Chris Atkinson works in IT. He generally avoids politics in Caledonia, the village in Racine County that he calls home. A wild-eyed activist, he is not.
Early in 2025, Atkinson noted local chatter about a data center. As an IT guy, he’s familiar with the concept – generally, gargantuan warehouses full of computer servers with enormous tangles of wires, cables and screens.
They work around the clock at a steady hum, processing untold terabytes of data from our phones, laptops and iPads. They also power artificial intelligence – give ChatGPT a command, and that data crunching has to happen somewhere.
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They’ve been around in some form for a half-century, but new iterations have sprouted up throughout the U.S. in recent years as the hunger for data processing grows at a pace faster than the current tech infrastructure can handle.
One of these projects was being proposed for Caledonia. It would take over a vast swath of rural land, bulldozing 244 acres of farm fields and countryside for buildings stacked with server racks and wires. Initially, local officials wouldn’t reveal the company who’d inhabit the space; six months later, Microsoft was named as the mystery new neighbor. Details about the environmental impact – water and electricity used, tax implications – were scarce.
But you don’t have to Google far to see that data centers have a Godzilla-sized appetite for electricity, require enormous quantities of water to cool and generally produce relatively few permanent jobs for such behemoths of land use. Their proponents push back hard against all these claims with counterarguments that make the data centers sound like the kind of neighbors you want – dutifully keeping to themselves while generating property tax windfalls that can prop up struggling burgs. Still, Atkinson’s BS radar got triggered. “I felt as if there was a lot of secrecy and lack of transparency,” he says. “It kind of made me really upset about the whole thing. It just set a fire in my heart.”
That fire spread into a people-powered movement in Caledonia. These are neighbors to the Foxconn swindle in nearby Mount Pleasant, in which the state gave billions in tax breaks, rural folks surrendered their properties, and the promised megafactory by the global electronics “savior” never materialized – until the site’s recent reinvention as a Microsoft data center. Scarred by the broken promises of the Foxconn experience, some Caledonians knocked on doors. Some planted yard signs, with a QR code pointing them to Stop Project Nova, a website Atkinson built. This movement culminated in public meetings with overflow crowds in September. Nearly everyone there spoke out against the project. That included Atkinson, who showed up wearing a red plaid shirt and holding a handwritten sign: “Keep Caledonia Rural.”
Days later, Microsoft, a global company worth $3.5 trillion, abandoned the project in the face of strident opposition from citizens of Caledonia, a village of barely 25,000 people.
David got the win.
Goliath took the L.
A Popular Uprising
The Caledonia example illustrates a few points. First, regular people who would be their neighbors generally disapprove of data centers. The Marquette Law School Poll, the A-standard for public opinion in Wisconsin, asked about data centers in October. It found that 55% of residents statewide feel that the projects’ costs outweigh their benefits. Partisan and geographic lines mean little: Republicans, Democrats and independents register roughly the same level of disapproval, and data centers are unpopular in every region of the state.
Second, people can, to at least a limited degree, turn their distrust of artificial intelligence – which many view as a soulless bogeyman coming to steal our jobs, warp public discourse and robotize society – into effective political action. “For an average person, it’s very hard to actually feel like you have a clear path to affecting AI,” says Ben Green, a University of Michigan professor who studies data centers. “But suddenly, with data centers, it’s a local zoning board that has to make a decision. You have a place where you can actually make your voice heard and push back against a particular foothold of the AI industry.”
Atkinson and his band of Caledonia rebels have become informal consultants to similar groups opposing other proposed data centers. That list includes but is not limited to Beaver Dam, Janesville, Mount Pleasant and Port Washington.
With the sudden flurry of news about data centers across Wisconsin, it can seem like we’re a hotbed for these projects. In reality, Wisconsin’s 27 data centers in operation or under construction lag far behind neighbors Illinois (93) and Iowa (73), according to industry tracker Aterio. Virginia, with about two-thirds the land of Wisconsin, leads the nation with 439 – and another 501 announced, compared to Wisconsin’s 33. Add it all up and it amounts to an unprecedented national push for the projects. “The tech industry is desperate for more computing power,” Green says.
