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Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers
- bell-cot 8mo agoThe most important news is in the subtitle - > Wisconsin has now joined several states with legislative proposals to make the process more transparent. Legislative or constitutional, good democratic government really needs limits on how much its supposed officials can do in secret.
- rayiner 8mo agoI agree, but what do you do when people are steeped in misinformation about water use and 5G signals?
- nemo 8mo agoYou can tell them the truth, you could do public reach out, you could do a whole lot of things. Secret back-room deals deliberately hidden from the public who will (justifiably) assume maliciousness just creates even worse PR, less trust, and opens up avenues of corruption and abuse.
- hallway_monitor 8mo agoDoesn't everyone know that dihydrogen monoxide can be lethal? https://www.csun.edu/science/ref/humor/dhmo.html https://www.csun.edu/science/ref/humor/dhmo.html
- throwhn1232 8mo agoThen you don’t get to build there, obviously. "Oh they’re too stupid to know better, let’s do what we want anyway" doesn’t seem like a sane solution, especially since the framework would be just as applicable to actually undesirable industrial plants and the like. They’re free to convince/bribe the people to allow it, not just push the poors around
- newsclues 8mo agoSecrecy needs a time limit.
- hrimfaxi 8mo agoWhy do we allow municipalities to keep secrets in the first place? Unless it is personnel-related it should be public. If the communications happened on taxpayer funded equipment they should be open.
- bloak 8mo agoThey'll tell you it needs to be confidential "for commercial reasons". They always do.
- petcat 8mo agoIn a lot of cases, it's the only way that municipalities can submit bids for projects they want. And in the commercial space the bidding process is usually confidential. So it's just basically a requirement of public private partnership. Of course the municipality could just say that they don't want the project and they won't submit a bid. That's fine too.
- buellerbueller 8mo agoMunicipalities should not be bidding on corporate benefaction; this is exactly the opposite of how the relationship between the public and private sector should be.
- imglorp 8mo agoIt's literally "we the people, by the people, for the people". Except for personnel/employee matters, state and local government should be completely transparent with secrets explicitly forbidden. Secret deals with corporations is corruption.
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- CodeCompost 8mo ago> Now Meta, the trillion-dollar company How is it that Meta is worth a trillion dollars?
- pixl97 8mo agoTurns out sucking up all the information there is and displaying ads is worth a lot.
- parpfish 8mo agoThat’s still a little mind boggling. They don’t make anything or directly help somebody else make something. they provide a platform that can maybe sometimes nudges an individual purchasing decisions in one direction.
- simonw 8mo agoThey capture around 15% of global ad spending. $200bn annual revenue with a 5x sales multiple gets you to a trillion dollars.
- celticninja 8mo agobecause it is all made up
- nythroaway048 8mo agoThis is happening all over the country. This is the Disney World playbook; people in these towns should understand what their land is worth to companies like Meta et al, and make a decision after having all the facts laid out for them in public.
- yunohn 8mo ago> “I know the opponents currently disagree, but I think the city acted in as transparent a way as they could,” Campbell said. The audacity of public officials these days is astounding.
- engelo_b 8mo ago[dead]
- parpfish 8mo agoDo data centers create that many jobs? Especially if you break it down by jobs per sqft, I can’t imagine it compares well to any other type of industrial development
- infecto 8mo agoThey bring in temporary construction jobs but once running they provide no meaningful jobs.
- parpfish 8mo agoIf we just want to front load a bunch of construction jobs, I vote for some megalithic stone structures. Let’s give something to the archeologists 5,000 years in the future.
- irishcoffee 8mo agoThey neither directly create many long-term jobs or use copious amounts of water. If we haven't collectively established at this point that LLMs, data centers, "AI", "the next industrial revolution" are created and controlled by the wealthiest people in the world, and said people don't give a fuck about anything but money and power, we're hopeless. The elite don't care about jobs, or water. At all. If I were wrong, the whole charade would have been shut down after LLMs convinced people to kill themselves. We have regulations on top of regulations in all corners of the US because of the "Safety" boogieman. I wish we had the same riots about LLMs that we do about other things. If this isn't the biggest evidence yet that social unrest is engineered I'm not sure what would be more convincing.
- bayindirh 8mo ago> use copious amounts of water. If you're in Europe and/or using completely closed loop systems, then yes. Your only water use is humidifiers, and maybe the sprayers you use on drycoolers in the summer months. On the other hand, if you use water spraying into air as heat absorption system or use open loop external circuits, you're using literally tons of water. Source: Writing this comment from a direct liquid cooled data center.
