Week ending March 13, 2026

Data centers drive town halls in Potosi and Beaver Dam, and a New York Times article puts together more puzzle pieces about Port Washington. A Charlie Berens quote ends up on a watermelon.

In Beaver Dam

Meta construction when driving north on County Highway W, from Hemlock Rd. to Highway A/W.

Drive northeast from Madison on Highway 151 and within the hour, you’ll enter Beaver Dam, where construction on a Meta data center campus is underway.

The development, organized for years under shell corporation Degas LLC, will take up 700,000 sq. ft. situated in rough triangle between US Highway 151, and County Highways A and W.

Buildings are going up at the south end of the road. As you drive up, you can see white hoop shelters. At the north end, electrical equipment to power an ATC substation is strewn out on the ground. Across the way, a brown expanse is dotted with orange flags and cones.

Electrical equipment sits waiting to be assembled at the ATC substation on the Beaver Dam campus.

The highway is rocky and dump trucks were whizzing by as I struggled to find a place to pull over on Wednesday. But the parking lot of Harmony Baptist Church, in the middle of the development, looked like a refuge.

Pastor Peter Ostrander and his wife, Laura, still own this five acres of land in the middle of the Meta development. They’ve been here since 2014, after purchasing the former schoolhouse for $68,000.

The Ostranders recall Alliant Energy coming through the area around 2019, seeking a large tract of land to attract a large industrial development. At the time, the option to buy land was $20,000 per acre and one and a half times the assessed value of buildings. In the end, the Ostranders were offered $250,000 for the land and the church.

Harmony Baptist Church is located in a former school.

They rejected the offer because it didn’t make financial sense. That was before they knew who would be coming to town. Later on, “you didn’t have to be an investigative reporter to find out,” says the Pastor.

“Because we were connected to the project, we would receive information from the DNR and say, a wetland protection meeting is taking place, you know. You can come if you want. Well, it just took a little bit of internet searching to realize that this Degas LLC was representing somebody else, and then as early as I think February of last year, when Forbes identified Meta as the parent company behind the whole thing.”

Alliant and the main construction company Mortensen has been “generally very good” in communicating, say the Ostranders. There have been some frustrations and inconveniences. Their driveway keeps getting torn up from construction. The water runs brown and black, but they didn’t drink the water before. It was full of nitrates from the farmland.

“From a church congregation, we have stayed out of the fight, so to speak. Because we have bigger issues. We could maybe engage in the battle. But people are still dying, and on their way to Hell. Our message is the Gospel of Jesus Christ, not no data center.”

A screengrab of the rough location of the Meta development. The land for it belonged to the Town of Trenton, but was annexed by the City of Beaver Dam.
Land annexed to the City of Beaver Dam, pulled from the Dodge County Assessor site. I’ve been spending time looking at the Department of Administration’s annexation petition portal.

In nearby Juneau, a community town hall

I was in the area for a town hall on data centers, where —by my count— hundreds showed up at a community center in the nearby city of Juneau.

“We’re here today talking about Meta’s AI data center, and Mark Zuckerberg, he’s got this famous quote: move fast and break things. And if trust is a thing, I think you probably broke it a little bit here,” said comedian and journalist Charlie Berens in kicking off the event.

A Wisconsin Watch report in January found that several data center projects, including in Beaver Dam, were kept under wraps through non-disclosure agreements. A bill pending at the state Capitol would ban the use of such agreements in data center deals.

“Most people had no idea the AI data center was there until it started being constructed. And that’s why this room has got so many different walks of life here. I mean, there are Democrats here, Republicans, there’s liberals, libertarians. There’s farmers, there’s fishes, there’s hunters, there’s swingers,” joked Berens.

Chanse Schomber, a Beaver Dam based chef who catered the event, hand-carved this watermelon. “I don’t want WALL-E. I want walleye” is a line from Berens in a video opposing data centers.

The town hall in Beaver Dam mirrored the format of a town hall just a few days prior in the the Driftless, in the Village of Potosi. A data center has been proposed twenty minutes away in the Village of Cassville, reports Wisconsin Watch.

Both events had some of the same speakers, including Berens and fiscal hawk Prescott Balch, a retired tech executive who organized opposition to a now-dead data center proposal in Caledonia, largely by unpacking financial claims. Balch is now lending his experience in interpreting financial documents in other communities. He’s also running for Caledonia Village Trustee.

The agenda for the Juneau event, along with other assorted pamphlets from organizers.

The event ran late into the evening. It featured a growing network of subject matter experts who are sharing their resources statewide. At the same time, residents who live nearby to the proposed development gave their testimony.

Emily Luy Tan is born and raised in Beaver Dam. She lives less than a mile from the construction site. In 2024, a neighbor asked her if she’d heard about an industrial site coming to a field across from their property.

“The next day, I went to the Beaver Dam City Council to try to see if I could get any answers, anything at all. And I got nothing. I was pressing the city administrator at the time to get some type of information about what was going on in my literal backyard, and he had the gall to ask me, ‘Why do you care?’

I then watched over the next few weeks as the city unceremoniously, and unanimously, annexed and rezoned this land to the city of Beaver Dam. Still with no idea what was coming. In these meetings where huge decisions were being made for our town, my mother and I were some of the only people… in the room.

And I thought I was going crazy. I’m like, is this not a huge development that’s happening at the time, and nobody’s talking about it? Was this just how things happened in local government? I had no idea.”

Beaver Dam is facing a second data center proposal. This is a separate class of data center, distinct from a hyper scale or even a co-located data center, that is instead call an “edge” data center.

The point is to store digital data as a local distribution hub, decreasing reliance on data centers that might be further away. This means, essentially, that your internet buffers faster. According to a fact sheet provided by the city, the newest data center would sit on 90,000 sq. ft. and use up to 16 MW.

Oppidan Investment Co, who is bringing the proposal, is based in Minnesota, where they have two developments underway. They have projects in Nevada, Texas, New Mexico, and Illinois, according to Data Center Dynamics.

Organizers say that this issue is scheduled to come before the Beaver Dam Common Council on Monday, but an agenda hasn’t been posted at the time of writing.

In Dane County

The Dane County committee met for the first time on February 10. They have a year to develop recommendations on future data center proposals. (Chali Pittman)

Prompted by the now-dead QTS proposal in the Town of Vienna, a Dane County committee is looking ahead to future proposals. It meets monthly on the second Tuesday of the month.

The committee’s charge is to consider things like energy, water, economics, zoning, and regulatory questions, and develop recommendations for Dane County communities by next year.

I attended the committee’s first meeting in February, and Isthmus was kind enough to let me write a story on the committee’s charge and a post-mortem on the QTS proposal from last fall.

The advisory committee met again this week, where they heard a presentation from Brian Ohm, retired professor of planning and landscape architecture at UW-Madison.

Data centers, Ohm says, are not the only contentious land use issue in our state’s history. Here are some others: shopping malls, cell towers, big box stores, concentrated animal feeding operations, wind and solar farms, and frac sand mines.

And apart from federal and state rules, how land use projects unfold is a highly local affair. Even county zoning, I’m learning, is a patchwork across Wisconsin.

The committee has a landing page where they plan to post resources as work progresses. They’ve already posted one — an overview of data center legislation in Wisconsin.

News in brief:

That’s all for now!

This weekly newsletter is attempting to do something a little different: round up the data center news across Wisconsin, and present the patterns that emerge.

I’m starting this out of a personal habit of aggregating developments and data center news, and a way to organize notes for longer research projects. Then I figured, why not share the notes with you?

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