The Great Lakes region is an appealing place to locate that power, he adds, due to the abundance of fresh water needed to keep data centers from overheating. The cooler climate helps, too.
‘You Either Ripen or You Rot’
Ted Neitzke is a Port Washington lifer: raised in the North Shore community, as was his wife, as are their kids. Now, the longtime educator and motivational speaker also serves as mayor of his hometown. He ran on a platform of creating jobs and investing in businesses to provide them.
“You either ripen or you rot as a community,” he says. “There’s nothing we can bring back. Wisconsin cannot host major manufacturing anymore.”
About two years ago, Neitzke was looking at an ever-challenging municipal budget when approached by state and regional economic development officials who had a semiconductor company seeking to site a factory in Port Washington. According to media reports, the company was set to purchase a couple thousand acres of farmland and would employ roughly 2,000 people. Ultimately, that deal fell through, but officials regrouped and one of the parties involved suggested a data center.
Cloverleaf Infrastructure, which bought the rights to the property, approached Vantage Data Centers with the idea. Vantage bought the land intended for the earlier project to develop a data center for then unnamed partners. Neitzke took fact-finding trips to Mount Pleasant, where Microsoft already operates a data center in the space that was supposed to host Foxconn, and to an existing Vantage data center in Virginia. He found rack after rack of computer hardware, blinking lights, a few hundred employees. That head count is a fraction of Plan A, but Neitzke was undeterred. “As soon as I walked in, I was sold,” Neitzke says of the Virginia facility. “It’s quiet, it’s modern, it looks nice, it smells nice. This would be perfect for Port Washington.”
Neitzke was further reassured by early reports that the data center would use 20,000 gallons of water daily, about what 65 households use. And that 70% of its energy needs would be provided through renewable means including wind and solar. And that the companies eventually revealed as the operators, global tech giants OpenAI and Oracle, would front the roughly $175 million in startup infrastructure costs.
Opponents have called malarkey on some of those numbers. Clean Wisconsin, an environmental group, says the water usage is vastly understated because the project will use 3.5 gigawatts of power. The water required for that much electricity: 54 million gallons a day, the group says, twice the daily usage by all of Green Bay – residences, businesses and factories.
The proposal played out in public over about a dozen meetings and faced significant pushback. Comedian Charlie Berens unexpectedly came out publicly against it, prompting a two-hour personal meeting with Neitzke. “We agreed on some things and disagreed on others,” Neitzke says. “My issues are local, and his issues are global – concerns that are beyond my control.”
The project will be massive: four buildings, with $15 billion invested and about 1,000 permanent jobs. It will bring big changes and put Neitzke’s hometown on the Big Tech map. He’s ready to go. “We’re not growing in any other way,” he says, “other than residential.”
A Hinge Moment?
One of the reasons that reasonable people can draw vastly different conclusions on data centers is because their current version – those of a size and scale required to power generative AI – are relatively new on the scene. We lack the, well, data to tell us just how they’ll affect the environment and economy of the small towns where they’re often planted. Early returns aren’t promising, though: A Bloomberg analysis found that consumer energy prices have shot up 267% in the last five years in areas near data centers.
The debate does feel like a societal inflection point, a confluence of hopes, fears and mountains of cash. For the moment, the battles will play out town by town, and the answers are beyond anything that can be spit out by a ChatGPT query – even with those spaceship-sized data farms crunching numbers round the clock.
Editors note: There have been some updates since this article was written. Multiple anti-data center protestors were arrested at a City of Port Washington meeting regarding the data centers on Dec. 2, 2025. Later that month, members of a group associated with the protestors launched an attempt to recall Neitzke.
