Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

https://www.wpr.org/news/4-wisconsin-communities-signed-secrecy-deals-billion-dollar-data-centers

by sseagull • 6 months ago

336 344 6 months ago

bell-cot5• 6 months ago

The 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• 6 months ago

I agree, but what do you do when people are steeped in misinformation about water use and 5G signals?

nemo• 6 months ago

You 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• 6 months ago

Doesn't everyone know that dihydrogen monoxide can be lethal? https://www.csun.edu/science/ref/humor/dhmo.html

throwhn1232• 6 months ago

Then 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• 6 months ago

Secrecy needs a time limit.

hrimfaxi3• 6 months ago

Why 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.

imglorp• 6 months ago

It'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.

CodeCompost• 6 months ago

Now Meta, the trillion-dollar company

How is it that Meta is worth a trillion dollars?

pixl97• 6 months ago

Turns out sucking up all the information there is and displaying ads is worth a lot.

parpfish• 6 months ago

That’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• 6 months ago

They capture around 15% of global ad spending.

$200bn annual revenue with a 5x sales multiple gets you to a trillion dollars.

celticninja• 6 months ago

because it is all made up

nythroaway048• 6 months ago

This 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• 6 months 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.

delichon• 6 months ago

NIMBY 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.

outside12342• 6 months ago

Is this satire? I can't even tell anymore. If so, bravo.

brightball2• 6 months ago

Yep. 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-c...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/01/technology/space-data-cen...

timmg3• 6 months ago

Do data centers in space actually make sense? I can’t figure out how that’s possible. But some people seem to believe they do(?)

janice19993• 6 months 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.

MattSteelblade4• 6 months ago

Not even a little; doesn’t pass napkin math. It doesn’t solve any problems while adding a litany of new ones: massive radiators for heat rejection, radiation hardening, and enormous launch + repair costs (assuming repairs are even possible). The idea exists to separate investors from their money; the product is the funding round.

_ea1k• 6 months ago

I've always assumed that the answer to this would be no. However, I also always assumed that a huge space-based internet system would be both expensive and impractical for bandwidth and latency.

Starlink has largely defied those expectations thanks to their approach to optimize launch costs.

It is possible that I'm overlooking some similar fundamental advancement that would make this less impractical than it sounds. I'm still really skeptical.

mekdoonggi• 6 months ago

Wouldn't it be cheaper to buy a container ship, convert it to a data center and connect it to a bunch of floating panels?

gman2093• 6 months ago

Most systems use fresh water for cooling. Salt water can corrode pipes and deposit sediment, but maybe there's a way to use ocean water efficiently.

They also need to be powered and connected to a network, but that seems like an easier problem.

sailfast2• 6 months ago

I wouldn’t overthink the SpaceX / xAI thing. Seems to me it’s a pure financing play to blend two companies owned by the same guy that might look meh on their own to the market but have a compelling narrative about “future growth” together.

All so that the same guy who is already quite rich can continue to run his funny-up money roll-up machine, re-capitalize on a bunch of froth and leave other people holding the bag.

simianwords23• 6 months ago

what about Google? It's always the same tired thought ending cliches - companies with "bad" people do obviously "bad" thing to convince idiotic shareholders and prop up the bubble.

i keep seeing this same repeated trope again and again.

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?

DalasNoin2• 6 months ago

Space doesn't seem like a good place to build datacenters at all. Cooling is going to be an enormous issue, how do you disperse of heat in a vaccuum? Radiators are very ineffective for cooling.

whizzter• 6 months ago

Cooling is the biggest reason for space datacenters, heat is movement of particles and vacuum being an absence of particles, so it's by definition cold.

Naturally the system needs energy, the sun giving radiation convertible to electricity should enable that.