- delichon 8mo agoNIMBY for data centers is opportunity for SpaceX. When they saturate the demand for communication, data processing demand will be ramping up with no apparent ceiling. The merger between SpaceX and xAI positions them to benefit both from the AI revolution, and from the resistance to it. It's like a hypothetical 19th century textile company that managed to profit from Luddite riots by using them to help move production to Umpa Loompa.
- outside1234 8mo agoIs this satire? I can't even tell anymore. If so, bravo.
- brightball 8mo agoYep. That was my first thought when I saw the SpaceX & xAI merger news. https://www.wsj.com/tech/bezos-and-musk-race-to-bring-data-centers-to-space-faa486ee https://www.wsj.com/tech/bezos-and-musk-race-to-bring-data-c... https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/01/technology/space-data-centers-ai.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/01/technology/space-data-cen...
- timmg 8mo agoDo data centers in space actually make sense? I can’t figure out how that’s possible. But some people seem to believe they do(?)
- janice1999 8mo ago> Do data centers in space actually make sense? No. It's currently a fantasy. Even if the cost of getting payloads to orbit decreased another x100, you still have the issues of radiation and heat dissipation.
- simianwords 8mo agothis will age poorly. you have both Google, Tesla/X betting on it. They are not stupid and probably have given it way more thought than people's whose paycheques not tied to this have thought about. This is an ambitious bet, with some possibility of failure but it should say a lot that these companies are investing in them. I wonder what people think, are these companies so naive? Edit: Elon, Sundar, Jensen, Jeff are all interested in this. Even China is. What conspiracy is going on here to explain it? Why would they all put money into this if it is so obvious to all of you that it is not going to work?
- phkahler 8mo agoThere is an obvious question I don't see anyone asking. Why do these data centers have to be built in every state? I guarantee it's not to run LLMs.
- 542458 8mo agoSame reason the F35 manufacture is awkwardly distributed throughout the US - the shore up political support (voting to kill jobs in your state is usually unpopular) and dip into as many subsidies as possible.
- brandonb 8mo agoNASA got its support in much the same way during the space race. Spreading the jobs widely is a good way to get political support.
- janice1999 8mo agoData centers don't create local jobs once construction is complete. 40 people, most remote, can run a data center. The F-35 program claims to have over 250,000 people employed in its supply chain in the US and has large factories with high paying, often unionised jobs.
- briffle 8mo agoI hear that argument, but a relative has been an elecrtrician that started out working mostly at the original facebook datacenter in 2016 or so. he now owns the business, and his single biggest client is still the facebook datacenter. Constant additions, reconfigurations, etc.
- andruby 8mo agoShould still be orders different from a the continuous labor intensive manufacturing of F35's
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- lapcat 8mo agoCapitalism as we're taught from economics textbooks does not exist in our reality. The theory is that sellers are supposed to compete among themselves to attract consumers. Instead we have local, state, and even national governments competing among themselves to attract sellers. And of course political election campaigns are mostly privately funded, so even the kind of competition that does exist is rarely "meritocratic," and it's certainly not democratic (small d). The wheels are greased in various ways, with campaign contributions in office and cushy corporate jobs afterward. You might say, "the public should stop electing corrupt representatives," but again, our political system is based on private funding of election campaigns, so the system practically requires financial corruption. The political duopoly is an advertising duopoly: politicians can't spread their message without money, which is why alternative parties are trapped forever in obscurity. Advertising is the price of admission to the debate. The for-profit news media conspires in this system by refusing coverage, and media-sponsored debate invitations, to candidates without money, allegedly because they're not "viable," a Catch-22 situation.
- outside1234 8mo agoSomeone is going to have to explain to me why anything at the state or local level should be allowed to be secret like I am two years old because I don't get how this helps citizens.
- jeffbee 8mo agoIt helps because the NDA enables a regulatory function of the local government that they otherwise wouldn't have. If there's no state or local statute that says the proponent has to reveal a given fact to the local government, then the local government has no way to demand it. The NDA is a negotiating instrument, they get to know the thing they want to know without having to go pass a law.
- comrade1234 8mo agoI wouldn't mind if they put one in Douglas county where I have a cabin. It would hopefully get some of the locals off government disability payments which seems to be the main income source there.
- chasd00 8mo agoFtfa “ The lack of public disclosure, while relatively common for typical development proposals in the planning stages…” Sounds like it’s not something new or reserved for data enter projects only but I agree it sure seems a shady practice.
