Foxconn and AI: How History Rhymes

Earlier this year, the Port Washington Common Council announced its controversial partnership with Vantage Data Centers, based out of Denver, to build a new AI data center for OpenAI, north of the town.

This announcement was met with uproar from residents in Port Washington and the surrounding communities with fear about how this data center will impact them. Common council meetings quickly became battlegrounds between constituents and their representatives. 

“A lot of us are very, very deep rooted into farming, and multiple generations of farmers live around that area, and we just don’t want to see this land go into something because once it’s gone, it’s gone, it’s never going to come back,” remarked Angela Bright, activist and professional in the agriculture industry.

Large scale industrial projects always bring up big demands such as, how much land does the community lose. All of the land being used for the OpenAI data center was bought from generational farmers, who were given massively inflated prices on their farms, which is a common tactic used by data center companies, like when some Beaver Dam farmers were offered $20,000 an acre, according to The Badger Institute.

“They just bought out farm after farm, and a lot of these people can’t turn down the money that they’re offering for their land, you know,” Bright said. “They’re starting to target communities like us, because we’ll never see that kind of money in our lifetime.” 

Rural communities tend to be the main targets of these projects as large companies view them as more easily swayed with the promise of economic prosperity. 

“The evidence is pretty overwhelming that democracy is a fragile thing,” said Chris Young, head of the department of conservation and environmental sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “Having a lot of community input at whatever level creates a kind of complexity and frailty when looking at where the power is really.” 

Billion-dollar companies like Vantage Data Centers have the ability to throw as much money around to secure and seize property for development, which is furthered by Port Washington’s city council showing unwavering support for the data center. 

“Economics asks what it is going to cost, politics questions who’s going to pay and when you break it down in this way you start to realize how local governments focus on these questions,” said Young. “At the small city level and county level there are people who don’t have the breadth of expertise to answer these questions, they know the local area well enough to be leaders, but they haven’t experienced something like this before.”

A tax incremental district or TID was established in Port Washington to help pay for the development of the data center site. A TID allows a company to develop the infrastructure of a designated area in a municipality and then be reimbursed by the tax revenue of the TID. In Wisconsin, any company can only be given a maximum of 12% from the annual tax revenue generated in a TID. 

However, in March 2025, a new bill was introduced with bipartisan support to the Wisconsin state legislature. This bill, named Assembly Bill 140, would remove the 12% limit in Port Washington specifically, allowing the city to allocate as much money as it wanted to reimburse Vantage.

With large-scale industrial projects like these, the balance between big corporations, community members, and politicians is an age-old dance that’s been occurring in this country since the Gilded Age. There are debates happening all over the state with projected data center sites being set in Beaver Dam, Kenosha, and more.

“The biggest thing you fear is the unknown,” said Young. “People look back on the coal burnings and smog as examples of what has happened.” 

There is a three-sided conversation that begins whenever a new industrial project is introduced to a community, with all three having different concerns, but it always revolves around the impact of the project on the community and how much economic potential might come from it. 

However, this isn’t the first time Wisconsinites have had this conversation. 

“This is a great day for America, it is a great day for Wisconsin, and it is a great day for Foxconn,” said Scott Walker, former Gov. of Wisconsin, at a 2017 White House event announcing the state’s partnership with Foxconn Technology Group, according to a WTTW article.

Foxconn was a tech manufacturing company based in Taiwan that would have built a $1 billion LED-TV factory in Mount Pleasant that was self-reported to bring 13,000 jobs to the town.

Making Wisconsin “open to business” was Walker’s gubernatorial slogan to make it easier for foreign investors to enter the state. Foxconn was supposed to be Walker’s golden goose egg, a billion-dollar tech manufacturer that was supposed to bring in economic prosperity to Mount Pleasant and surrounding Racine County.

“The ways that the promises that were made, the kinds of offerings made at various levels of government, relied on people’s trust,” said Young. “When somebody says there’s going to be all kinds of jobs, that’s when the red flag goes up for me.”

To clear up enough land for the project, families living on the proposed site were given a letter in October of 2017 saying that they would lose their homes due to the eminent domain law. The law gives municipalities the ability to seize private land so long as it can be properly condemned as blighted or unfit for life. Once seized, the deeds to each property were then given to Foxconn, giving it full ownership of the land. 

Both the company and government worked in tandem, developing a concerted effort to make development as smooth as possible.

“Most of these families that have been on this land for generations are really at the end, because of federal policies in the 70’s that gutted family farms; this is the generation that has given it up, they’ve been playing it out by taking subsidies and buying new tractors, but now they’re at the point of having the biggest tractor and not being profitable,” said Young. 

To make way for 13,000 new workers in southeastern Wisconsin, the Department of Transportation spent $168 million on highway and road expansion, Mount Pleasant and Racine County spent $258 million on new sewer and water lines to accommodate the site and the American Transmission Company spent $257 million on new powerlines and a whole new substation, according to StrongTowns.org.

This equates to $683 million in taxpayer money for infrastructure expansions to nothing.

The Foxconn bubble blew, and so did Walker’s dream. Nothing was built on the acres cleared away for development, and the only thing left was government mistrust in the community, which is the same feeling shared by many Wisconsinites as new data centers promise economic investment in their backyard.