This story was produced and originally published by Wisconsin Watch, a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. It was made possible by donors like you.
How did a $1 billion, 520-acre data center proposed by one of the world’s richest companies go unnoticed in tiny Beaver Dam, Wisconsin?
A key reason: In a city that lists “communication matters” atop its core values, officials took steps to keep the project hidden for more than a year.
Now Meta, the trillion-dollar company that owns Facebook and Instagram, is building a complex as big as 12 football fields in a city with a population of 16,000, enough to fill only a fifth of Lambeau Field.
It’s one of seven major data center projects pending in Wisconsin that combined are worth more than $57 billion.
In four of them, including Beaver Dam, local government officials kept the massive projects under wraps through confidential nondisclosure agreements, a Wisconsin Watch investigation has found.
Secrecy also occurred in the three communities without NDAs.
In one, the Madison suburb of DeForest, officials worked behind the scenes for months before publicly announcing a proposed $12 billion data center, which residents are fighting.
The lack of public disclosure, while relatively common for typical development proposals in the planning stages, raises questions about how much time the public should have to digest projects that dramatically affect the economy, land use, energy, taxes, the environment and more.
“As soon as community leadership is contemplating, even entertaining it, I think they need to make the public aware,” said retired tech executive Prescott Balch, who is advising residents around Wisconsin where data centers are proposed. “Even if it makes it harder, that’s the right way to do it. And nobody is doing it that way.”
Blowback from residents who have been kept in the dark has spurred a new legislative proposal that would ban data center NDAs statewide.
Wisconsin has some 40 data centers, stretching from Kenosha to Eau Claire. But most are tiny compared with the big seven: three under construction in Beaver Dam, Mount Pleasant and Port Washington; and four proposed in DeForest, Janesville, Kenosha and Menomonie.
Besides storing and processing data, data centers are vital to advancing the use of artificial intelligence.
A case study in how projects each worth $1 billion or more are kept quiet is Beaver Dam, the Dodge County burg an hour northeast of Madison, where Meta’s data center is expected to open in 2027.
The Beaver Dam Area Development Corp., a quasi-government nonprofit that functions as the city’s economic development arm, signed an NDA on Dec. 1, 2023, not with Meta, but with a shell company no one had ever heard of, Balloonist LLC.
The agreement referred only to a “project,” making no mention of a data center or Meta.
The NDA was signed “very early, almost in the introductory period of that project,” the development corporation’s leader, Trent Campbell, told Wisconsin Watch. All major development projects have “different levels of confidentiality for different purposes. And this entity believed it to be necessary at the onset of the conversations.”
The NDA meant that the Beaver Dam Area Development Corp. could not reveal its discussions with Balloonist, or even disclose “the existence of the project.”
The NDA also put the wheels in motion.
For more than a year, the city quietly took official actions to make the data center a reality, including:
- July 2024: The city council voted 12-0 to approve a predevelopment agreement with another shell company, Degas LLC, that only later was identified with the data center. The agenda and the minutes of the meeting don’t mention a data center.
- November 2024: The city council created a tax incremental finance, or TIF, district for the data center to help fund development. The agenda and the minutes for that meeting do not mention a data center, though the agreement itself does.
Not until February 2025 — 14 months after the NDA was signed — did the Beaver Dam Area Development Corp. announce that it and the city were working with a company — then still unidentified — on a “potential data center project.”
Campbell noted to Wisconsin Watch that Gov. Tony Evers and other officials had identified the site for a major development as far back as 2019. For months after the NDA was signed, it wasn’t known whether the data center would come to fruition, he added.
“I know the opponents currently disagree, but I think the city acted in as transparent a way as they could,” Campbell said.
Eventually, a news report in April 2025 identified Meta, which declined comment for this story, as the company likely behind the data center.
Meta confirmed its involvement eight months later, saying on Facebook: “We’re proud to call Beaver Dam home. We are honored to have joined such an incredible community in 2025.”
The first reply to that post was from a Beaver Dam resident, who wrote: “We would have been honored to have the opportunity to decline this.”
NDAs also helped keep the public in the dark about data centers under consideration in the three other cities that used them.
- Menomonie signed its NDA with Balloonist LLC in February 2024 — more than a year before the city in northwest Wisconsin announced a $1.6 billion data center proposal in July 2025. Two months after the NDA, the city council unanimously helped pave the way for a data center by changing a land use ordinance. The change gave, for the first time, a definition of the ordinance’s reference to “warehousing,” saying warehousing includes data centers. The city’s mayor put the proposed data center on hold in September 2025. In January 2026, the city council adopted a zoning ordinance for data centers that reversed the warehousing definition. “Based upon feedback from the community and elected officials, it is clear that additional discussion should occur regarding the appropriate level of regulation of data centers,” the city’s public works director told the council and the mayor.
- Kenosha signed its NDA, with Microsoft, in May 2024, six months before news reports surfaced saying the NDA kept the proposed data center operator’s name confidential. It was later announced that Microsoft had purchased 240 acres in the neighboring town of Paris, which the city annexed in December 2024. No dollar amount for the proposal has been announced.
- Janesville announced in July 2025 it was approached by developers about a data center and put out a request for proposal. The city signed its NDA two months later and is now in negotiations with Viridian Acquisitions, a Colorado developer, for an $8 billion data center.