Both parts are documented about ISS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_system_of_the_Inter...

phkahler• 6 months ago

There 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• 6 months ago

Same 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• 6 months ago

NASA got its support in much the same way during the space race. Spreading the jobs widely is a good way to get political support.

janice19993• 6 months ago

Data 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.

janice19993• 6 months ago

“We’re going to have supervision,” Oracle founder Larry Ellison said. “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”

sailfast2• 6 months ago

They don’t, but Wisconsin is a pretty good spot for them.

drunner• 6 months ago

The reason likely here is water. It was the same with foxcon. They want access to Lake Michigan.

taco_emoji• 6 months ago

I have a feeling the Great Lakes Compact members will have something to say about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact

threetonesun• 6 months ago

I guess it's an answer to the obviously absurd idea that 98% of data centers be in Northern Virginia.

My less snarky answer is -- we've always had data centers all over the place? When I started in web dev we deployed to boxes running in a facility down the street. That sort of construction probably dropped considerably when everyone went to "the cloud".

Aurornis• 6 months ago

Distributing our infrastructure is a good thing.

Putting them all in one or two places isn’t good for reliability, disaster resilience, and other things that benefit from having them distributed.

Data centers do more than just run LLMs. It’s a good thing when your data is backed up to geographically diverse data centers and your other requests can be routed to a nearby data center.

Have you ever tried to play fast paced multiplayer games on a server in a different country? It’s not fun. The speed of light limits round trip times.

I guarantee it's not to run LLMs.

Are you trying to imply something conspiratorial?

cobolcomesback• 6 months ago

It’s to run LLMs.

In the before-AI world, it mattered a lot where data centers were geographically located. They needed to be in the same general location as population centers for latency reasons, and they needed to be in an area that was near major fiber hubs (with multiple connections and providers) for connectivity and failover. They also needed cheap power. This means there’s only a few ideal locations in the US: places like Virginia, Oregon, Ohio, Dallas, Kansas City, Denver, SF are all big fiber hubs. Oregon for example also has cheap power and water.

Then you have the compounding effect where as you expand your data centers, you want them near your already existing data centers for inter-DC latency reasons. AWS can’t expand us-east-1 capacity by building a data center in Oklahoma because it breaks things like inter-DC replication.

Enter LLMs: massive need for expanded compute capacity, but latency and failover connectivity doesn’t really matter (the extra latency from sending a prompt to compute far away is dwarfed by the inference time, and latency for training matters even less). This opens up the new possibility for data centers to be placed in geographic places they couldn’t be before, and now the big priority’s just open land, cheap power, and water.

leptons• 6 months ago

Oregon for example also has cheap power and water.

Cheap for who? For the companies having billions upon billions of dollars shoved into their pockets while still managing to lose all that money?

Power won't be cheap after the datacenters move in. Then the price of power goes up for everyone, including the residents who lived there before the datacenter was built. The "AI" companies won't care, they'll just do another round of funding.

https://www.axios.com/2025/08/29/electric-power-bill-costs-a...

lapcat• 6 months ago

Capitalism 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.

outside12342• 6 months ago

Someone 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.

jeffbee2• 6 months ago

It 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.

chasd00• 6 months ago

Ftfa “ 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.

dguest4• 6 months ago

I'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".

infecto6• 6 months ago

I 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.

GorbachevyChase5• 6 months ago

I 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• 6 months ago

This 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

bparsons• 6 months ago

Don't give them any ideas

jjkaczor• 6 months ago

Naw - corps will just get engineers to fudge the emissions numbers, then they have someone low-level and easy to blame and remove from the organization... VW:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

datsci_est_20153• 6 months ago

It’s definitely a result of the money at play, which is unprecedented in scale and (imo) speculation.

But this is, in theory, why we have laws: to fight power imbalances, and money is of course power.

Tough for me to be optimistic about law and order right now though, especially when it comes to the president’s biggest donors and the vice president’s handlers.

infecto6• 6 months ago

What is always left unclear in these anti data center articles is how much the public is left in the dark? It’s not out of the normal for large developments to be kept under NDA until hitting a threshold of certainty, usually that does not mean the residents are left out of voicing their opinions before ground breaks.

tzs3• 6 months ago

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?

In the US neither of those are generally made public per se. They are made public when the thing actually passes testing or certification.

