If you haven’t heard already, the University of Michigan is attempting to build a computing facility in partnership with Los Alamos National Lab. Needless to say, it’s having a tough time doing so.
Of the many sticking points between community members and the U-M administration, the most interesting to me has been the unlikely semantic debate that’s arisen about what to call the building. The University insists, time and time again, we call it a “high-performance computational facility.” Many people, on the other hand, find it more fitting to label it a “data center.” To the administration, “data center” is one of the worst pejoratives you could call any innocent, budding research complex still in its infancy. After all, hundreds of billions of dollars in data center investments have been disrupted as a result of local backlash since 2023.
By attempting to relabel the data center, the administration is seemingly operating under the assumption that people oppose data centers because of the name. That would be wrong…