A proposal to impose an 18-month data center moratorium was approved by the Dane County Board of Supervisors Thursday evening and now goes to County Executive Melissa Agard for final approval.
The proposal, recommended for approval on May 26 by the board’s Zoning and Land Regulation Committee, would prevent the processing and issuance of zoning permits for new hyperscale data centers in order to allow the County Board’s Advisory Committee on Data Centers time to research the environmental, utility and land-use effects of large-scale facilities.
According to Dane County board staff, the moratorium would apply only to hyperscale data centers with at least 5,000 servers and 10,000 square feet of space.
It would only apply to towns subject to county zoning, not to cities, villages or towns that have adopted their own zoning codes.
The city of Madison has enacted its own temporary data center moratorium, a 12-month pause that was the subject of a June 3 public information meeting.
Enabling AI
So-called “hyperscale” data centers, which are being constructed in Wisconsin and elsewhere to accommodate artificial intelligence applications, are increasingly controversial due to the large amounts of electricity and water they consume and the public’s concern about how they affect land use and utility rates.
The county resolution comes as the Advisory Committee on Data Centers continues its work researching data center development, including questions about energy use, water resources, long-term land use, and the demands of artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure on local communities.
The data center advisory committee is made up of 11 members, including County Board Chairman Patrick Miles, municipal representatives and environmental and energy experts.
In a May 27 interview with In Business Madison, Miles said the county needs more time to consider amendments to its zoning code based on the information gleaned from the advisory committee’s work.
Miles made it clear that the resolution acted on at the committee level applies to hyperscale data centers, not to an enterprise operation such Epic’s or another business that needs to develop a data center for their own needs on a much smaller scale.
“The other thing is that where the county has jurisdiction in a moratorium like this, it would only be to those 26 towns that are subject to county zoning,” he said. “There are six towns that have opted out of county zoning and adopted their own zoning code, and then cities and villages of course have adopted their own zoning codes.
“For those communities, this moratorium wouldn’t apply to them, but it is my hope that they would see this as a model for them to follow,” he said.
Miles mentioned the failed QTS Data Center proposal in the village of DeForest, which was rejected in February due to intense public opposition.
“The whole reason I created the advisory committee is just seeing how members of the public around the state where the other projects have been proposed, haven’t felt like their concerns are being heard,” Miles said. “There seems to be some reluctance from the industry to be really transparent with some of the facts surrounding data centers, and so this is an effort to gather that information in an impartial way that can empower communities throughout the county to make informed decisions for themselves.”
Pointing to a Feb. 5 report from the Brookings Institution, Miles said there is some concern that companies that have proposed data centers have made exaggerated assertions about their long-term economic benefits.
“Promises of that haven’t always come to bear,” he said, “so we’ll be looking at that information as well.”
Miles said the county’s study will look at some of the mitigating steps communities, including community benefit agreements, could take to make these large data centers a win-win proposition.
“For sure, we’re looking at the risks and barriers to such projects and whether or not there are tools, whether they be cooperative agreements of some sort that provide some measure of expectation for promises to be kept,” he said.
According to the Brookings Institution report on the long-term economic benefits of hyperscale data centers, stiffer competition among data center developers for limited land and harder-to-win approvals are giving local regions more leverage in community benefit negotiations,
The report, titled “Turning the Data Center Boom Into Long-Term Local Prosperity,” said the standard model of data center siting — based in part on fraught battles over electricity and questionable long-term economic benefits — may be giving way to an alternative model of at least partially shared economic gains for host regions.
In doing so, they are beginning to realize that their land, infrastructure, water and electricity are valuable and potentially part of grand bargains that deliver high-value economic development to the regions that provide them.
The report cited Microsoft’s data center in Mount Pleasant as a model for local cooperation in driving long-term industrial and technology development goals.
That community has been receptive to Microsoft’s data center campus, in part because of the company’s new Community First AI Development Initiative, which was borne out of the concerns and questions the community fielded.
The initiative is grounded in five commitments to communities that Microsoft believes will raise the bar for itself and others, including a commitment to water conservation with the help of a closed-loop cooling system in which water keeps circulating within a sealed piping system.
During a Feb. 5 panel discussion sponsored by the Wisconsin Technology Council, Rima Alaily, corporate vice president and general counsel of infrastructure legal affairs for Microsoft, said in addition to water conservation, the other commitments of Microsoft’s initiative center on protecting local ratepayers by paying “its own way” on electricity; supporting local job creation, not only with construction and data center jobs but by tapping into Wisconsin’s manufacturing supply chains; adding to the local tax base to ensure there is more revenue to invest in local schools, hospitals and other institutions; and by investing in AI skills training so that local workers benefit professionally.
“It’s our belief that our ability to build out and deliver AI infrastructure really depends on communities coming to the conclusion that the benefits outweigh the costs,” Alaily said in February.
