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Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)
- marticode 5mo agoWell my IP (regular plain residential Asian ISP) is blocked on this site. Zealous Cloudflare-blocking is breaking the web. (also thanks for the useful message telling me to "contact the website owner... while blocking me from the website where the contact info should be)
- kogasa240p 5mo agoMicrosoft has decided not to move forward with its proposed site for a data center in the Village of Caledonia after facing significant community pushback from residents. Posted and last updated VILLAGE OF CALEDONIA, Wis. — Microsoft has decided not to move forward with its proposed site for a data center in the Village of Caledonia after facing significant community pushback from residents. PREVIOUS COVERAGE | Microsoft data center proposal continues to divide Caledonia residents as rezoning plans move forward “Based on the community feedback we heard, we have chosen not to move forward with this site,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement Wednesday. The tech giant’s decision comes after hundreds of residents voiced opposition to the project over recent weeks. More than 2,000 people signed a petition opposing a rezoning proposal that would have allowed the data center to be built on 244 acres of land. Watch: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia after community pushback The proposed site was situated on County Line Road and State Highway 32, southwest of the WE Energies Oak Creek Power Plant, and was surrounded by farmland and residential properties. 47032805-Concept Site Plan - Project Nova by TMJ4 News Despite abandoning this particular location, Microsoft indicated it remains interested in investing in Southeast Wisconsin. The spokesperson said the company looks forward to “working with the Village of Caledonia and Racine County leaders to identify a site that aligns with community priorities and our long-term development goals.” TMJ4’s Jenna Rae, who has been following this story, reached out to Todd Willis, the village administrator, who provided the following statement: “Nothing official has been submitted to the Village regarding their pending application, and have no comment until such time.” - Todd Willis, Village Administrator Resident Prescott Balch told TMJ4 that his phone did not stop ringing on Wednesday morning, as people delivered the news. PRESCOTT BALCH TMJ4 Prescott Balch lives in Caledonia. Balch welcomed the news that Microsoft is changing plans to bring a data center in the area. "We're ecstatic that those arguments held water and ultimately convinced a large corporation to back off, so great day here in Caledonia," Balch said. Village trustee Nancy Pierce says she learned about the change from a news article. "I have a lot of respect for Microsoft, making the decision when they say they listened to the constituents. They also listened to board questions both at the planning commission at the board level. I believe that they took a lot of different pieces of information into play," Pierce stated. Nancy Pierce TMJ4 News Nancy Pierce is a village trustee in Caledonia. Both Pierce and Balch made it clear that they are not opposed to working with Microsoft in Caledonia. As the tech giant looks for a new site, there is hope that there are improvements to the overall process. "I would’ve liked to been able to engage directly with Microsoft much earlier in the process. We were not allowed to do that. I think that became an obstacle for a lot of different points and reasons," Pierce explained. "I feel like now they would come forward much quicker and engage directly with the community, really get to understand the community." "There are people that have an opinion about what they want to do with their village, and that was absent in this to me. That's the real message of this thing," Balch explained. "Let's help Microsoft find the right spot in southeast Wisconsin."
- isodev 5mo agoIt's amazing how after all these years, tech world still believes it's a good idea to sell the entrance to their websites and services to the same bouncer. Cloudflare not in the mood for your IP/ISP/Country? Tough cookies.
- llm_nerd 5mo agoIn this case a site is geoblocking. It's an affiliate station is Wisconsin, serving up local news. Sites have been using things like MaxMind and blanket blocking entire regions long before Cloudflare. If you've run a site like that, pretty soon you realize 100% of the traffic that hits you from Asia, Russia, the Middle East and even Eastern Europe / the Baltics is exploit detection scripts and is just noise in your logs. Okay, 99.999999% as once every decade something ends up on HN and gets a broader audience.
- isodev 5mo agoThis is such a narrow PoV and I don't see how it relates to Cloudflare currently being de factor gatekeeper for every web properly of consequence. What's the point of publishing news or content on the web if you don't want it to be accessible? What about locals who travel? What about locals who share links with others?
