- Residents in Ypsilanti Township reject University of Michigan’s proposed $1.2 billion high-performance computing facility co-developed with Los Alamos National Laboratory, citing lack of invitation and concerns over national security implications.
The room at the Ann Arbor Marriott Ypsilanti at Eagle Crest filled to capacity on September 9, 2026, and it did not stay polite for long. Residents shouted “we did not invite you” at University of Michigan officials, rejecting a proposed $1.2 billion, roughly 220,000-square-foot high-performance computing facility planned for a 144-acre site on Textile Road near the Huron River.
The project’s co-developer is Los Alamos National Laboratory, the U.S. Department of Energy nuclear weapons lab created for the Manhattan Project. That fact alone has upended trust in one of Michigan’s most prominent institutions.
What U-M and Los Alamos Are Actually Building
The facility would serve two distinct missions: academic research and classified federal computing for a nuclear weapons laboratory.
U-M describes the center as dual-use, combining a university computing hub for cancer research, drug discovery, and climate modeling with a federal research component supporting LANL’s national security work, according to Michigan Public Radio. LANL has acknowledged that some computational research conducted at the facility could relate to nuclear modernization, specifically safety and reliability simulations of the existing stockpile, with no physical weapons, plutonium, or nuclear materials planned on site. Those simulations are intended to assess the safety and reliability of the existing arsenal without live testing…