In Michigan cities there is plenty of vacant land. Thousands of acres of vacant land. Here in Lansing the old GM owns two large plots where factories stood stamping out Oldsmobile's. There is all the power you would ever need. They're surrounded by other factories making possibly more noise than even a data centers fans. A small business community that has been decimated by the GM employees business in the neighborhood leaving.
So where do they ask to put a small data center? Right in the city's entertainment district! Makes less sense than putting it on farmland. Look Michigan needs the jobs, just a little common sense would go a long ways.
The site of the old GM Fisher Body plant is a sixty acres brownfield. The proposed downtown data center location is a one acre unused parking lot. It is close enough to LBWL, Lansing's utility company for water/electricity, to reuse the generated heat [1].
I don't think this really compares to the 270 acres data center for OpenAi/Oracle planned in Saline Township, which will be connected to one of the few 345kV transmission lines in Michigan. [2]
[1] https://www.lbwl.com/community/newsroom/2025-11-05-deep-gree...
I also toured one of our larger data centers, and even inside the small cube farm area it felt like a normal office. The noise only picked up once inside the room with the servers.
Noise during construction would probably be worse than noise during operation.
Also Michigan isn't perpetually wet, the summers can get dry at times which means natural sources slow down and ground water recedes and data centers can't/won't scale down utilization based on seasonal conditions. If they end up relying on pulling from ground water, they might not see any limits or problems on their time scales, but 20 years down the road when the local's natural springs and artesian wells stop performing they might get pissed.
All that said, Michigan is pretty good at trying to protect its water, and I expect there to be a decent amount of pushback and opposition to any irresponsible planning with regards to water usage. But on the other hand, we do have a number of corrupt politicians which a big tech company could easily line the pockets of.
Now Iowa probably has more water than almost anywhere, but still. Protesting the usage is valid.
They're taking advantage of inappropriately priced industrial water.
Regardless of if it makes sense, that's what they're doing. Using a lot of cold groundwater and then dumping it.
It would be much more expensive to have a closed loop of cooling water (and you're not going to get a lot of cooling on a humid 90 degree Iowa summer day)
People say the same thing about Michigan, yet, here we are
The population in Nunavut is 40,000 vs 10M in Michigan, despite Nunavut being 21x larger than Michigan. That ends up being 0.05/sq mi in Nunavut vs 174/sq mi in Michigan.
Northern Canada is much colder, has more fresh water, and has drastically lower population density, which should make it easier to find an area where people won't complain (other than environmentalists), and they would be able to better leverage nature for most of the year to help with cooling costs.
So, basically none?
700,000 gallons per acre per growing season for Corn, need to look up cover crop water for a per year figure.
500-2000gallons per pound of beef- and usda estimates place domestic production at 27Billion pounds per year.
We should be good stewards of our clean water (aquafers probably shouldn't be used unless they are of the self-filling variety), nor should down-river be deprived of their share. It's just Water use for forced convection evaporative cooling is not that much in the grand scheme, and most of it is used at the power plant rather than the DC.
You rewrote this comment, again this is very misleading.
My family has grown corn for 140ish years. In that time we have used exactly 0 gallons of water to grow corn. We don't irrigate, we don't have the mechanisms to irrigate, nobody in 100 miles irrigates (they do in far western Iowa and Nebraska and other marginal-to-grow-corn places) 80% of the corn grown in the US is grown with no irrigation.
It rains. That's it.
Even people who irrigate don't use that much water, they supplement the rain.
700,000 gallons per acre per year is the amount of water you'd have to use to grow corn in the desert which nobody does (I'm sure one or two crazies can be found on very small scales)
It is a disingenuous argument made either out of ignorance or manipulation.
I don't know what realistic alternative the residents have in mind, but I'd say even a few jobs is better than the urban decay that's been destroying Michigan.
Can we prove that the location of this DC is attracting crime? It's not a vacant lot. This protest is because DTE is expected to raise electric rates for the state's residents, so you're costing the local economy in aggregate more than the jobs that the DC is even providing. It's not guaranteed, if almost likely not, to be a net positive on the whole versus the zero-case of a "vacant lot".
> the urban decay that's been destroying Michigan.
I'm asking this genuinely: have you been to Michigan? The entire state is certainly not some sort of industrial wasteland and a lot of people equate the state to the Urbex porn of the shell of Detroit. This is planned in the state capital's entertainment district, not some semi-abandoned factory area.
Most of the state I've seen has been mostly nature, some sand dunes, and woods.
There will be few jobs created after construction is complete, and the ones created won't pay anything like typical tech comp.
They're not software engineers or data scientists if that's what you mean by "highly qualified".
Datacenters techs do the physical parts of the job we once called "system administrator". That definitely requires skill and attention to detail, not just the ability to "install some parts".
