Ypsilanti$1.2bn Michigan data center needs 200,000 gallons daily.
Ypsilanti’s utility authority imposed a 365-day moratorium for sustainability studies; the US University of Michigan called it “unlawfully discriminatory.” The utility is proceeding with its sustainability study; the university has threatened legal action to force a connection.
Sources: 404 Media
THE THIRST
A hyperscale data center can consume 1-5 million gallons of water per day for evaporative cooling — comparable to a town of 10,000-50,000 people. The 200,000 gallons/day figure here is modest by industry standards, which is itself the warning: this is what entry-level looks like.
WHY EVAPORATIVE COOLING WINS
Air cooling is cheap but caps out around 20kW per rack. Modern AI training racks dissipate 50-130kW. Evaporative cooling — running water through cooling towers and letting it boil off — is the only economical way to remove that much heat at scale. The water is not recycled; it leaves as vapor.
THE PEER PROBLEM
Data center campuses cluster around cheap power, but cheap power often means dry climates — Arizona, Nevada, west Texas, inland Spain. Michigan looks wet by comparison, which is exactly why operators are moving north. The Great Lakes basin holds 21% of the world's surface freshwater.
THE LEGAL ASYMMETRY
US water utilities operate under a duty-to-serve doctrine — they generally cannot refuse a connection to a customer who pays the tariff. The exceptions are capacity, infrastructure, and public-health grounds. A blanket moratorium for sustainability study sits in legally untested territory; the discrimination claim hinges on whether other large customers were treated the same.
THE GREAT LAKES COMPACT
The 2008 Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Compact — ratified by all eight basin states and Congress — bans most water diversions out of the watershed. Inside the basin, large withdrawals (over 100,000 gal/day averaged monthly) require state review. Michigan's threshold catches this project; the Compact gives municipalities a veto lever they did not have before 2008.
THE PUBLIC-PRIVATE FRICTION
The University of Michigan is a public institution, but the data center is a commercial-scale facility intended in part for AI compute leased to private partners. The discrimination framing — a university suing a municipal utility — obscures that the underlying customer profile looks identical to a Meta or Google build. Calling the moratorium discriminatory only works if the utility welcomed comparable industrial draws elsewhere.