Supermancho3• 6 months ago

I don’t want my competition to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what pace I’m doing it at

This is likely a misdirection. The "competition" is for the water and power, ie the local communities. This is a NIMBY issue with practical consequences. That's how it has been used in one part of North Dakota. Applied Digital is building in a town (~800 ppl) named Harwood after being unhappy with Fargo tax negotiations. The mayor of Harwood abused an existing agreement with Fargo, which will have to meet the water and power needs of everything in Harwood.

JKCalhoun• 6 months ago

Is this the tactic of pitting cities against one another in a race-to-the-bottom competition that gives public tax money to corporations?

mistrial92• 6 months ago

Hollywood in its heights also uses this kind of opportunistic abuse in siting movies and TV

vasco• 6 months ago

Well it makes sense for the company to demand it, but for the community / municipality it only makes sense if they believe someone else will sign such a secrecy deal, because if their location is so good, advertising it would generate bidding war and they'd get more money.

So it depends on the game theory but with coordination on the municipalities doing it in the open should generate higher demand.

buellerbueller6• 6 months ago

Governments should not be allowed to make deals that are kept secret from the people; the government is an arm of the people.

emsign3• 6 months ago

Data centers raise electricity bills and use too much ground water. Due to the AI bubble more data centers need to be built in areas that cannot support these facilities, deregulation, investor and political pressure ensures this, i.e. corruption. The last remaining spots are near residential areas. So people are pissed because of:

* noise pollution, infrasound from HVAC travelling long distances making people sick

* power outages priorizing data centers at the expense of residentials

* rising electricity bills

* rising water bills

jandrewrogers• 6 months ago

use too much ground water

Data centers use little water. Less than using the same land for anything involving agriculture, for example.

The idea that a data center uses too much water is recently invented propaganda that is readily verifiable as fiction. Cui bono?

zug_zug• 6 months ago

Yeah, if you're going to spend 100 million building a datacenter you should be required to add equivalent grid production in the area. It has drastically increased our electricity prices where I live.

GorbachevyChase5• 6 months ago

The elected representation agreed to this, and a with a bit of imagination, you can list a few reasons for exercising an NDA before a vote:

- Avoid the large and well-funded network of professional activists in the US from sabotaging the property and injuring locals - Avoid local political actors from spreading fear and misinformation just for the sake of grandstanding. - Avoid activist attorneys and judges from across the country, some paid by competitors, to create endless frivolous legal obstacles

We need an acronym like NIMBY but when it’s obnoxious progressive hedge fund managers and tech-rich psychopaths who live in some toxic coastal city who don’t want it in your own back yard a thousand miles away.

convolvatron2• 6 months ago

I wish I didn't feel so compelled to wade into this comment. After reading it several times I just can't make sense of it. Surely its the tech-rich psychopaths and hedge fund managers (I dont think of them as being particularly progressive) that are asking city councils to sign NDAs and are funding these data centers in the first place? it really seems like you're blaming them for stirring up antipathy for the project?

miki123211• 6 months ago

There's more to NIMBY than "thrashing your land."

The US seems to have a "tragedy of the commons" problem when it comes to NIMBYism. Everybody wants X to exist, but X causes some negative externalities for the people living close to it, so nobody wants X build specifically in their back yard, they want it but built somewhere else. Because the US seems to delegate these decisions to a much more local / granular level than Europe does, nobody has the courage to vote "yes", so X never gets build.

Who should decide whether E.G. an airport or a datacenter gets build? Should it just be the people living next to it? Should it be everybody in the relative vicinity who would use its services? Should it be everybody in the country (indirectly through the elected representatives)? I think those are the right questions to ask here.

e402• 6 months ago

The idea that data centers have to be built near homes (or anywhere people live or work) is absurd. The US is huge and vast amounts of open spaces.

dguest4• 6 months ago

I think what you are talking about is called "tragedy of the anticommons" [1].

Who gets to decide if an airport or data center gets built is a complicated question. But there are other options to keeping one party in the dark via NDAs. On one extreme we have eminent domain, on the other there's just buying out the local community transparently.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons

duped5• 6 months ago

Everybody wants X to exist

Hardly "everybody" wants AI to exist.

fc417fc802• 6 months ago

An airport that services large passenger jets will absolutely tank property values if you happen to fall within the flight path. Yet I don't believe that owners typically receive any compensation when that happens. I assume other externalities are handled similarly (ie not handled at all). Then it shouldn't be surprising that people don't want to be the one to take the fall for everyone else's benefit.

mkarrmann• 6 months ago

Idk why it's hard to believe another company would try to outbid.

