In small Wisconsin cities, billion dollar data center projects tied to Microsoft and Meta are reshaping local economies before residents even know who is at the table. Non‑disclosure agreements signed by local officials have kept basic details about land, power and public subsidies out of public view, triggering a backlash that now stretches from city halls to the state Capitol. The fight is no longer just about jobs or tax base, it is about whether communities get to see the tradeoffs of the AI boom before the concrete is poured.
The controversy centers on at least four communities that quietly negotiated with tech giants or their intermediaries for sprawling server campuses, including a roughly $1 billion Meta facility in Beaver Dam and Microsoft‑linked projects in Kenosha and elsewhere. As residents learn that their own leaders agreed to secrecy clauses, they are demanding to know why decisions about water, electricity and long term land use were made behind closed doors and whether Wisconsin is becoming a test case for how far corporate confidentiality can reach into public governance.
How NDAs took over local decision‑making
The story starts in Beaver Dam, where officials courted a massive Meta data center while promising almost no public detail. Construction is underway at the 350-plus-acre Beaver Dam Commerce, and the project is expected to cost approximately $1 billion, yet residents learned after the fact that the city’s economic development arm had signed a sweeping nondisclosure agreement. The Beaver Dam Area Development Corp., described as a quasi‑government nonprofit that functions as the city’s economic development arm, signed the NDA with a shell company that did not even mention a data center or Meta by name, according to detailed accounts of how Beaver Dam.
That pattern repeats across the state. At least four Wisconsin communities, including Beaver Dam, Menomonie, Kenosha and Janesville, signed secrecy deals tied to billion dollar data center proposals, according to reporting that first mapped the scope of these secrecy deals. A social media post amplifying that work noted that, in Beaver Dam, officials signed an NDA and then took official actions related to the $1 billion project while the public was kept in the dark, and that similar nondisclosure agreements are now surfacing in other states as well, as highlighted in a widely shared Facebook post.
Microsoft, Meta and the shell‑company playbook
Behind the legal language, the corporate players are clear. In Beaver Dam, the NDA masked Meta’s role until the company publicly announced an artificial intelligence data center campus that would span more than 300 acres and cost about $1 billion, according to filings that later surfaced in an energy demand lawsuit. In Kenosha, city leaders signed an NDA with Microsoft in May 2024, six months before news reports revealed that the agreement had kept a proposed data center project secret from residents, even as the city weighed land use and infrastructure questions tied to Kenosha’s NDA with. Other tech firms, including Oracle and Vantage Data Centers, have been linked to similar confidential talks in Wisconsin, underscoring how the NDA model has become standard practice for the industry.
Menomonie offers a particularly stark example of how little these agreements disclose. The city signed its NDA with a developer that never used the words “data center” in the document, even though internal discussions focused on that exact use, according to a detailed breakdown of how Menomonie signed its. A local outlet later reported that the agreement referred only to a generic “Project Silver,” without naming the company or the facility type, even though city staff and elected officials understood they were weighing a large data center proposal, as described in a Menomonie‑focused analysis. That same report noted that NDAs also helped keep the public in the dark about data centers under consideration in the three other cities that used them, reinforcing the sense that secrecy is a feature, not a bug, of the current development model.
Public outrage, lawsuits and a push to change the law
Once residents learned that their communities had been negotiating in secret, the backlash was swift. A statewide investigation found that at least four Wisconsin communities had signed nondisclosure agreements for billion dollar data centers, and that one village, DeForest, later announced that a data center “is not feasible” after the project had been developed in secret, according to a detailed account of the. A separate explainer noted that NDAs had kept the public in the dark not only in Beaver Dam and Menomonie but also in Kenosha and Janesville, where local leaders weighed tax breaks and infrastructure commitments without fully disclosing the nature of the projects, as summarized in a regional roundup. For residents, the core complaint is not just that tech companies want confidentiality, it is that public bodies agreed to it while making decisions about land, water and electricity that will shape their cities for decades.
Legal challenges are now testing how far that secrecy can go. Midwest Environmental Advocates filed a lawsuit to challenge the confidentiality surrounding energy demand forecasts for Meta’s Beaver Dam data center, arguing that the public has a right to know how much electricity the campus will consume and what that means for the grid, according to the group’s lawsuit announcement. The complaint builds on a broader critique that tech giants are using legal loopholes and NDAs to hide the environmental impacts of their data centers, including water use and carbon emissions, a pattern described in a national analysis of how tech giants are to cover up environmental impacts. In Wisconsin, that critique has moved from the courts to the Legislature, where a new Republican bill aims to bar secrecy deals with data center developers by prohibiting local governments from signing NDAs that conceal basic project details, according to a bill summary.
The energy and ratepayer stakes behind the fine print
Behind the legal fight is a more concrete concern: who pays for the power that will feed these server farms. Microsoft plans to build 15 new data centers in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, as part of a broader AI expansion, a buildout that has already put Wisconsin electric rates in the spotlight, according to a detailed rate analysis. Regulators at the state Public Service Commission have warned that the proposal could be difficult to implement fairly, with one PSC warning drawing fire after the agency suggested that utilities might struggle to figure out the correct rate structure for such massive new loads, as described in a regulatory debate. A separate broadcast report noted that Microsoft’s data center project in Rine County is growing massively and that records show the tech giant plans 15 more in Mount Pleasant, underscoring how quickly these facilities could reshape local grids, according to a televised segment.
Meta’s Beaver Dam campus raises similar questions. The data center, which was officially announced in November, is expected to cost approximately $1 billion and will span more than 300 acres, part of Meta’s broader AI data center buildout, according to the energy demand filing. Midwest Environmental Advocates argues that utilities and regulators have withheld key forecasts about how much electricity the campus will require, citing confidentiality claims that mirror the NDAs used at the local level, as detailed in the group’s legal challenge. Critics say that without transparent data on load growth, it is impossible for ratepayers to know whether they will subsidize new transmission lines or generation capacity for Meta and Microsoft, a concern that echoes national warnings that Silicon Valley is using NDAs and trade secret claims to shield the environmental and financial impacts of its data centers, as argued in a broader look at how Silicon Valley handles disclosure.
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