- llm_nerd 5mo agoYou brought up Cloudflare, when in reality this site went into their caching services configuration and purposefully enabled geofencing restrictions. They could have done this a million ways, and Cloudflare is basically irrelevant to this conversation, and is utterly fungible. >What's the point of publishing news or content on the web if you don't want it to be accessible Because you don't want the burden of far away users who will never represent a penny of income for your content? This is a weirdly entitled comment. Quite aside from certain countries disproportionately account for malicious traffic, often there are legal issues that come into play as well. This is why many regional sites block EU locations because they don't want the compliance costs for users that aren't their base.
- dylan604 5mo agoI'm not defending Cloudflare, but what is a better solution? If small websites can just be DDOS'd out of existence because some group thinks it'll be funny, what protections do they have? It takes too much equipment and know-how to stop an attack for people to be able to survive online. The next thing you'll hear about is a monthly service fee to the hackers as a protection racket just like the mob.
- deely3 5mo agoAnd don't forget about kids safety!
- PunchyHamster 5mo agonah they will be selling their service to both hackers and their targets
- somenameforme 5mo agoThe site's also blocked for me, also on a normal residential IP. Making your site inaccessible for people out of fear that somebody might make it inaccessible for people feels reminiscent of blockading the strait because you don't want the strait blockaded.
- expedition32 5mo agoThe internet is killing itself. And no I do not blame small website owners they just have to live with this mess same as everyone else.
- dantillberg 5mo ago> feels reminiscent of blockading the strait because you don't want the strait blockaded I think this is a poor analogy, unnecessarily politicizing the topic. It might be a good analogy the other way around, if hackers DDOSed the website as revenge for partial IP-based blocking, in order to apply pressure to the website operator to remove IP-based blocking. But that wasn't the topic.
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- PunchyHamster 5mo agoblock was enabled by site owner, not cloudflare. If they used something else they'd just blanked block ASN IP blocks
- zinekeller 5mo agoAnd as stated by others, it's about not complying with GDPR et al. Heck, this is not even Cloudflare, it's AWS Cloudfront!
- Symbiote 5mo agoThe site works fine from the EU.
- not_a_bot_4sho 5mo ago> (also thanks for the useful message telling me to "contact the website owner... while blocking me from the website where the contact info should be) I hit this a lot with Firefox VPN and it's ridiculous
- sammy2255 5mo agoYou could use a search engine to find their contact information
- theflyinghorse 5mo agoI don't understand why cloudflare is loved by tech people. They ARE breaking the web.
- throwaway2037 5mo agoReal question: What is the alternative to prevent DDoS? The killer app is that their DDoS prevention is free for small sites.
- toast0 5mo agoMost sites can probably make do with ddos mitigation from their hosting provider. Larger hosting providers may have enough bandwidth to accept and drop most inbound volumetric DDoS. Smaller providers often contract with a DDoS mitigation service; during an attack the mitigation service BGP announces the attacked range, filters out problematic traffic and forwards the rest. It's been at least 7 years since I ran servers that routinely saw DDoS... at that time, we didn't tend to attract attacks anywhere near 10Gbps, so having 10G connections for severs likely to be targetted did most of the work. I'm sure it's worse now, so 10G might not cover easy attacks but 100G servers aren't hard to find. Attacks do get larger than 100G, but most sites won't be hit with a large attack. For a small site, taking an outage during a DDoS is often an acceptable alternative too.
- Mickelby 5mo agoIf you run a website then you quickly learn that 99% of traffic is bots/spam/scam/ai, and will overwhelm your resources. You can block it with the click of a (Cloudflare) button. There is nothing to consider here.
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- arjie 5mo agoWhat is the actual procedure through which this happens? You buy the land and then are granted permission on a discretionary basis? It seems to me that if you were a small business this becomes much harder to participate in because you need to acquire and hold the unproductive asset. This would mean that land use tends towards that which large firms (which can sustain the costs easily by self-financing) find useful.
- delfinom 5mo agoZoning laws. Many parts of the US but not all have land use zoning. The zoning for any property you buy is public record, so any business knows well in advance of what they are buying. If you want to deviate from the zoning you have to submit an application for that zoning variance which requires usually a community hearing. Neither small or large businesses really have any big advantages here. Got to win over the community. If anything, the small business may be local and the operators more readily able to convince the community for a variance than some corporate lawyer.