Discovering good locations for data centers is genuinely a difficult problem. They're relatively scarce. Bidding wars seem completely plausible.

topaz0• 6 months ago

In which case doing this in the dark is clearly bad for the community -- if that location is what's scarce then they should be demanding a better deal.

duped5• 6 months ago

Whereas everyone here seems to assume it's to avoid NIMBY

Literally every data center project that gets announced near me gets protested at council meetings, petitioned, and multiple series of reddit/bluesky posts about the project.

It's hard to put into words for HN how deeply locals resent tech companies and AI. You could call it NIMBY, but the hatred is deeper than that.

The sentiment is "you have enough money, go away. Your business is fundamentally bad."

wat100004• 6 months ago

It's pretty wild. People around me are complaining that their electric bill tripled and blaming data centers for it. No, your rates didn't triple in the last year. Your bill went up because you used way more electricity, probably because it's been ass-freezingly cold.

bluedino3• 6 months ago

They all blindly chant "no datacenters" across all forms of social media.

Ironic.

eigencoder2• 6 months ago

Let me give you an anecdote that illustrates why it was needed in Eagle Mountain, Utah. One of my friends works for the city there and he told me about how the development went down.

When the city council first heard that Facebook wanted to build a data center, they shot it down solely because of Facebook's reputation. A year or two later, Facebook proposed the exact same project to the city council, while keeping their name secret under an NDA. Then, when the city council was only considering the economics of it, they jumped at the chance for the tax revenue and infrastructure investment. With essentially the same exact plan as before, one of the council members who rejected it before the NDA said "this is exactly the kind of deal a city should take."

I think in many ways, these companies are fighting their own reputations.

wat100004• 6 months ago

I wonder if they ever considered improving their reputations instead.

b00ty4breakfast2• 6 months ago

it's worrying that they would consider something without knowing who they were dealing with, economics be damned.

horsawlarway• 6 months ago

I'm not sure how I feel about this.

I think "reputation" is absolutely critical to functional societies, and this feels a lot like putting a mask on and hiding critical information.

If Facebook got rejected because people hate Facebook, even when the economics are good... that's valuable to society as a feedback mechanism to force Facebook to be, well - not so hated.

Letting them put a legal mask on and continue business as usual just feels a bit like loading gunpowder into the keg - You make a conditions ripe for a much larger and forceful explosion because they ignored all the feedback.

---

Basically - the companies are fighting their reputations for good reason. People HATE them. In my opinion, somewhat reasonably. Why are we letting them off the hook instead of forcing them to the sidelines to open up space for less hated alternatives?

If I know "Mike" skimps on paying good contractors, or abuses his employees, or does shitty work... me choosing not to engage with Mike's business, even though the price is good, is a perfectly reasonable choice. Likely even a GOOD choice.

josefresco• 6 months ago

I was curious so I looked it up. Your description of the events isn't quite accurate IMHO. There was an objection to a Meta datacenter, but then state lawmakers passed new laws after losing the business to NM. It doesn't look like anyone was "fooled" by the anonymous bid but rather they simply changed their minds/laws.

https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2018/05/22/utah-county-...

In 2016, West Jordan City sought to land a Facebook data center by offering large tax incentives to the social media giant. That deal ultimately fell through amid opposition by Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams and a vote of conditional support by the Utah Board of Education that sought to cap the company’s tax benefits.
That project went to New Mexico, which was offering even richer incentives.
Three months after the Utah negotiations ended, state lawmakers voted in a special session to approve a sales tax exemption for data centers. The move was seen by many as another attempt to woo Facebook to the Beehive State.

So basically they first said "No", lost the bid, had FOMO so they passed new laws to attract this business.

