SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
Back here in Wisconsin, I've been driving through the state this week. And just north of Milwaukee, you quickly enter farm country - cornfields, rolling hills, barns and grain silos. Then suddenly, next to a highway, you get a visual shock.
And - oh, Henry, is this the data center on the left?
HENRY LARSON, BYLINE: It's huge.
PFEIFFER: There's something massive under construction over there.
It's a hyper-scale data center in Port Washington, Wisconsin. I went there with NPR producer Henry Larson, and we could barely find words for how colossal this project is.
This skyline of cranes and...
It stretches along 2 miles of highway. It covers 2 1/2 million square feet of former farmland.
LARSON: It goes literally to the horizon.
PFEIFFER: This emerging data center complex has torn up the land and torn up this community. It's a local story playing out nationally as artificial intelligence companies race to build data centers to power their AI and many people increasingly say we don't want these here.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Will you acknowledge the mental health impacts of the residents living closest to the data center? Will you offer support to people who have endured the most?
PFEIFFER: Port Washington's gargantuan project has led to angry protests, multiple lawsuits and opponents arrested for civil disobedience. Supporters say data centers will keep the United States competitive and could bring great wealth to places where they're built. But many residents feel frightened and helpless as they watch this rapid change, like 67-year-old Amanda Mueller. She relocated to Port Washington five years ago.
AMANDA MUELLER: This was my last move. I feel like an elephant looking for a place to die in life, and I found utopia. It was so perfect.
PFEIFFER: She bought a four-bedroom ranch house within walking distance of a beautiful, undeveloped stretch of beach on Lake Michigan.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS ON GRASS)
PFEIFFER: Is this all your yard you see here, all this?
MUELLER: Yeah. I own...
PFEIFFER: Wow.
MUELLER: ...Three acres.
PFEIFFER: All the way to that fringe of...
MUELLER: Yeah.
PFEIFFER: ...Pine trees.
MUELLER: Oh, all the way through there.
PFEIFFER: Wow.
MUELLER: This is the perfect retirement home. I mean...
PFEIFFER: Look at this view you have.
But her view is different this year. You can glimpse cranes in the distance. Port Washington's data center is being built about a half mile from her house.
When did you get a hint that something was about to dramatically change in your neighborhood?
MUELLER: I'm going to say two years ago. The farmer right next to me just sold a lot of his farmland. And then someone else said, yeah, another farmer's selling. And it's like, wait - it's all consolidated.
PFEIFFER: Were you feeling some combination of kind of dread, dismay?
MUELLER: I put my house up for sale.
PFEIFFER: Literally?
MUELLER: Yeah.
PFEIFFER: But she says she got just one offer that eventually fell apart. She believes the buyer got spooked by the data center. Mueller is infuriated with the mayor and city council for approving this project. She's now one of Port Washington's leading crusaders against it, pushing back with litigation and asking for moratoriums and environmental reviews and more voter input.
MUELLER: There should be a buffer zone around data centers, and it should be within at least a mile of a data center, you should not have residents living anywhere near it. There has to be guardrails.
PFEIFFER: Port Washington Mayor Ted Neitzke says adequate guardrails have been put in place. There may be no bigger champion for this project than the mayor.
(SOUNDBITE OF CAR DOOR CLOSING)
TED NEITZKE: I don't know where you want me to start, but - so I'm 55. So I've lived here, went to high school here, married my wife, who's from here, our kids went to school here.
PFEIFFER: He drives us around Port Washington, recalling when it was a declining industrial city that didn't yet have a cute touristy downtown. He thinks people against the data center have it all wrong, just like they were wrong about a popular brewery now located near the city's pretty marina.
NEITZKE: So this is one of the new developments. This is where we'll go for beer and cheese curds. But this building here was very controversial. People lost their jobs on their council because this was a parking lot, and nobody wanted to lose the parking lot. Change is something that does not come easy to small Midwestern towns.
PFEIFFER: In Port Washington, being mayor is a part-time job. It pays an annual stipend of $7,500. But the role gave Neitzke the power to help approve this $15 billion data center project. He envisions thousands of local jobs, beautification and infrastructure projects and a gusher of new tax revenue.
NEITZKE: One of the things I did was I flew out to Loudoun County, Virginia, and I went and visited all the data centers...
PFEIFFER: One of the epicenters...
NEITZKE: Yeah.
PFEIFFER: ...Of data centers.
NEITZKE: I mean, I don't know if you can find more in the United States. And as I drove around, I really could not understand - what are people so mad about? Because when you're in that area, and you're driving around, they're just large boxes filled with computers.