When the tech industry transitioned from on site systems to datacenters and big compute / big data, "system administrator" got split into "site reliability engineer" and "datacenter technician" as they scaled independently, with datacenter tech being focused on manufacturing and physical troubleshooting.
They have always been the "blue collar" workers of tech, both in terms of pay and prestige. Like tech support, the job is considered more of a stepping stone into the operations (not R&D) side of big data companies.
That all said, the qualifications of applicants for a job depend a lot on the labor market, in particular, the desperation of applicants. During the dotcom bust, a lot of CS grads (including me) were applying for technician jobs.
Median US Salary for a Data Center Technician is around 80k.
Median US Salary is $63,360.
Median household income is around $75,763 (Detroit CSA #s).
There's a lot of people out of work right now.
They certainly are not high density employers, but these huge hyperscale facilities typically employ 150-300 people directly, and probably at least that many on average in contracting roles. They are massive facilities.
The noise problem is caused by fans (air cooling). Data centers cooled by water do not have noisy fans. My understand is modern data center designs use close loop water systems, eliminating noise and water table issues.
But as several data center engineers I have spoken to agreed with me that if it was put on one of the many empty parking lots West of the Capitol it would be surrounded by mostly empty government buildings where a majority of state workers are working from home. They would still be able to access the steam district.
Honestly, if there is a place it would have made sense to do evaporative cooling it was probably Michigan anyways... but I hope the closed loop option ends up working out just as well.
Evaporative cooling works best in low humidity areas. That's why it's so often deployed in deserts.
Power can be had from the closest high voltage line (and maybe even easier to get outside of the city)
The fiber have to be dragged from either nearest point of presence (a building with many fiber connections coming to it from multiple companies to exchange traffic), or to whatever dark fiber infrastructure is available nearby.
In city, that's usually not that hard, ISPs already "plumbed" most of the bigger cities with fiber infrastructure.
Middle of the boonies, where we want the datacenters to go ? Dig, dig dig, get permissions for digging, get permission from everything around the ride from city's fiber infrastructure to the place in middle of nowhere, months or years in getting permissions, and red tape anywhere. There is probably some power close enough, or at the very least you can find a location close to power, but location close to fiber will if anything be some existing industrial centre, and even that might not be a sure bet. You might get lucky and get a permission to use existing poles to drag some fiber on them, but it's still PITA
They have no reason to change their behavior because no one has caused them enough pain to change their behavior.
> They listened to Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel criticizing the lack of transparency with DTE, the utility that's associated with the Saline Township proposal, and legislators who protested tax breaks for data center projects.
> ...
> "We're talking about 1.4 gigawatts, which is, of course, enough to provide energy to a city of a million people," Nessel said. "I think we should be taking this extremely seriously, don't you? Do you guys trust DTE? Do you trust Open AI? Do we trust Oracle to look out for our best interests here in Michigan?"
this wasn't just a random group of 100 people, they were organized enough to get the state AG as well as multiple state legislators to speak. seems fairly newsworthy to me.
Given that there are usually _zero_ people rallying in Lansing, this is notable enough for the local newspaper.
[1] A. Guthrie, 1967
not so much for a 300 acre noisy, water hogging data center.
The threshold is an organization organizing it. Getting 100 people out demonstrates your political power to your supporters and the people you seek to influence. Getting 1,000 people demonstrates that you have more of it.
"99.9% of residents did not show up to protest new datacenters in Michigan"
https://www.mlive.com/news/2025/12/amid-polarization-opposit...
Data center proposed for Downtown Lansing would be first of its kind in US
https://www.wilx.com/2025/11/05/data-center-proposed-downtow...
At least 16 sites eyed for data centers in Michigan amid AI boom. Here's where
https://www.mlive.com/news/2025/12/at-least-16-sites-eyed-fo...
"The man from Deep Green, who earlier repeatedly reiterated his intention to be a "good neighbor," responded by saying "I get it, you're Luddites."
https://www.lansingcitypulse.com/stories/opinion,171738
Residents protest data centers outside Michigan Capitol as debates rage on
"One of the speakers, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, took the podium first."
https://www.wilx.com/2025/12/16/data-center-protest-outside-...
Michigan data center developments raise concerns over water and power use
https://www.9and10news.com/2025/12/12/michigan-data-center-d...
Activists seeking a statewide moratorium on new AI data centers to rally in Lansing next week
https://michiganadvance.com/briefs/activists-seeking-a-state...
At the same time, data center being proposed for Lansing, NY also drawing opposition from local residents
https://www.sierraclub.org/atlantic/finger-lakes/blog/2025/1...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/tsunami-...
"Global computing power demand from internet-connected devices, high resolution video streaming, emails, surveillance cameras and a new generation of smart TVs is increasing 20% a year, consuming roughly 3-5% of the world’s electricity in 2015, says Swedish researcher Anders Andrae."
It's not crazy to think it might increase to 20%. How much is it really in 2025?
I haven't seen that. Interestingly it's less than 2015, per the article.