(also thanks for the useful message telling me to "contact the website owner... while blocking me from the website where the contact info should be)
VILLAGE OF CALEDONIA, Wis. — Microsoft has decided not to move forward with its proposed site for a data center in the Village of Caledonia after facing significant community pushback from residents.
PREVIOUS COVERAGE | Microsoft data center proposal continues to divide Caledonia residents as rezoning plans move forward
“Based on the community feedback we heard, we have chosen not to move forward with this site,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement Wednesday.
The tech giant’s decision comes after hundreds of residents voiced opposition to the project over recent weeks. More than 2,000 people signed a petition opposing a rezoning proposal that would have allowed the data center to be built on 244 acres of land.
Watch: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia after community pushback
The proposed site was situated on County Line Road and State Highway 32, southwest of the WE Energies Oak Creek Power Plant, and was surrounded by farmland and residential properties.
47032805-Concept Site Plan - Project Nova by TMJ4 News
Despite abandoning this particular location, Microsoft indicated it remains interested in investing in Southeast Wisconsin.
The spokesperson said the company looks forward to “working with the Village of Caledonia and Racine County leaders to identify a site that aligns with community priorities and our long-term development goals.”
TMJ4’s Jenna Rae, who has been following this story, reached out to Todd Willis, the village administrator, who provided the following statement:
“Nothing official has been submitted to the Village regarding their pending application, and have no comment until such time.”
Resident Prescott Balch told TMJ4 that his phone did not stop ringing on Wednesday morning, as people delivered the news. PRESCOTT BALCH TMJ4 Prescott Balch lives in Caledonia. Balch welcomed the news that Microsoft is changing plans to bring a data center in the area.
"We're ecstatic that those arguments held water and ultimately convinced a large corporation to back off, so great day here in Caledonia," Balch said.
Village trustee Nancy Pierce says she learned about the change from a news article.
"I have a lot of respect for Microsoft, making the decision when they say they listened to the constituents. They also listened to board questions both at the planning commission at the board level. I believe that they took a lot of different pieces of information into play," Pierce stated. Nancy Pierce TMJ4 News Nancy Pierce is a village trustee in Caledonia.
Both Pierce and Balch made it clear that they are not opposed to working with Microsoft in Caledonia.
As the tech giant looks for a new site, there is hope that there are improvements to the overall process.
"I would’ve liked to been able to engage directly with Microsoft much earlier in the process. We were not allowed to do that. I think that became an obstacle for a lot of different points and reasons," Pierce explained. "I feel like now they would come forward much quicker and engage directly with the community, really get to understand the community."
"There are people that have an opinion about what they want to do with their village, and that was absent in this to me. That's the real message of this thing," Balch explained. "Let's help Microsoft find the right spot in southeast Wisconsin."
This would mean that land use tends towards that which large firms (which can sustain the costs easily by self-financing) find useful.
How big "should" a data center be? How big are some other data centers? How big is us-east-1, for an example of a large one? I'm finding this to be rather difficult information to google.
[0]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/sto...
Although I obviously don't care about Microsoft's outcome here, this was clearly a great site at the intersection of two transmission lines and with essentially infinite water resources.
The data center would have been built in this scene. https://www.google.com/maps/@42.8440852,-87.8474228,2445m/da...
The whole project was several million in expenses before even making a dollar. We aren't huge either, the permitting was not supposed to take that long it but a real strain on the business.
So yeah, you're correct. The current process favors large firms, at least those large enough to absorb the cost for multiple years or however long permitting takes, which in some municipalities can be a very, very long time.
Often the choices are —
1. Buy land at $/acre that reflects very little premium, based on a short feasibility study, but without any ultimate contingency that permitting will occur. This is your example. But problematically all permitting applications are typically public record, so when you fail, the land can’t be sold on to someone else as if that didn’t happen, any sophisticated buyer will know the exact issues the city/county had with your usage. Land often transacts onward at firesale prices under these circumstances.
2. $/acre for land is bid upon at a substantial premium reflecting the future value as a datacenter, it remains under contract for potentially years pending outcome of approvals, then it transacts. Permitting being denied usually results in either no money changing hands or a small termination fee reflecting the carrying cost of the land during that period. If permitting works out the seller of land walks away very happy as the $/acre was extremely lucrative.