Port Washington in Ozaukee County and Mount Pleasant in Racine County responded to records requests from Wisconsin Watch saying they had not signed NDAs for their data centers.
In Port Washington, where three people were arrested during a city council meeting on the data center in December, residents are trying to recall Mayor Ted Neitzke, saying he has been secretive about the $15 billion data center from OpenAI, Oracle and Vantage Data Centers.
In Mount Pleasant, Microsoft this month announced plans to add 15 data centers, worth $13 billion, to the $7 billion complex under construction there.
NDAs are described by economic development officials as necessary and criticized by data center opponents as against the public interest.
NDAs and other steps to protect confidentiality are crucial at the early stages of a development proposal, said Tricia Braun, executive director of the Wisconsin Data Center Coalition.
“If I’m a company considering making strategic investments, regardless of industry, I don’t want my competition to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what pace I’m doing it at,” said Braun, a former executive at the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. “You want to make sure everything is buttoned up and bow tied before that type of information is put into the public realm.”
Questions have swirled around transparency even in communities where local government officials did not sign NDAs.
That includes DeForest, which lists “communicate clearly” among its core values.
The DeForest data center, proposed by Virginia-based QTS Data Centers, is controversial, in part, because the village board would have to annex 1,600 acres in the neighboring town of Vienna.
At one DeForest Village Board meeting about the project, Village President Jane Cahill Wolfgram said that based on emails she had been receiving from residents, there was “just one thing I think we need to clear up.”
“And you can ask any one of these board members. They will tell you, they just learned about this project in the last couple of weeks.”
That was Nov. 18, 2025.
But Village Board trustees had been offered one-on-one meetings with the developer some 10 weeks earlier, trustee Jan Steffenhagen-Hahn said in an email to Vienna resident Shawn Haney.
“Because of the scale of this project,” that’s when residents should have been notified, said Haney, a leader of a group that opposes the data center.
Other emails obtained by the group show that DeForest staff were strategizing with QTS representatives and Alliant Energy as early as March 2025 — seven months before announcing the proposal last October.
In one email, the village planner discussed with QTS representatives when to seek various village approvals, including annexation, while acknowledging that doing so without disclosing “any details of the project or operations will be difficult.”
Cahill Wolfgram told Wisconsin Watch she in fact had met with QTS on Oct. 1, three weeks before the public announcement. She expressed frustration that many residents are urging trustees to stop the data center.
“They’ve been brought in from the very early moments of this discussion and they have continued to be front and center of everything we’ve done,” Cahill Wolfgram said. “As village president, I know of nothing that has been done behind the scenes.”
A public hearing on the annexation is scheduled for Feb. 9.
The state Department of Administration, which reviews annexation proposals and issues advisory opinions, concluded the DeForest annexation is not in the public interest because of concerns over how the village would provide water and sewer services for the annexed area.
The Clean Economy Coalition of Wisconsin has called for state leaders to pause consideration of any data centers until a comprehensive strategy on them is adopted. In part, the coalition said comprehensive planning is needed to avoid more “stranded assets.”
Wisconsin Watch reported in December that Wisconsin utility ratepayers owe nearly $1 billion for stranded assets — coal power plants that have been or soon will be shut down. A push to provide new energy capacity for data centers poses the risk of creating more stranded assets.
Microsoft on Jan. 13 announced new standards aimed at being a “good neighbor in the communities where we build, own and operate our data centers.” It mentioned transparency five times.
But University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee researchers called Microsoft’s initial Mount Pleasant data center a “microcosm of a larger problem with secrecy and lack of transparency about water and electricity demands” of data centers throughout the country. That, they wrote, “harms the public’s ability to determine whether hosting a data center is in their best interest.”
Mount Pleasant has wanted a major development where the data center is now under construction because a massive development signed with Foxconn in 2017 largely fell through.
Local government use of NDAs and other methods to keep data center development secret is widespread across the U.S.
In Minnesota, local elected officials were aware of data center proposals for months or even years before disclosing them. In Virginia, 25 out of 31 data center projects had NDAs. In one New Mexico county, county staff negotiated for a $165 billion data center with an NDA that kept elected officials in the dark.
Several states are targeting NDAs.
At least three — Florida, Michigan and New Jersey — are considering legislation to prohibit governments from signing data center NDAs. A Georgia bill would prohibit NDAs that hide information about data center electricity or water usage. New York is considering a bill to limit NDAs for economic development proposals generally.
Now, similar legislation is pending in Wisconsin.
Last week, state Rep. Clint Moses, R-Menomonie, citing questions about transparency over the Menomonie proposal, introduced a bill to prohibit NDAs for data center proposals in Wisconsin.
“I’ve never seen such overwhelming opposition from all sides of the aisle,” he told Wisconsin Watch, describing constituents’ feelings about data centers and secrecy surrounding them.
Moses said he understands the need for confidentiality in economic development generally, but that because data centers have such widespread impact, public notice is paramount.
“The earlier the better,” he said.
Braun, the data centers coalition leader, said the public should be notified when a data center proposal is ready to be considered for approvals by elected officials — after municipal staff do due diligence to determine whether things such as zoning, utility capacity, water and sewer would make a proposal potentially viable.
Balch, who helped defeat a proposed data center in the Racine County village of Caledonia, where he lives, said the public should be alerted well before local elected officials consider such votes.
“You have to use your judgment,” he said. “But at some point, you need to realize this is not a normal thing and we need to look out for the residents.”