Asked about the identity of the company, Foxley said only that it is “a major technology company that wants to bring a data center to Utah.”
And that vision could soon be a reality, after members of the Utah County Commission voted Tuesday to approve roughly $150 million in property tax incentives to lure an as-yet-unnamed company — that sounds an awful lot like Facebook — to the southern end of Pony Express Parkway.

Seems like a pretty open and obvious secret.

grayhatter3• 6 months ago

Then, when the city council was only considering the economics of it, they jumped at the chance for the tax revenue and infrastructure investment. With essentially the same exact plan as before, one of the council members who rejected it before the NDA said "this is exactly the kind of deal a city should take."

Just think at how much extra money would start coming into the state, if they just allowed $company to build an orphan grinding machine!

why it was needed in ...

"Needed"

I willingly pay more to participate in the economies that behave ethically. If you have to hide who you are, and by proxy, how you behave, to get what you want... It's exhausting listen to people advocate for, or be apologists for people who are intentionally ignoring consent.

analog31• 6 months ago

A palpable fear in Wisconsin is access to water. Another is the potential abuse of eminent domain.

When Foxconn made a deal with the state to build a factory for large screen TVs, water was a major part of the deal. They were given an exemption on obeying state environmental laws. They also condemned farms and properties in order to buy the land from owners who didn't want to sell it.

A potential further reason for secrecy is that water use in the Great Lakes watershed is governed by a treaty with Canada, and the people in the Great Lakes region are quite united on being protective of our water even when we disagree on a lot of other political issues.

kevin_thibedeau2• 6 months ago

The concern is that the sellers can ratchet up their asking price if a deep pocketed buyer is known. Walt Disney used a bunch of shell companies to buy up land in Florida. If property owners knew he was buying, they'd ask for much more.

tokai3• 6 months ago

But the price should be ratchet up if the demand is there to support it.

dguest4• 6 months ago

I think it's equal parts "who" and "how much".

If Walt Disney wants to buy a bunch of random houses in Florida I think most people would sell them for market price. But if they all know that their specific house is an essential part of a multi-billion dollar plan, you're liable to have holdouts.

salawat• 6 months ago

Reputation working as designed?

packetlost• 6 months ago

This stuff is happening like 10 miles away from where I live and there's absolutely a ton of local pushback, mostly justified, but there's also a lot of propaganda. The pushback in DeForest, in particular, got a ton of attention on local subreddits and facebook groups and had a ton of drama at city counsel meetings. People do not want these datacenters here.

I'd be willing to bet it's largely driven by NIMBY concerns as this type of stuff can end small-time political careers.

upboundspiral• 6 months ago

What I've come to realize is that the rust belt states have been in huge trouble for decades.

They were living in "benevolent feudalism" when GM, Ford, etc all had factories there. The problem is that these companies effectively owned the cities in which they operated. And then they left.

Since the Reagan years we decided to export everything that built our economy so the landlords in power could have even more profitable quarters in the short term. What this did however is destroy the economies of the non-software states.

The rust belt states are currently being subsidized by the rich states. This has been going on for decades. This vacuum of power has allowed the new landlords in power to swoop in and play city governments against each other with impunity.

The negotiating power of these states is so poor that they present an opportunity for the Metas of the world to make them even worse while becoming the new "benevolent" landlords. There doesn't need to be an NDA and secrecy, and in theory the city could get a good deal out of it, but realistically their utilities will just be abused because the words "civil rights" and "justice" have exited the lexicon.

reactordev• 6 months ago

Sadly this is true. Already, resources have been sucked up by data centers and local towns have to use bottled water and pay 4x electric bill rates.

https://www.pecva.org/work/energy-work/data-centers-industry...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2026/01/11/ameri...

https://archive.ph/9rY9Z

kjkjadksj• 6 months ago

What is surprising is that to me where you see datacenter build out hand over fist isn’t really in the midwest where one might assume due to low land costs. Surprisingly, the heart of the datacenter buildout seems to be northern virginia. Not exactly a cheap land sort of former one horse town.

jadbox• 6 months ago

Absolutely this. It's no wonder why these states are also culturally grounded in terms of "command and hierarchy". If GM fires you, it's end of the line for you.. good luck serving hot meals at Cracker Barrel.

rvba• 6 months ago

They dont have any negotiating power -> it is a race to the bottom

expedition322• 6 months ago

Unfortunately for the rust belt states data centers don't bring in a lot of jobs.

