Oakland University (OU) in Rochester, Michigan, is seeking proposals for a new data center on its campus.

OU released a “request for proposals” (RFP) last month, detailing the data center project planned for a five-acre site located at 253 Pioneer Drive, Rochester, on the existing parking lot P-35.

The site is adjacent to an existing electrical substation operated by DTE Energy, which initial assessments suggest has up to 26MW of available power capacity for the data center project.

The Oakland Press reports that it is this substation that really provides the opportunity, quoting OU’s vice president for finance and administration, Steven Mackey, as noting: “We have that asset built into our campus.”

Mackey added: “The new data center would bring potential for smart campus technology, artificial intelligence research, experimental and digital learning, jobs for students, and the local economy.”

In the RFP, the University describes its project as a “colocation Edge data center in the sub-30MW range serving a mix of tenants.” In addition, OU is interested in colocating some or all of its high-performance computing infrastructure in the data center, but does not expect to be the sole or primary tenant of the data center.

OU aims to retain ownership of the land but to transfer all “design, build, finance, operating, and maintenance risk, including the securing of tenants, to a third-party Project Team.”

The data center will also be required to include a 1,000 sq ft (93 sqm) office space for OU’s AI Institute, and dedicate 2,000 sq ft (186 sqm) to OU’s compute infrastructure, which at the time of requesting bids does not exceed 1MW of capacity. The full expected size of the data center has not been stated.

The data center is required to recapture heat and send it back to the OU central heating plant.

Bids are due by July 29, 2025, though according to Mackey, OU has already received interest from 32 companies, and is currently working with the Brailsford and Dunlavey consulting firm, which will evaluate the proposals and make recommendations to the university.

A company will be selected in August, with a proposal made to the board of trustees in October.

OU currently operates the Matilda HPC cluster, which is comprised of 40 standard compute nodes, each with 192 GB of RAM and 40 CPU Cores at 2.50 GHz; 10 high throughout nodes, each with 192 GB of RAM and 8 CPU Cores at 3.80 GHz; four large memory nodes, each with 768 GB RAM and 40 CPU Cores at 2.50 GHz; four hybrid nodes, each with capacity to include specialized accelerator cards or GPUs and 40 CPU Cores at 2.50 GHz; and three GPU nodes, each with 4 NVIDIA Tesla V100 16G GPUs with NVLink, 192 GB RAM and 48 CPU Cores at 2.10 GHz.

According to DataCenterMap, Michigan has 53 data centers across 11 markets, with the majority in Detroit. Operators include EdgeConneX, US Signal, ManagedWay, 123Net, 365 Data Centers, and Cogent.