- dguest 8mo agoI'd like to hear the argument for why this is needed. I can imagine a number of reasons, but this is all I found in the article: > If I’m a company considering making strategic investments... I don’t want my competition to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what pace I’m doing it at... You want to make sure everything is buttoned up and bow tied before that type of information is put into the public realm. I'm having trouble with this. Is the worry that Amazon will outbid or outmaneuver Meta? How does this work in practice? Whereas everyone here seems to assume it's to avoid NIMBY. I can see how a Meta spokesperson won't say "if we told you we're trashing your land you'd object" but I'd hope they could come up with a better argument than "your community is a pawn in a 5d chess game, better that you don't know".
- infecto 8mo agoI wish I had better hard numbers on it but from my experience, it’s not unusual for large buildouts, say for example a manufacturing plant to happen with NDAs until you get at least initial sign offs. Land, county, electric grid, water etc. There is a component of not wanting the competition know exactly what your doing but also it’s usually better for most parties including the constituents to not know about it until it’s at least in a plausible state. Thought differently, it’s not even worth talking about with the public until it’s even a viable project.
- GorbachevyChase 8mo agoI can’t give you a number, but I work in the space and it is very common. It’s not just industrial sites; it can just be a new bank headquarters.
- a2128 8mo agoThis is a scary argument. Should we also ban car emissions/safety testing, because Volvo's competitors might discern something from the results? Should we also stop FCC certification because competitors might glean information out of a device's radio characteristics? The local residents, if not the public at large, should have a right to know. If not, then it should go both ways and grocery stores shouldn't be allowed to use tracking because my personal enemies might discern something from the milk brand I'm buying
- onionisafruit 8mo agoI’m having trouble with the football-field to acre conversion in this article. It talks about the complex being the size 12 football fields and the data center being 520 acres. I could believe it if those numbers were swapped and there was a 12 football field data center in a 520 acre complex. So I don’t know if they swapped the sizes of the complex and the actual data center or the author thinks football fields are much larger than they really are.
- irishcoffee 8mo agoYeah, as you say, 12 football fields are an order of magnitude smaller than 500+ acres.
- bluedino 8mo agoFor non-Americans, an American Football field is about 1-1/3 acres, a little smaller than a football/soccer field at about 1-3/4 acres
- rkomorn 8mo agoNot sure if serious because you're converting from football fields to acres, but the acre is another unit that non-Americans generally don't use.
- tzs 8mo agoAcres are still widely used in the UK and Ireland for measuring rural and agricultural land. The legal documents for the land will use hectares, but lots of people and documents will use acres outside of legal documents. India has has a substantial number of acre users.
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- timmg 8mo agoI find it strange how data centers are getting (sorta) vilified. I keep hearing stories on NPR that are kinda subtle fear-mongering. Like data centers are probably the least bad thing to build nearby. They take in power and produce computer. No pollution, no traffic, no chemicals or potential explosions. They do take power. But, like, we know how to generate electricity. And solar is getting really cheap.
- infecto 8mo agoYeah it’s wild to me to. Especially as I think rising rates are getting misaligned with data centers. I am sure the continued demand has added to some of the costs but people are forgetting most of the US grid is ancient and largely neglected. When building a facility requiring large electric or water usage that facility is usually paying large upfront costs to get connected with 10 or 20 year contracts. It’s a pretty unique time we live in where economic growth is seen as negative.
- ecshafer 8mo agoIts pure fearmongering by the opposition. Before NPR became a total meme, they used to be overly crunchy granola and against all technological or industrial advancement. They are just getting back to their roots.
- barbazoo 8mo agoYes pollution. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/29/gas-power-ai-climate https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/29/gas-powe...
- agscala 8mo agoMy understanding is that they use up a lot of water and electricity, driving costs up for local residents. Datacenters are asking for tax breaks because they "contribute back to the local economy". In most cases however, the added jobs are mostly temporary (construction) In short, they're asking residents to pay for some short-term jobs and long-term utility price increases. A bad deal if you ask me
- tdb7893 8mo ago
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- StarterPro 8mo agoThere is no need for this many data centers. LLMs are a scourge on humanity as they are currently implemented, and what will they do when these are no longer needed? I can't wait until OpenAI, NVIDIA and Microsoft all go belly up.
- spaceribs 8mo agoI can't wait for cheap RAM and SSDs to flood the market...
- riskable 8mo ago> what will they do when these are no longer needed? Bitcoin—>Altcoin—>NFTs—>StableCoin—>AI—>They'll just invent something new to over-hype and spend billions on. It won't end until we reach the Shoe Event Horizon.
- 52-6F-62 8mo agoI'm not sure it's that linear https://www.thenerdreich.com/network-state-comes-for-venezuela/ https://www.thenerdreich.com/network-state-comes-for-venezue...
