A proposed University of Michigan data center will support research related to nuclear weapons and plutonium pit development for Los Alamos National Laboratory, the student-run newspaper Michigan Daily reported Jan. 30.
Patrick Fitch, deputy laboratory director for science, technology and engineering at Los Alamos, reportedly said at an open house for the project that nuclear weapons research, including plutonium pit research, would be a big part of the planned center’s mission. There would be two computers, which require 55 megawatts total, and one would be dedicated to restricted data for nuclear weapons research.
The data center would be in Ypsilanti Township, an apparent point of contention among the Township’s residents. The Michigan Daily said Ypsilanti residents and University members worry about the effects to the environment and electrical grid, and have also expressed concerns over the potential that the center could be used to develop nuclear weapons, which the University has denied.
DOE has selected four nuclear complex sites to be used for new artificial intelligence (AI) data centers, and has been looking to invite private sector partners to work to build AI data centers and energy generation projects. DOE has said in the past the push for AI centers on federal lands took after the executive orders, Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure, Deploying Advanced Nuclear Reactor Technologies for National Security and Unleashing American Energy.
In an interview on the sidelines of Exchange Monitor’s Nuclear Deterrence Summit in late January, Thom Mason, Los Alamos’s lab director, told the Monitor that AI large language models, which require a lot of power, are helpful for the lab to use in a classified setting. Historically, data on the nation’s nuclear weapons tests is “voluminous and hard for any single person to kind of absorb,” Mason said. He added that “using researchers and private sector resources “around the world” has been helpful to “fill the gaps in the training data” on open source AI tools “that exist because we don’t share classified information.”