Communities Are Aligning to Fight Data Centers: A Report From Rural Wisconsin

An Ohio village fights an international data center and its 800 MW gas plant

By Cathy Cowan Becker Wednesday night took me to the small village of Ashville, Ohio, to testify against an 800 MW fracked gas plant planned to power an EdgeConneX data center, located directly next to children’s soccer and baseball fields and on top of the village aquifer. I was not the only one to testify. In fact, I was 51st out of 80. As you can see from these photos, the townspeople turned out. There was so much incredible testimony from th…

Communities are aligning to fight data centers: A report from rural Wisconsin

This story first ran in Hard Reset. Reprinted with permission. WISCONSIN RAPIDS—Concern about AI in the San Francisco Bay looks different than it does here. At home, the impacts of it are still mostly hypothetical. In places like Wisconsin Rapids, they’re real and urgent. Jasmine Sun has done some absolutely incredible reporting on data center backlash in Michigan and Wisconsin this summer. I followed the story less as a San Francisco-based tech…

Viewpoints: Not all data center sites are wrong - Wisconsin Rapids is one example

A stroll around the massive downtown Wisconsin Rapids site of a shuttered paper mill, once Wisconsin’s largest, is a weedy reminder of a bygone manufacturing era.This tired hodge-podge of buildings is also the focus of a local campaign against building data centers – even though it’s hard to imagine a 220-acre location with better access to electric power, rail lines, roads and ample water supply.