Not to be outdone, plans in Port Washington are underway to build a data center campus that, when it opens in 2027, would need more than 1 gigawatt of power. That’s enough to power roughly 800,000 residences, or several hundred thousand more homes than in all of Milwaukee, the state’s largest city.
Discussions are also underway to add other hyperscale data centers, including a 615-acre proposal in Dane County and facilities eyed for Mount Pleasant and Kenosha, with several of the projects spearheaded by some of the nation’s largest companies like Meta and Microsoft.
With unprecedented development on the horizon, officials with some of Wisconsin’s largest utility companies say they’re doing their due diligence to ensure that existing ratepayers aren’t left footing the bill for the massive energy consumers and the infrastructure upgrades needed to support them.
“I would say that is at the forefront of everything we do — protecting the ratepayers and making sure we’re not raising rates for these data center projects,” said Coleman Peiffer, senior manager of data center services with Alliant Energy.
Ultimately, the final funding formula for those projects will be up to the state Public Service Commission, Wisconsin’s independent utility regulatory agency.
The impending projects are “game-changing” in their size and energy demand, said Tom Content, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board, a watchdog organization that champions safe and affordable utilities in the state.
Wisconsin regulators can take a lesson from other states that already boast massive data center facilities, he said. That includes ensuring that the multibillion-dollar companies behind those projects pick up the tab, rather than existing Wisconsin ratepayers.
“These are incredibly wealthy companies that can certainly afford to pay their own way for the changes that they’re asking for in our energy system,” Content said.
“What these cases are about — and they're playing out here in Wisconsin and in dozens of states across the country — is making sure that we're holding them to that commitment,” Content said. “They've pledged that they're going to pay their fair share, but the devil is in the details on what's fair.”
Any one of the data centers being eyed for Wisconsin would immediately become the largest energy consumer in the state. Charter Steel in Saukville is currently considered one of the state’s largest single energy users, with a total electric load of about 70 megawatts. The smallest data center proposal currently in the works, in Beaver Dam, would be more than twice that size once it goes online.
And because of their huge energy demand, the proposed developments also require upstream upgrades to transmission lines and the state’s power grid.
Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard University, said the influx of data centers nationwide has created a quandary for many states as they try to attract major developments, while also making sure existing ratepayers don’t get stuck paying for the massive system upgrades.
“The way that we traditionally pay for new transmission lines and new power infrastructure is to socialize the cost across all consumers,” Peskoe said. “If you're building something to deliver power just to one consumer, then that consumer ought to pay for it.”
A December 2024 report from the U.S. Department of Energy estimates the country's data center load growth — or increased demand for electricity — has tripled over the past decade and is projected to double or even triple again by 2028.
While the nationwide increase in massive data center projects has been seen in several other states, such developments in Wisconsin didn’t begin in earnest until July 2023, when Gov. Tony Evers signed the state’s 2023-25 budget, which included sales and use tax exemptions specifically for data center projects.
“We started fielding a handful of calls weekly from interested data centers,” Peiffer said. “It really opened us up for business.”
In July, Evers signed a bipartisan bill that creates exceptions for tax incremental financing districts to support the data centers in Beaver Dam and Port Washington. The two data center requests are now before the PSC.
Alliant Energy’s proposal calls for an $850 million, 150-plus megawatt facility in the Beaver Dam Commerce Park. According to a report from Bloomberg News, the company behind the proposal is Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.
The proposal from We Energies, a subsidiary of WEC Energy Group, calls for a 672-acre campus in Port Washington — developed by Denver-based Vantage Data Centers, a global data center developer and operator — that would open at roughly 1.3 gigawatts of energy demand in 2027.
The Port Washington Common Council unanimously approved an $8 billion development agreement with Vantage on August 20. Officials have not said who would operate the campus but have said they will be used for to process artificial intelligence.
Peskoe said a 1-gigawatt facility would be similar to adding the city of New Orleans to the state grid.
Other data centers in development include Microsoft’s plans to spend $3.3 billion on a facility in Racine County, while Virginia -based QTS Data Centers recently announced plans for a $3 billion, 615-acre data center campus along Highway V west of DeForest.
©2025 The Wisconsin State Journal, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
