Don’t say the words “data center” right now unless you want someone to throw their opinion at you. Even when they have little to nothing to do with artificial intelligence and have a modest environmental impact, these boring hubs of interlinked computer servers are under the proverbial microscope. Just look at what happened in Midtown.
In spring, out-of-state developer Trent Overhue quietly brought forward a plan to install what appeared to be a 19,000-square-foot data center in the long-vacant 158,000-square-foot Midtown Walmart, 5825 W. Hope Ave. But Overhue tried to, well, let’s say rebrand what was being proposed. In documents filed with the city, it was described as a “computational research facility”; that’s a use case for a data center, not something entirely different.
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While plans to put a self-storage facility and a new library branch at the ex-Walmart are still moving forward, the “research facility” was dropped from the proposal, Ald. Mark Chambers Jr. announced days after a contentious, six-hour-plus community meeting didn’t go well for Overhue on June 29.
Sneaking around what has become a politically toxic form of land use backfired terrifically. “People weren’t told. There was no transparency,” says Mabel Lamb, executive director of the Sherman Park Community Association, one of the community organizations that brought opposition – along with the local chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation – to the proposed “research facility.”
Had the plan gone forward, it would have been at minimum the city’s fifth data center, the Journal Sentinel uncovered. For decades, these nondescript buildings – housing computers used to run complex calculations or store information – have operated quietly throughout the U.S. But since the AI boom, Big Tech companies are moving fast to construct massive facilities capable of fulfilling anticipated AI demand. Massive controversy has followed.
The two hyperscale data centers rising in Port Washington and Mount Pleasant, by Vantage and Microsoft, respectively, will require as much electricity as a large city: a demand of 3.9 gigawatts combined, per an estimate by the nonprofit Clean Wisconsin. The Midtown proposal probably would have required less than 1% of that. Still, that distinction doesn’t make much of a difference to those in the anti-data center camp.
Traditional – call them old-fashioned – data centers have been instrumental to the modern world for decades. They store our emails, documents, cat videos, selfies and bank information. Smaller data centers are perhaps more essential to the information landscape than the new supercomplexes – and locality matters, according to Michael Zimmer, director of Marquette University’s Center for Data Ethics. “There are more companies in the region that have data they need to manage,” he says. “You could be running a flower shop, and you need to have customer data.” Zimmer foresees smaller developers continuing to show interest in installing “micro” data centers of less than 50,000 square feet in former department stores and other abandoned but durable eyesores. The Midtown proposal won’t be the last of its kind.
So, what’s Overhue up to now? He is building at least two other “computational research” facilities in his home state of Missouri.
The Opposition View
Samantha Doucas organized dissent to the Midtown proposal on behalf of the Milwaukee branch of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. “I don’t like how [AI] is being used … to replace artists, directors, musicians, and just extracting resources,” she says, “to the benefit of a few wealthy people.” So long as utilities are necessary for day-to-day life, like the internet has become, Doucas says, there will be opposition to private control of those essential resources. Her group supports the proposal from some city alders to take public control of utilities away from for-profit We Energies. Until then, a data center “could be the size of my shoebox and I’d oppose it,” Doucas says. “As long as the technology is in the control of Big Tech, the people are not going to see any benefits from this.”
