Anti-tech sentiment ignoring staggering job and revenue projections
A growing number of Wisconsin communities are choosing to act against considerable economic interest and sit out the data center revolution.
The economic benefits of a multibillion-dollar project — a construction boom, a property tax bonanza and the kind of jobs that could carry a whole region into the future — are apparent.
So, too, is the success of a tightly focused misinformation campaign waged by well-financed advocates from outside of these communities. Right now, facts, guarantees and reassurances are no match for the satisfaction of having beaten back or at least stalled the Trojan-horse data centers carrying the real invader, artificial intelligence.
“I call it the Boogeyman Industry right now,” Ron Brisbois, Grant County’s longtime economic development director, said. “You have people from the outside throwing anything against data centers that will stick. Locally, these people are intimidating and bullying people.”
When data center developers first approached Brisbois, he reckoned that at minimum their project would be three times bigger than the largest development in the history of Grant County, the $350 million A.Y. McDonald brass foundry in Dickeyville.
The foundry, which is nearing startup later this year, was approved with virtually no public opposition despite projected annual water use greater than any data center currently under construction in Wisconsin, Brisbois said.
The data center promised the Town of Cassville at the very minimum $5.5 million a year in property taxes, a boon for public schools that have shrunk or disappeared along with the population, which in the Village of Cassville had dropped from 900 a decade ago to 760 at the end of last year.
In addition to the hundreds of jobs for the people erecting the data centers on the campus, the proposal held out the prospect of at least 50 permanent jobs at the centers for a village and town that has been in an economic freefall since the Nelson Dewey and E. J. Stoneman generating stations both closed in 2015, putting 100 people out of work.
The Badger Institute has for the past three years reported on the economic bounty of data centers and AI (here and here and here and here and here and here and here).
There are staggering economic numbers attached to the Vantage data center project in Port Washington and the Microsoft project in Mount Pleasant. Microsoft this month announced the completion of its first data center at its site just west of Racine and creation of “the world’s most powerful supercomputer.”
The two projects are responsible for more than $22 billion in total investment, 7,000 construction jobs, a combined construction payroll of more than $880 million, a projected 1,800 permanent jobs, and another 4,200 indirect jobs, according to the Data Center Resource Hub, curated by M7, the economic development arm of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce.
When Meta announced a third major data center project, in Beaver Dam, the numbers were similar: more than 1,000 skilled trade construction jobs, 100 permanent jobs.
Meta guaranteed to pay for $200 million in energy network upgrades, utility substations, and transmission lines. All water used at the centers when operational would be reclaimed for reuse and the cooling of supercomputers would be done through a closed loop system, just like the other two hyperscale projects in progress in the state
And while those projects have not yet begun generating property taxes, there is ample evidence nationally that taxpayers benefit from data centers.
In just six years in Loudoun County, Virginia, considered the data center hub of the U.S., tax revenue collected on computer equipment alone increased from $330 million to $1.4 billion by the end of 2026.
By 2030, computer equipment taxes could reach $2.5 billion for a county whose entire budget is $4.7 billion in 2026, with a record $2.1 billion going to its county public school system. Loudoun County’s take is so large, fiscal managers last year urged cutting rates to stem excessive revenue.
Wisconsin is different. It doesn’t levy property taxes on businesses’ equipment. And increased tax revenue for general uses won’t be realized in Port Washington, for instance, until tax incremental financing is paid off. But TIFs do expire and real estate tax revenue will increase.
People in Wisconsin aren’t getting the message. In June, nine communities and counties across the state have either declared outright moratoriums on data centers or have called for reviews of their zoning codes that could be used to block data centers.
Last week, under intense public pressure, the Janesville City Council chose to break off talks with a data center developer about a demolished former General Motors assembly plant, a site that has been off the tax rolls since 2008.
Neighbors are raising environmental and water use concerns over a 2 million square foot data center recently proposed in the Town of Beloit.
More stoppages are on their way, in places that have never had an inquiry from a developer.
Tricia Braun, executive director of the Wisconsin Data Center Coalition, agrees with Brisbois that the message being delivered far more successfully is the one that an environmental advocate, the Sierra Club, calls its “Big Tech Unchecked Toolkit.”
“We must ensure that Wisconsinites do not subsidize Big Tech billionaires through higher energy bills,” according to the Sierra Club campaign strategy, reported Power the Future, a nonprofit favoring rural energy development, in April.
That verbatim language has made its way onto several local Facebook pages like those in Cassville and the Village of DeForest, where “No Data Center in DeForest” drew almost 4,000 members and helped drive away an inquiry by QTS Data Centers of Sterling, Va. earlier this year.
While always presented in stories as “local volunteers,” organizers of the “No Data Centers in the Driftless” Facebook page, Pete Moris and Melodie Betts, are people who made careers elsewhere before moving back to Grant County. Moris spent 17 years in strategic communications with the Kansas City Chiefs NFL franchise.
After the No Data Centers page spread the word, hundreds of people showed up for a rally to protest the Cassville project in March. At the end of April, the Cassville Town Board codified public sentiment with a moratorium.
Grant County and several other Grant County towns also declared moratoriums.
“My theory, not gospel by any means, is there were folks who wanted a data center who didn’t think little old Cassville Township could do anything to stop it, Moris put it. “It’s kind of that David and Goliath thing.”
“If you know them both, protest is what they do and that’s OK,” Brisbois said. “But the local press hasn’t been fair. That news is at the top of stories. The economic benefits, if they’re even in the story, are buried at the bottom.”
In the last month alone, Dane, Dodge, Shawano and Winnebago counties, the Village of Wrightstown, and the cities of Delavan, Superior, Wausau and Milwaukee have passed decisions to in some way halt data center development.
“Right now, if you’re an official, you aren’t getting up in front of anybody and saying you’re in favor of a data center,” Braun says. “It’s suicide.”
The backlash is bound to show up in bills in the next session of the Legislature. In the last term, Democrats in both chambers proposed a bill that called for a statewide moratorium on any further data center development until the Legislature signs off on detailed and comprehensive standards.
Bills to ensure that developers pay for power grid infrastructure and prohibit local governments from entering into non-disclosure agreements with data center companies had bipartisan support but also flaws that stalled them. They will almost certainly be introduced in the next session.
There were also partisan bills that Democrats introduced with progressive labor and renewable energy requirements sure to drive off prospective developers. Those, too, may come back.
Although the developer has stopped contacting him, Brisbois refuses to consider the Cassville proposal to be dead. And he believes taxpayers in Grant County are sincerely interested in understanding what they stand to gain from a data center.
“Is it a majority of the people?” Brisbois said. “Let’s just say a majority of the people here are hungry for the truth about data centers.”
Mark Lisheron is a contributing journalist of the Badger Institute.
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