But a seller would probably prefer to sell without contingency, so what terms are available depends on market conditions.
Title insurance for residential real estate may sometimes cover properties that are unbuildable due to unsatisfiable permit requirements.
All told, it's easier as a buyer if you purchase an existing structure that was built under permits and is currently in use under appropriate occupancy permits.
Neither small or large businesses really have any big advantages here. Got to win over the community. If anything, the small business may be local and the operators more readily able to convince the community for a variance than some corporate lawyer.
It varies from state to state (and city specific laws), but to go from empty land to productive asset can take several years.
The average data centre is 10,000 square metres (2.5 acres).
As well as compute and network facilities, DCs also need to accommodate parking, personnel areas, cooling, fire-suppression, power substations, power redundancy (generators), ground-security…
244 acres is absolutely at the upper end of any DC site.
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/933687/u...
Most hyperscalers now prefer to build larger sites as “campuses” which may consist of many buildings each consuming 40-100MW, and then yes each building needs most of what you mentioned, so it adds up.
A few sites are now also contemplating BTM or ‘behind the meter’ power generation which takes additional space.
Then some sites like Microsoft’s Fairwater design are optimized for a very large number of Accelerator cabinets — think GPU, TPU, etc. Those cabinets are each consuming 140kW today and with a path to 700-1000kW cabinets soon, so that’s one super dense building instead of a campus of less dense buildings filled with Compute.
So that is the mental model you should have for “how big is us-east-1”. But also, the data centers are not going to be, individually, anything like 244 acres. Best guess is that individual data centers are between 200,000 and 400,000 square feet. That is 5 to 10 acres.
Do the math above and us-east-1 may be 300 acres of floor space spread over a very large area.
I can’t find a link now but it was one of the re:Invent talks like Peter DeSantis briefly explaining AZs before he dug into how Amazon optimizes their concrete mixtures to be more environmentally friendly or something…
All things point to that being the biggest region any hyperscaler has in the world, and several gigawatts of power consumption.
James Hamilton also gave a talk in 2021 about AWS having crossed 20 million Nitro cards deployed and 12GW power consumed —
https://mvdirona.com/jrh/talksandpapers/JamesHamilton2022101...
I live beneath two transmission lines (overlapping, I guess, but not intersecting) and would prefer no data centre built here. Why? Because it will provide me no benefit whatsoever, reduce my property value, and worsen my quality of life due to things like light pollution and noise.
If data centre operators would fix these things perhaps people would feel differently. For example - provide multi gigabit fibre Internet to everyone nearby.
Kind of a cool idea, actually. These data centers could turn the towns where they build into startup incubators. Offer free high speed internet and heavily subsidized compute to residents in exchange for building there. At least gives back economically somewhat, as a data center itself doesn't provide much in return.
Sending kilobytes of text over thousands of miles is a lot easier than piping energy or housing across distance!
Modern datacenters also require very high standards of construction and are complex, so these projects create jobs and also represent a real training, upskilling and work experience opportunity for labor. There are many examples of electricians, plumbers and groundwork teams who did Microsoft’s site getting future work from Meta, Google or Amazon in the same part of the state because the experience has value.
It’s easy to dismissively say datacenter is bad, or that it consumes too much water (despite many datacenters accused of this being a closed-loop cooling system), and ignore the billions of dollars spent during the project on labor which supports that local economy, or the improvements negotiated for the local area and paid for the hyperscaler, bundled in by the city/county planning as part of the permits and approvals.
It’s also rare the tax for a campus is fully rebated, although it’s normal for the improvements to be partially rebated for some period (this is an investment incentive). Viewed over 20-40 years these sites are often tremendously lucrative in tax for the county/city as well.
Nothing is "infinite"
Did us white europeans and white WASP american have it good, yes. Why do you hate us so, out with it.
Cant tell if woke socialist, racist or both.
Not being able to steal from whites as easily as you can steal from blacks is literally white supremacy actually, so to be a good ally everybody has to let Microsoft build a datacenter in their backyard. YIMBYs rule!
TIL.
There's no reason they can't be economic accelerators for the towns they are in.
Should I not be able to use youtube or order online because we don't have a DC right next door?