Ours is probably about 25 acres…