PFEIFFER: But you really can't imagine what people would be mad about?
NEITZKE: Honestly, if you did your diligence, I don't understand why a community like ours, who grew up an industrial base, would fight the fact that we would need this back again.
PFEIFFER: The mayor drives us to the data center site, and as we get near, he agrees the scale and pace of construction is mind-boggling.
When you look at all this, what emotions are you feeling?
NEITZKE: Pride and angst - it gets me excited because I know that it just locks in the future for our kids, for jobs, at least for the next 50 to 75 years. I know that our city's finances will be set as a result of it. And the angst is it's insane.
(SOUNDBITE OF TURN SIGNAL CLICKING)
NEITZKE: I mean, it's just so big.
PFEIFFER: When we arrive, an entourage of company representatives and PR people give us hard hats and fluorescent vests...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Oh, there you are. Hey, (inaudible). How are you?
NEITZKE: Oh, I got to grab my gear.
PFEIFFER: ...And we pile into a large van.
(SOUNDBITE OF VAN DOOR CLOSING)
UNIDENTIFIED TOUR GUIDE: Building 12 is 540,000 square feet, and Building 11 is 725,000 square feet.
PFEIFFER: The complex is all dirt and steel and construction workers and convoys of trucks.
(SOUNDBITE OF BEEPING)
PFEIFFER: We stop at what looks like a windowless gray warehouse.
(SOUNDBITE OF CONSTRUCTION EQUIPMENT RUNNING)
PFEIFFER: And this will be the data center itself holding computing equipment.
VICTORIA TYSON-BLOYD: Yes, ma'am. You just walked in on what would be a loading dock, but yes. Each one of these are different bays, and there's different walls that protect the different areas. But correct, each one of these will be data centers.
PFEIFFER: That's Victoria Tyson-Bloyd. She's overseeing this construction for Vantage Data Centers.
TYSON-BLOYD: All of this infrastructure is what supports the cooling, the heating and the electricity and the fiber, which is your communications connections to each one of these buildings. That's what we're building.
PFEIFFER: This complex is part of a program called Stargate that President Trump announced at the White House last year. Its goal is to create a nationwide network of advanced AI data centers. The Port Washington complex is a partnership with Oracle and OpenAI. We asked how long the contract will last.
TYSON-BLOYD: How long is our company thinking (inaudible)...
(SOUNDBITE OF METAL CLANG)
TYSON-BLOYD: ...Over? Don't know that.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Yeah.
TYSON-BLOYD: Yeah.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Yeah, we won't be able to disclose that.
TYSON-BLOYD: Yeah.
PFEIFFER: You know but can't say?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: So...
PFEIFFER: You know but can't say?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: It's a term of contract. We - yeah.
TYSON-BLOYD: Yeah.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: We have a lease.
(SOUNDBITE OF BEEPING)
PFEIFFER: That vagueness makes the public uneasy, and data center operators have often used nondisclosure agreements to keep their projects secret during the early stages. Meanwhile, people like Amanda Mueller are watching the future be built near their homes, using a technology its own creators say could one day kill us.
Whenever there's been a new technological advance, whether it's railroads or cellphone towers or - you pick it - it creates a period of discomfort where the rails have to get laid and the towers are suddenly stuck there starkly in a previously pretty neighborhood. What do you think, if anything, makes this technological development different than ones in the past?
MUELLER: We don't know what it's being used for. I mean, with those things, we knew. We were moving freight. We were moving people. We were moving, you know, produce. We don't know what the end goal is.
PFEIFFER: On this, Amanda Mueller and Mayor Neitzke agree.
You are very cheerleading. You're very persuasive in what the future benefits of this could be. Then why do you think that polls show that two-thirds of Americans oppose data centers?
NEITZKE: 'Cause nobody knows what they do.
PFEIFFER: Which is part of the problem, right?
NEITZKE: Well, it's a huge problem.
PFEIFFER: They're afraid of what might come.
NEITZKE: It's a huge problem. And the reason nobody knows what they do is because they've been able to operate without having to ask - tell anybody what they do. And as a result, that little mystery created a huge gap in knowledge, and that drove a lot of ignorance.
PFEIFFER: Mayor Neitzke admits he doesn't really have control over how AI will be used. But the part of the world he can control is this one - on the streets where he grew up, in the city he believes will flourish with data center money. So he asks, if you were in his shoes, what would you do?
(SOUNDBITE OF YUSSEF DAYES' "RUST") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