- bobthepanda 5mo agoAlso for a large enough utility hookup you will need to coordinate with the utility and or government since you can’t just plop down a large consumer on any old power line or pipe.
- thewebguyd 5mo agoZoning is only part of it. If a plot is already zoned industrial, but is empty, you still need to get the permitting for building construction, utility hookup, waste water & stormwater, environmental inspections, etc. It varies from state to state (and city specific laws), but to go from empty land to productive asset can take several years.
- cucumber3732842 5mo agoOr better yet, farmer Johnson lets his D rate hay plot grow over because he never really thought it was worth it and the son that was managing that plot left for college. Someone buys the plot 30yr later. They can't clear it and farm it without spending a quarter mil on environmental permitting because the government sees it as a pre-existing forest and the drainage ditch farmer Johnson's dad dug back in 1988 is now a stream (i.e. protected wetland) so they want the new owner to get the same permits that someone bulldozing a swamp for a strip mall would. You see comparable fact patterns on every axis of regulation.
- delecti 5mo agoMy first reaction is that 244 acres for a data center sounds absolutely obscene. But I have to admit that I'm coming from a place of ignorance. How big "should" a data center be? How big are some other data centers? How big is us-east-1, for an example of a large one? I'm finding this to be rather difficult information to google.
- jeffbee 5mo agoAlmost all of the site would have been open space, existing transmission corridors, an electric substation, and two flood control ponds they threw in to try to sweeten the deal by offsetting the new impermeable surfaces. The data halls are a small portion of the site.
- dqv 5mo agoStormwater ponds are the bare minimum, not a deal sweetener. A deal sweetener would be an ecological management plan which demonstrates a true desire to limit the environmental impacts of this development as much as possible. And no, a storm pond company that just pours chemicals into the water to control algae and plants invasive privets around does not demonstrate that. You're saying the data center has a small footprint, but it does not. You don't need that much stormwater pond if you don't have giant impervious surfaces. Deal sweetener is footprint (buildings, parking lots, and substation) being 1/6 of the land with the other 5/6 dedicated to nature preservation. Not all wide open space is created equal. If it's wide open space with Eurasian grasses that get cut every few weeks, it's useless and has 0 benefit to the local ecology. Even if they weren't cut, they're still do very little for the ecology in the area. If those forests don't have keystone tree species, then it's the same. The people running these companies are so incompetent, they can't even do greenwashng right.
- jeffbee 5mo agoI think you're a little miscalibrated on "giant impervious surface". The 244-acre site in question would have had three data halls, a substation, and one assumes parking lots and aprons. Here's a 300-acre Walmart distribution center in the same region. It has about 100 acres of concrete. I think that's a lot more than the data center would have had. https://www.google.com/maps/search/Walmart+Distribution+Center/@43.5123707,-88.8039434,2516m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDUyMC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/search/Walmart+Distribution+Cent...
- jeffbee 5mo agoWealthy white exclave succeeds in using environmental justice language to keep cheap coal-fired power to themselves. Very American outcome. Although I obviously don't care about Microsoft's outcome here, this was clearly a great site at the intersection of two transmission lines and with essentially infinite water resources. The data center would have been built in this scene. https://www.google.com/maps/@42.8440852,-87.8474228,2445m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDUyMC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/@42.8440852,-87.8474228,2445m/da...
- trollbridge 5mo agoSome of us would like to keep our “infinite” water resources which actually aren’t infinite. I live beneath two transmission lines (overlapping, I guess, but not intersecting) and would prefer no data centre built here. Why? Because it will provide me no benefit whatsoever, reduce my property value, and worsen my quality of life due to things like light pollution and noise. If data centre operators would fix these things perhaps people would feel differently. For example - provide multi gigabit fibre Internet to everyone nearby.
- jeffbee 5mo agoI support in principle the rights of towns to set their own land use rules, but on the larger societal picture I don't support people benefiting from things like intermodal shipping, goods distribution, and information services that they refuse to host. So I perceive a certain hypocrisy in this story.