No well educated highly paid person wants to live in the middle of nowhere. Wisconsin will never be Seattle, Boston or NYC.

scoofy2• 6 months ago

I want to step in here and point to Strong Towns. It’s easy to say THAT the cities have owners, but not why. The why is the American development pattern that creates suburbia that can’t generate enough taxes to pay to maintain the town.

That’s the problem. Suburban infrastructure is wildly expensive. A return to dense walkable villages would, in large part, fix the problem.

https://www.strongtowns.org/

OGEnthusiast• 6 months ago

IMO it's just regression to the mean. The Rust Belt cities benefitted from being in the right place at the right time (post-WWII US during industrialization) for a few decades, but post-globalization they are just one of infinity undifferentiated land masses competing on cost of land and power (vs e.g. SF or NYC which compete largely on access to social networks and institutions).

AndrewKemendo• 6 months ago

"your community is a pawn in a 5d chess game, better that you don't know".

This is literally called arbitrage, were there is a price difference between the the people pricing it and what the benefit is to the people buying it.

If I have information that you do not have, that indicates that underneath your land there is a gold mine, then I’m going to offer you whatever you think you’re value of your land is worth without telling you that there’s a gold mind underneath it so that I can exploit the difference in information.

That’s the entire concept behind modern economic theory, specifically trade arbitrage. That’s precisely what it is and that’s exactly the point from Meta.

tptacek• 6 months ago

Secrecy in real estate negotiations is common enough that it's an exemption in many state FOIA laws.

Exoristos• 6 months ago

The reason is normally that cities are providing sweetheart deals that exploit the local taxpayers and benefit the corps and a handful of city cronies. The poorer or more burdened the taxbase, the more secrecy or other tricks. That said, there's probably more than the normal going on in these particular cases.

onionisafruit• 6 months ago

I’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• 6 months ago

Yeah, as you say, 12 football fields are an order of magnitude smaller than 500+ acres.

bluedino3• 6 months ago

For 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• 6 months ago

Not 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.

timmg3• 6 months ago

I 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.

infecto6• 6 months ago

Yeah 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.

ecshafer2• 6 months ago

Its 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.

barbazoo2• 6 months ago

Yes pollution.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/29/gas-powe...

agscala• 6 months ago

My 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

tdb78932• 6 months ago

You talk about how solar is getting really cheap but electricity costs are actually rising significantly for most people I know (I've had to help friends pay electricity bills recently). I don't know how much of this is data centers but electricity prices are a major worry for a lot of normal people and you can't just handwave it away with "we know how to generate electricity" (there are also other worries like water usage in some areas). I don't hate data centers but the hate for them is based on them seeming to exacerbate what's already a serious worry to people already struggling to afford electricity.

timmg3• 6 months ago

But if electricity prices go up, doesn’t that motivate new generation? Like, it is pretty common to see prices go up, then supply increase, then prices go down.

dfxm12• 6 months ago

In addition to environmental concerns (including power and water usage) & noise pollution concerns, which are specific to data centers, local citizens are also against the tax breaks the owners of these data centers get. This bit isn't unique to the data centers, and we also saw similar pushback when details like this came out around Amazon warehouses. The fact is, the local communities don't reap the benefits from these despite having to shoulder the cost. Once built, they provide few, if any, jobs, little money goes back to the community, no new products or services are provided.

jplusequalt• 6 months ago

Data centers absolutely cause pollution.

triceratops3• 6 months ago

And solar is getting really cheap.

Alas...

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/wind-s...

gosub1006• 6 months ago

I find it strange that when there is a housing crisis, they can't seem to build enough, frequently because of building permit refusals. But when a data centers get secrecy and fast tracked before anyone can oppose them.

barbazoo2• 6 months ago

Is there evidence of "fast tracking"? I'm imagining permitting a green field data center build is different from densification of an already populated urban place.

comrade1234• 6 months ago

I 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.