- Cthulhu_ 8mo agoThe compute will find a use case; if the AI bubble bursts I'm sure all the excess capacity will be rerouted to crypto again. But also, there's still plenty of usage in chatbots or image / video generation, I'm not convinced that will just stop.
- GorbachevyChase 8mo agoA scourge? I get some kind of valuable use from it almost every day. This criticism sounds completely out of touch.
- croes 8mo ago> as they are currently implemented
- Noaidi 8mo agoNo say "nothing to see here" like giving people nothing to see. Also interesting that these investors could have invested in power plants to bring down people utilities but they are not interested in investing in people. When AI crashes these plants need to be stormed and taken over by the people of the community.
- lenerdenator 8mo agoKind of typical capital move; don't care about the opinions of people in places like Wisconsin - and indeed, my area in Kansas City - and instead only care about how you can squeeze profit out of them.
- xborns 8mo agoI live near one of these projects by chance. It seemed like back door deals for land which some happened to be sold by a former Oracle exec then magically the tax district approved unanimously by < 10 council people to put a tiny city of ~11,000 people on the hook for $500 million dollars in tax financing for their infrastructure? For extra fun today the WI Realtors Association and other groups are suing the city to stop an upcoming vote from an accepted petition that forced approving projects over tax financed projects $10 million dollars get voter approval. https://biztimes.com/mmac-sues-city-of-port-washington-over-referendum-related-to-tid-financing/ https://biztimes.com/mmac-sues-city-of-port-washington-over-...
- tart-lemonade 8mo agoA $500m TIF district for a city that takes in $10m annually and holds <$100m in assets? I've seen some really dumb uses for TIFs before but this might just take the cake.
- anigbrowl 8mo agoWI Realtors Association and other groups are suing the city to stop an upcoming vote Everyone likes to complain about politicians, with good reason) but we don't talk enough about the people who are trying to buy them as a means to cut out the voters.
- bespokedevelopr 8mo agoI don’t like that county officials are willing to sign NDAs in order to bring data centers to their counties. It should be public, there should be competition if it is so desirable or important to be located in that county. The leaders in these companies love to talk up free-market, but then do everything to Standard Oil their way in. I also don’t understand the vehement push back against data centers in WI. It is a prime location for both residents and business. WI and all of the upper midwest was gutted of their manufacturing in my parents time. Now companies are bringing back long term commitments and the people there don’t want it? I can understand not wanting a data center in AZ or NM. But WI has the resources, climate, and power generating capabilities to support this. There is talk of bringing back the Kewaunee nuclear plant even to support growth. How does a former manufacturing power house state, not want to bring back jobs and the tax revenue a dc will pull in? One of the boomer-issues I’ve heard, as I characterize it since it comes from my fam, is that data centers along with solar are taking away farm land and they’re pouty about it. However that farm land is soybeans grown for export to other countries, acting as a fresh water subsidy for those places. The farmers aren’t feeding the state anyways. Most of the fervent opposition however comes from my generation who are mad about AI so therefore data centers can’t be built because they don’t like it. It isn’t a very compelling argument.
- Throaway1982 8mo agoits mostly about environmental concerns, but data centres dont add nearly the amount of jobs that manufacturing had
- bespokedevelopr 8mo agoSo add 0 jobs because people don’t like chatgpt and it won’t create the same amount as 1960’s manufacturing; or add some jobs to rural WI? You only have to look at Hermiston/Umatilla OR to see how impactful data centers can be on rural communities. There’s a lot more than 40 new jobs there since Amazon started building data centers.
- Throaway1982 8mo ago
- EvanAnderson 8mo agoI live near one of these in Ohio. The municipality entered into an NDA with the buyer and the local community is having a hell of a time getting answers to questions. The buyer bought all the farms and homesteads in an 160 acre parcel (a quarter section, in surveying terms) and paid well above market rate for a lot of it. This year is a re-valuation for property tax in my county and we've seen massive valuation increases. There is speculation that the valuation algorithm is using these "motivated buyer" sales to inflate other property values even though the likelihood of similar sales occurring in the future is very slim.
- cyanydeez 8mo agoThey primary concern is these centers will force water and energy expansions and those will be equally split. Like, you go with friends to a bar, do you want your check equally split or based on drinks had? The infrastructure when exponentially above the norm should be paid by the heavy user. Currently, most utilities dont do that.
