Faceless megacorps scouring rural Wisconsin for land have put residents on edge – and it showed in the state’s primary earlier this month.
The big story in Dairyland isn’t the narrow defeat of state Rep. Francesca Hong, who preached a data center moratorium before losing the Democratic primary by roughly 3,000 votes to Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley.
The big story comes from a small but consequential place that residents love and vowed to protect. Wrightstown, Wisconsin, just wrote the playbook for communities confronted by the proliferation of AI data centers, sometimes planned in secret. Residents learned of a potential project, organized against it, pushed village officials to pause development and forced the issue onto the ballot.
Then nearly 9 in 10 Wrightstown residents spoke through their votes on Aug. 11 and said “Yeah, no” to AI data centers. And what happened next? Rep. Tom Tiffany, the Republican candidate for governor, made more than a dozen online posts claiming Crowley is too soft on data centers, according to an Aug. 23 Washington Post analysis. Crowley’s campaign countered by highlighting Tiffany’s congressional vote for legislation that included a 10-year ban on state and local AI regulation — and his previous description of data centers as “exciting new technology.”
But as the Wisconsin Examiner reported, the candidates largely agree on key guardrails: Both support giving communities the final say, banning local government nondisclosure agreements and protecting utility customers from added costs. Neither supports a moratorium, though Tiffany wants to repeal state tax incentives for data centers while Crowley has called for scrutinizing whether those incentives benefit taxpayers.
The political brawl comes after an LLC swooped into Wrightstown earlier this year, armed with a generic name and hungry for rural land deals.
Village officials denied at spring community meetings that they’d seen a project proposal from developer Cloverleaf Infrastructure. Yet emails released in response to an open records request revealed they’d been communicating with the company since January, WPR reported.
Residents pushed for and got a June pause on all AI data center projects until they could speak at the polls. Village board members in July unanimously extended the moratorium to a year as residents prepared to vote in a nonbinding referendum on Aug. 11.
NetChoice, a tech industry association that counts Amazon, TikTok, Meta, YouTube and other Big Tech players as members, threatened legal action over the referendum.
But the industry couldn’t defeat months of grassroots organizing.
According to Ballotpedia, Wrightstown was the only Wisconsin municipality with a data-center-related measure on the primary ballot. Nationwide, Ballotpedia is tracking eight such measures in six states, including California, Illinois, Michigan and Nevada. As of Aug. 26, voters had approved four measures that limited development, none that favored it, and four remained pending.
In Wisconsin, Wrightstown’s vote followed Port Washington, where 66% of voters in April backed a measure requiring voter approval for future tax incremental financing districts exceeding $10 million — a referendum spurred by opposition to incentives for a massive data center.
Janesville voters will weigh in next: A November referendum will decide whether projects exceeding $450 million at a former industrial site must go before voters. Any referendum on a specific data center project would come later.
Why do we supposedly need these data centers in the first place?
First, let’s look at some of the people behind these projects.
Former New York City Mayor Eric Adams sprang to action in Wisconsin Rapids this month as a paid adviser to the PNK Group. You may recall that Adams faced an indictment in a five-count federal bribery case. President Donald Trump’s administration bailed him out.
Now Adams is flacking for a 150-megawatt data center campus in Wisconsin Rapids. Attendees didn’t hold back at the pitch meeting, with one asking: “So, one question is how can we trust you because you’re a convicted felon, you’re indicted for bribery, and secondly, you talk about how AI and the medical use of AI, but given your ties to cryptocurrency and to the Russians, what is your AI data center going to be used for?”
(Adams was not convicted of the charges against him.)
Residents booed Adams and pushed for answers about water use, electricity demands, jobs and foreign ownership.
Without solid information on the who, let’s move to the why.
Big Tech has ready answers, citing national security for instance.
They cry “Just trust us!” as Elon Musk’s company xAI fights for the right to nudify kids.
Does national security include spying on U.S. citizens with Flock cameras, which are so universally loathed that people are chopping them down? The Washington Post documented at least 50 cases across the country of law enforcement officers misusing the cameras, including to stalk women. Right- and left-leaning communities are ending contracts.
So, what’s next? Our state and federal lawmakers should wake up and follow the Wrightstown playbook.
Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul ordered a first-in-the-nation statewide AI data center moratorium.
There is room for bipartisanship in Washington. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., introduced the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act to impose a pause on development of data centers.
Elected officials are finally catching up, with Republicans increasingly criticizing data centers nationwide, according to a Washington Post analysis.
What the Flock are the rest of you waiting for? Lawmakers, act now or suffer at the ballot box. Your political action committees can’t save you.
Juliana Keeping is the founder of Keeping Strategies LLC, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy communications firm specializing in moving evidence-based bipartisan reform at scale. She also serves as strategic artificial intelligence adviser at Our Lady of the Lake University in Houston and a Rotarian. She is the author of Keeping Shop, a newsletter on Substack.
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