A Wisconsin family sold 173 acres at Port Washington for 10.2 million dollars, ground with a fair market value of 590,000. Developers spent at least 125 million dollars buying more than 1,500 acres around the project, and a 672-acre data center is now going up about a mile inland from Lake Michigan.

A Wisconsin family sold 173 acres at Port Washington for 10.2 million dollars, ground with a fair market value of 590,000. Developers spent at least 125 million dollars buying more than 1,500 acres around the project, and a 672-acre data center is now going up about a mile inland from Lake Michigan.

A data center boom is turning farmland into a speculative frenzy, where developers will pay seventeen times assessed value for the right parcel—leaving assessors, neighbors, and municipalities scrambling to understand what's actually happening.