- 3eb7988a1663 5mo agoSurely I benefit from a host of things for which I want nowhere near me. Strip mining, petroleum refining, chemical processing, coal fired electricity, etc. Am I allowed any autonomy or must we all accept that if a rich group wants to plop down a leather tanning factory across the street, I should have no recourse?
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- rbanffy 5mo agoFor a moment I thought they were referring to the Scottish Highlands, but I guess the name fell in disuse when the Roman Empire fell...
- Danox 5mo agoProbably a wise decision on their part Microsoft already is all in on Copilot AI if it fails, the CEO probably is gone.
- simonebrunozzi 5mo agoAre you sure? AFAIK, Satya did a great job from the point of view of a shareholder - +1,200% from 2014 to today [0] [0]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/stock-price-history https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/sto...
- Ampersander 5mo agoThat was then. Today the stock is trading at a lower price than in May 2024. Google is up over 100% in that time.
- shimman 5mo agoNot that impressive when MSFT has a monopoly in several verticals that allows them to subsidize their many failures.
- thewebguyd 5mo agoThey're already backtracking on, at least, the consumer Copilot being shoved everywhere in Windows. I think Nadella is already on his way out though (voluntarily). Judson Athoff is already taking over as "CEO of Commercial Businesses" so Nadella can be closer to engineering, which he's said he misses.
- ralph84 5mo agoOne of the emails that came out in the Musk v. OpenAI trial was Nadella in 2022 saying he wanted to own the entire AI stack. Four years later Microsoft is no closer to owning any part of the AI stack. Complete fumble of the bag.
- bigdick1 5mo ago[dead]
- sterlind 5mo agoit's not the size of the chip, it's the motion of the digitalocean.
- 3eb7988a1663 5mo agoNotably, this location is not far from where the Foxconn facility was going to be installed (the "eighth wonder of the world", 10k+ jobs, yada yada). After that debacle, I can imagine local residents are deeply skeptical of new big development projects.
- pathartl 5mo agoIt's about 15 miles north. Microsoft is already building a data center on some of the land that Foxconn didn't use
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- ChrisArchitect 5mo ago(2025) OP.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- simianwords 5mo agoI wonder if USA would have futuristic Datacenter Towns much like coal mining towns - they might have their own lore, vibe and aesthetic about them. Certain new emerging towns would get the moniker of "DC towns". New economies might flourish - perhaps not jobs from DC but certainly the tax money should help. This could happen if the NIMBY movement weren't so extreme.
- saulpw 5mo agoIf it actually helped the economies flourish, then that would be interesting. NIMBY is in some part a reaction to the belief (likely true) that there would be neither jobs nor tax money from a data center in their community backyard--it's all downside with no upside.
- simianwords 5mo agoThe Loudoun county has Datacenters that pay enough in taxes equalling the salary of 30k residents earning $40k dollars each (in a county of ~400k population). This is a shockingly high upside relative to any other industry, like Car or Steel industry which pollute way more. These taxes can be used to create better infra and have other things going on. Better schools and maybe even research facilities. But I do think the opposition is largely ideological in nature so these arguments don't matter at the end.
- JuniperMesos 5mo agoTaxes have relatively little to do with how good schools are, that is dominated by the quality of the students who live close enough to attend the schools.
- y1n0 5mo agoI can't believe you blame students for bad schools.
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- dmix 5mo agoI'd say they should come build them in Canada instead since our energy is cheaper, but anti-industrial development policy and NIMBYism is even more embedded than America, which is probably why no one is bothering.
- SecretDreams 5mo agoI think it's less this and more they're encouraged to build in America over Canada.
- LogicFailsMe 5mo agoAt what point was this datacenter going to benefit the residents beyond a trifling number of jobs in exchange for draining local resources for pennies on the dollar Microsoft should have paid? If the tech companies can't make these things into genuine win/win scenarios, then don't let them build anything, they're currently as useless to local communities as stadiums except you don't even get to watch games in them. Absolutely 100% force them to make a genuine case for them and to sign contracts demanding they live up to their obligations. Otherwise, it's more evidence why billionaires need to write and sign some reality checks on their dragon piles.