A site in the Driftless Area in southwest Wisconsin is being eyed for a possible $1 billion data center, just as the state considers who should pay to provide the unprecedented amount of electricity such projects need.

It would be the eighth major data center known to have been proposed in Wisconsin, though one of those, near Madison, has been dropped.

Ron Brisbois, executive director of the Grant County Economic Development Corp., said Feb. 9 he expects to learn by spring whether Grant County remains in consideration by a company scouting sites for what it said would be a $1 billion data center. 

“They’re casting a pretty wide net, Grant County just happens to be part of that net,” Brisbois told Wisconsin Watch. “It’s very, very preliminary.” 

The revelation contrasts with how other Wisconsin officials have handled data center proposals. 

A Wisconsin Watch investigation found that local officials in some of the seven communities where hyperscale data centers have been proposed worked on the proposals for months before making any announcement to the public. In four of the communities, officials signed confidential nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), pledging to keep details of the plans private.

Brisbois said he has not been asked to sign a data center NDA. He said he met with a company, whom he would not identify, in November before announcing at an open meeting in December that a $1 billion data center was being floated in Grant County. That mention was reported by local news media.

Brisbois told Wisconsin Watch he felt that his board of directors deserved to know about the initial inquiries, but that he wouldn’t release details that might jeopardize the project.

“I don’t know who the end user would be, all I’m being told is it’s one of the big five or six businesses,” Brisbois said. “I’ve asked not to be told that information. I don’t need that information to do my job.”

Besides storing and processing data, data centers are vital to advancing the use of artificial intelligence (AI). Major companies building data centers in Wisconsin include Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, in Beaver Dam, which used an NDA; and Microsoft in Mount Pleasant and Vantage Data Centers in Port Washington, to serve OpenAI and Oracle, which did not.

“I like to be transparent with my board of directors,” Brisbois said. “But did I give a lot of details? No. I thought it was an appropriate time that we were being evaluated, at least initially. Did I need to do that? No. But it’s how I do my job.”

Doug Schauff, the town chair in Cassville, in southwest Grant County, told Wisconsin Watch he attended a meeting about the data center about a week ago. He wouldn’t reveal other details, other than the company involved is seeking 400 or 500 acres in the town.

“Everything is so vague right now,” Schauff said. “They had not contacted land owners. … They wouldn’t give us any definite figures (on power usage), which would be Greek to us anyway.”

The seven major data center projects detailed in the Jan. 26 Wisconsin Watch report were valued at more than $57 billion, including one in the Madison suburb of DeForest. DeForest city officials did not sign an NDA, but kept details of a $12 billion data center proposal quiet for months before announcing it to the public. Amid opposition from residents, the city dropped the project Jan. 27. 

Data center proposals are pending in Kenosha, Menomonie and Janesville, all of which signed NDAs. 

The Janesville City Council has scheduled five informational sessions on an $8 billion data center proposed there. The first is Feb. 9, when the council is also scheduled to consider a proposal from data center opponents that would require a referendum on such large-scale projects.

Republican state lawmakers on Feb. 6 introduced a bill that would prohibit local governments from signing data center NDAs.

Meanwhile, attention is turning to how the state will determine who will pay to provide the massive amounts of electricity that data centers need to operate.

On Feb. 10, the Public Service Commission is scheduled to hold a hearing, which will be livestreamed, on establishing a payment structure for the generation and distribution of electricity needed by “very large customers,” such as data centers.  

A key question is whether data centers will be required to pay entirely, or whether some of those costs will be spread among other residential and other general ratepayers.

Bert Garvin, an executive vice president of We Energies, has said the rate structure proposed by the utility to the PSC will protect general ratepayers. “While your bills may go up for other cost-of-service reasons, we can assure all our customers your bills aren’t going up because of” data centers, he said at a public forum last week.

At the same forum, Tom Content, executive director of the consumer advocate Citizens Utility Board, said “the devil’s in the details” on how the PSC protects ratepayers. 

“I think it’s really important that these wealthy tech companies have to put up the money and not have to achieve compliance with that some other way,” he said.

Content also alluded to stranded assets — power plants that are shut down while ratepayers are still paying off their debt. He said the PSC must impose “exit fees” stringent enough so that data centers remain financially responsible for new multibillion-dollar power plants, should the AI phenomenon become a “bubble” and data centers shut down early.

Wisconsin Watch reported in December that residential and business utility customers in Wisconsin owe $1 billion for stranded assets — the debt taken on to build and upgrade power plants that have been shut down or are scheduled to be shut down soon.

As Wisconsin weighs who should pay, another possible billion-dollar data center emerges was first posted on February 9, 2026 at 4:48 pm.

©2024 “Racine County Eye”. Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at denise@