Open house set Dec. 11 for proposed VBT data center

Post cards have been sent out to neighbors of a 280-acre tract in Van Buren Township inviting them to a community open house from 6 to 8 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 11, at the Van Buren Township Hall, 46425 Tyler Rd.
This public meeting is being held to discuss a proposed data center to be built on property bordered on the west by Haggerty Road, on the east by Hannan Road, on the south by the I-94 North Service Drive, and to the north by I-275.
Ron Akers, Van Buren Township municipal services director, said representatives from DTE also will be there, along with the developers. He said this is not planned for all 280 acres because there are wetlands on site.
The post cards said the developer Panattoni will be in attendance to present the potential project and answer questions people may have regarding development of the site.
According to its website, the Panattoni Development Company was founded in 1986 and now is one of the largest privately held, full-service real estate developers in the world. Its U.S. operations are headquartered in Irvine, CA.
Reportedly, Panattoni was one of the developers seeking to build the Stellantis warehouse complex, which went with another developer and is now under construction on Ecorse Road north of Willow Run Airport in Van Buren Township.
Data centers are bringing pushback from residents around the state and the proposed site in Saline Township is bringing demonstrations against it.
The Michigan Public Service Commission planned a public hearing for Wednesday, Dec. 10, over DTE’s application for approval of contracts for a massive AI data center in Saline Township.
It comes after DTE tried to fast-track the contracts and avoid public hearings. But this is just one example of the ongoing fight over data centers in Michigan.
There are 57 data centers in Michigan, including 27 in Detroit, five in Ann Arbor, and one in Monroe.
A family in Howell Township that had requested rezoning to put a AI data center on its property, on Sunday withdrew its request due to opposition. It was due to be discussed at last Monday’s Howell Township Board of Trustees’ meeting, but rezoning is off the table for now.
Breanne Green, with Stop the Data Centers Livingston County, a leader in the movement to prevent data centers from flourishing, said the withdrawal of the request was a tactical victory but was not a final decision.
“The community will continue to show up, and we expect the township to protect residents and uphold the master plan. We’re not backing down,” Green said in a statement. “Residents spoke up, that’s what made a difference. But it’s also clear the developer plans to return as soon as they believe they have influenced the process or changed the board’s mind. This is far from over.”
This week a proposed data center for a vacant parcel on Inkster Road in Southfield was announced.
According to a report from WKAR in Lansing, a data center is a facility that hosts powerful computers. Those servers process and store massive amounts of digital data. Every time someone sends an email, scrolls Facebook or streams Hulu, that information is processed and stored in a data center.
Organizations use data centers as a central location to build, run and deliver services as well as store and process the data.
The report said data centers are usually large, plain buildings that look like a normal warehouse on the outside. They can be loud – up to 96 decibels inside of buildings, which is louder than a lawnmower. People have reported hearing data centers from the outside, which sounds like a low buzz, and can be heard miles away in some cases.
These facilities can be traced back to the 1940s when early computing systems needed a lot of space. In the 1990s, microcomputers – like a desktop computer – were introduced and began filling the old computing system rooms. Those were called servers, and the rooms were called data centers.
The introduction of cloud computing in the early 2000s allowed organizations to access resources remotely, through the internet. The demand for data centers boomed, leading to the first hyperscale data center in 2006 – like the one proposed in Saline Township.
Today’s surge in demand for data centers is fueled by emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, 5G, and edge technologies, WKAR explained.