RSVP to join Workers Strike Back in strategizing a nationally coordinated, militant fightback against AI data centers, nuclear weapons, imperialist war and genocide, ICE terror, and mass surveillance!
The University of Michigan (U-M) is collaborating with Los Alamos laboratories to build a data center in Ypsilanti, Michigan, that would be used primarily for nuclear weapons research. Working people in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor have been organizing against this data center for well over a year, succeeding in pushing back the start of construction until 2028. But despite the near-unanimous opposition of residents, the Ann Arbor-based U-M administration plans to move forward with the plan to build the $1.2 billion data center along the Huron River, adjacent to a city park and low-income housing.
This is one in a wave of data centers being pushed across the U.S. by billionaire tech giants, and we can stop it! We say NO to data centers that will be used to commit genocide, imperialist war, ICE terror, and mass surveillance. We say NO to the pollution, climate change, and the loss of jobs related to these data centers and the AI powered by them. We demand that the U-M administration end all funding of and participation in the proposed data center in Ypsilanti. U-M is spending $850 million on the data center, all while nickel-and-diming campus unions and students. Without U-M participation, Los Alamos will no longer be exempt from zoning laws or property taxes, and we can stop construction.
Rather than fighting the data centers, Michigan Democrats like Governor Gretchen Whitmer are offering tax breaks to the Big Tech and real estate billionaires. We need independent working-class organizing to disrupt business-as-usual for both the U-M administration and the Democratic and Republican parties in Michigan. We need mass action against these data centers, including mass civil disobedience and strike action.
This is also why Workers Strike Back supported the independent antiwar campaign of Kshama Sawant, co-founder of Workers Strike Back and a member of our elected National Coordinating Committee. Kshama’s campaign called for stopping AI and the data centers, opposed nuclear and other weapons of imperialist war, called for a permanent arms embargo on the genocidal state of Israel, and demanded to shut down ICE. Kshama won the highest-ever vote, by far, for an openly Marxist candidate running for the U.S. Congress. Workers Strike Back is building on that momentum by campaigning against AI data centers across the nation.
In Michigan, we demand:
Stop the U-M Data Center! No Funding for Weapons of Imperialist War!
Tax the Billionaire Tech and Energy Giants - Fund Affordable Housing, Free Healthcare, and All Our Needs!
Take Big Tech and the Major Energy Companies into Democratic Worker Ownership!