StarterPro• 6 months ago

There 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• 6 months ago

I can't wait for cheap RAM and SSDs to flood the market...

riskable• 6 months 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• 6 months ago

I'm not sure it's that linear

https://www.thenerdreich.com/network-state-comes-for-venezue...

Cthulhu_• 6 months ago

The 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.

GorbachevyChase5• 6 months ago

A scourge? I get some kind of valuable use from it almost every day. This criticism sounds completely out of touch.

croes2• 6 months ago

as they are currently implemented

cowpig2• 6 months ago

You are capable of considering effects of systems outside of your immediate, moment-to-moment needs?

SketchySeaBeast3• 6 months ago

Commensurate to the actual cost?

mehlmao• 6 months ago

Do you have children? Post some pictures of them so Grok can show us what they look like unclothed and covered in "yogurt".

It's possible to imagine LLMs implemented responsibly, but our ruling class has decided against that.

wasmainiac2• 6 months ago

It’s no more useful than when google and stack overflow was at its peak! All I want is to find docs. The coding performance is lackluster, oversold and under delivered. Everything else gen AI is dystopian.

Noaidi• 6 months ago

No 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• 6 months ago

Kind 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• 6 months ago

I 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-...

tart-lemonade• 6 months ago

A $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• 6 months ago

WI 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.

bespokedevelopr5• 6 months ago

I 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.

Throaway19824• 6 months ago

its mostly about environmental concerns, but data centres dont add nearly the amount of jobs that manufacturing had

bespokedevelopr5• 6 months ago

So 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.

GoatInGrey• 6 months ago

There are many poor characterizations here. Besides data centers clearly not employing the average worker, there are real impacts. In Farmington, for instance, has a data center planning to drain 900,000,000 gallons of water per year from the local aquifer. You have instances like Granville, Ohio where electric prices rose by 60% over five years after data centers went in. One proposed data center in Sherburne County is planning to consume 600MW of power alone (typical household uses 1.2 kW). This is also as there are roughly $500 million in state subsidies being drafted for these data centers.

So, essentially, Minnesotans are being asked to subsidize facilities that will employ only a handful of specialists, raise electric bills, strain water resources, produce outputs many residents actively oppose, and accelerate the automation of their jobs...all while the state offers ~$500 million in support to these companies and nothing to offset the costs borne by residents.

bespokedevelopr5• 6 months ago

This article is written by a Wisconsin publication about data centers in Wisconsin. My comments are specific to Wisconsin. Like I said in my comment, some states aren’t well equipped to handle new manufacturing/dc.

I cannot take your comment very serious when so much of it is plainly wrong. You fall into the later category of what I described in my original comment. Outside of reddit-sphere people do not take these flippant and short-sighted comments seriously.

EvanAnderson2• 6 months ago

I 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.

cyanydeez4• 6 months ago

They 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.

phil213• 6 months ago

Power 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.

kiddico2• 6 months ago

Just curious where you are in ohio and want to do more research. I'm in the Mansfield area.

EvanAnderson2• 6 months ago

Miami County. There are datacenter projects outside Piqua and in Shelby County near Sidney.

cyanydeez4• 6 months ago

Foxconn on steroids

duped5• 6 months ago

Foxconn was just bribery, they never planned on building anything.

cyanydeez4• 6 months ago

Hint: Many people think there are no reasonable plans to use these data centers.

almosthere2• 6 months ago

These 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"

PTOB3• 6 months ago

Things 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]?

b00ty4breakfast2• 6 months ago

because 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• 6 months ago

Gobsmackingly poor deals made by city and town politicians are par for the course, and why 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.

PTOB3• 6 months ago

Thanks for that link. Great starting point for me.

renewiltord2• 6 months ago

Almost 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.

VoidWarranty• 6 months ago

Wisconsin 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• 6 months ago

I 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• 6 months ago

Natural 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_Wisc...

[1] https://www.wpr.org/news/we-energies-add-3gw-electric-grid-d...

w10-1• 6 months ago

fun 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.

Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

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