- phil21 8mo agoPower is metered. If a facility is somehow getting subsidized by the rest of the ratepayers then it’s a pricing problem that needs fixing. The issue is that we collectively decided to stop investing in energy infrastructure for 50 years or so, and now all that capital investment needs to happen at once. You can’t even build a transmission line in a reasonable timeframe due to the insane NIMBY veto we have given everyone. Typically industrial consumers of electricity with predictable 24x7 demand are a good thing for an electric grid. They actually subsidize the rest, and that’s reflected in the lower cost per watt they tend to pay the utility. If the entire interconnection is simply out of generation capacity that’s a much larger failure further upstream by regulators and voters who wanted their cake and to eat it too for many years. It’s coming for us either way if we want to remain a viable competitive economy on the world stage. You can only maximize financialization for so long until you need to start actually making stuff again.
- manIliketea 8mo ago
- cyanydeez 8mo agoFoxconn on steroids
- almosthere 8mo agoThese data centers are causing people with specific (probably autistic) hearing (disorders or specialties) to go insane. It is unfortunate that these data centers are being considered by only the electric and water issues, but not direct insanity that it causes some residents that hear the "hummmmmmmmmm"
- PTOB 8mo agoThings like this have had me scratching my head for decades. Why would local governments annex property, upgrade utilities, and build new roads without moving that burden to the entities driving those things? They routinely do this for new residential developments in many jurisdictions, refusing to annex subdivisions until the residents have paid for the utilities and roads. There seems to be no reason that the current residents of a region should consider paying for these things to benefit the owners of facilities that do not generate enough tax revenue to support the added costs. Hospitals, schools, water treatment facilities, roads for their own use may merit issuing bonds that can be paid off based on new or existing taxes. But asking folks making standard wages to pitch in over decades for a company which could pay for the needed upgrades with a few weeks of revenue makes little sense. It seems disingenuous on its face or downright negligent at worst. Does anyone have a bead on resources that could help me learn more about how all this works [or doesn't]?
- b00ty4breakfast 8mo agobecause these entities have lots of money to pay people to convince local government that they should let them build their misery factories within their jurisdictions for "muh tax revenue" (that is paltry because corporate taxes end up being cut in the race to attract these vampires) and "muh jobs" (that usually dry up once the current thing in {industry} dies and the communities get left with the refuse. see also: the fracking and natural gas boom from ~20 years ago in the rust belt and the midwest).
- mceachen 8mo agoGobsmackingly poor deals made by city and town politicians are par for the course, and why https://www.strongtowns.org/ https://www.strongtowns.org/ should be prerequisite reading for any council member, mayor, or board member approving deals that impact their community. It's easy to look at a glossy project 2-pager and only see the immediate tax revenue. It's much harder to glean a nuanced understanding of future financial burdens from a given project. No company will have any incentive to be forthright with that information.
- PTOB 8mo ago
- renewiltord 8mo agoAlmost everything in our society should be by-right not discretionary. We should make a set of rules (ideally policing by outcome - e.g. x dB and y NOx) and then allow anything that meets the rules. Our current approach allows for too much rent extraction.
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- VoidWarranty 8mo agoWisconsin runs mostly on coal power plants. It's a terrible place to build data centers. My guess is that the locals have proven themselves easily dazzled by the contract dollar amounts and arent thinking about the future. Remember the FoxConn debacle? That was WI.
- 1970-01-01 8mo agoI was about to ask where they plan on getting the extra power. They are anti solar and wind, so they will either need to burn coal or import it or both (or change the laws!)
- tfehring 8mo agoNatural gas, not coal. From Wikipedia [0], "The electrical energy generation mix in 2024 was 40.7% natural gas, 31.8% coal, 15.5% nuclear, 4.5% solar, 3% wind, 2.9% hydroelectric, 1.4% biomass (including refuse-derived fuel), and 0.2% other." The new generation capacity being added is 1.4 GW natural gas and 1.1 GW solar [1]. New coal plants aren't economical under any reasonable market assumptions anywhere in the US. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Wisconsin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Wisc... [1] https://www.wpr.org/news/we-energies-add-3gw-electric-grid-data-center-demand https://www.wpr.org/news/we-energies-add-3gw-electric-grid-d...
- w10-1 8mo agofun fact: insider trading in stocks is illegal, but insider trading in real estate is not. So if someone is even considering buying a big block of land, anyone who knows about it can buy first in the area. That drives confidentiality agreements (which increase the value of being an insider). Similarly, for large players to make large stock transactions, proceeding through the public markets led to traders seeing the bid/ask volume and act first, making it more costly. That lead to dark pools and off-exchange trading, which has become the majority (in dollar volume) since roughly 2024. So the "public" markets are now just tracking private ones.