Data centers take center stage in Wisconsin governor’s race

A year ago, most Wisconsin residents thought little about data centers, according to local leaders and journalists.

But today, the computing facilities — and where they get their energy — are a key issue in the hotly contested Aug. 11 Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor.

At a lively town hall last week in Milwaukee, five Democratic candidates vied to outdo their peers in tough talk about data centers and their developers, described as ​“Big Tech oligarchs” by state Rep. Francesca Hong, the leading contender according to recent polling.

Whoever wins the nomination will run against Tom Tiffany, the Republican candidate on the ballot in November and a current U.S. representative for north and central Wisconsin. He too has focused part of his campaign on curbing data centers, promising to prevent the use of farmland for the facilities and repeal tax breaks for them. But unlike the Democratic hopefuls arguing that AI facilities should be powered largely by clean energy, Tiffany is pushing state regulators to keep decades-old coal plants online past their retirement dates to help meet ballooning power demand.

While data centers are an increasingly hot-button topic nationwide in the run-up to the November elections, the tension is particularly pronounced in Wisconsin as developers have recently flocked to the state, drawn by its cool climate, access to water, robust transmission and generation infrastructure, and generous tax incentives passed by the Republican-dominated legislature and signed by current Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in 2023.

That’s spiked public fears about the facilities’ impacts, including that the boom in energy demand will drive a buildout of polluting power plants and increase household utility bills. A July 22 Marquette University Law School poll found that over three-quarters of Wisconsin voters say the costs of data centers outweigh the benefits, up from 55% in October 2025. Almost nine out of 10 Democrats and two-thirds of Republicans who answered the poll held this viewpoint.

We Energies, the utility serving over a million customers primarily in southeast Wisconsin, is planning to meet data centers’ power demand with two new gas plants, one of which would be the state’s second largest. Meanwhile, Wisconsin’s first hyperscaler data center went online this summer near Milwaukee. That and another data center under construction not far away in Port Washington are expected to need 3.9 gigawatts of power — far more than is used by all the homes in the state combined.

“This story isn’t going away. It will only grow in importance to people,” said Elizabeth Ward, director of the Sierra Club’s Wisconsin chapter. ​“People are worried about air pollution, water pollution, land impacts, especially when gas plants are being built just to serve data centers. We hope to have a strong governor who passes safeguards against them.”

How the candidates want to curb data centers

All the Democratic candidates at the data center–focused town hall vowed to keep the industry on a tight leash and ensure that community protections are enforced by the legislature, governor’s office, utility regulators, and state agencies.

State Rep. Hong, the choice of 38% of respondents in a July 29 poll by Marquette University Law School, is calling for a moratorium on data center development to give the state time to develop a robust regulatory framework. New York’s Democratic governor instated a similar policy last month, the first of its kind in the U.S.

While none of the other candidates support a moratorium, each says they would aggressively pursue ratepayer protections and clean energy investments from data centers and utilities that serve them.

Hong calls her data center plan ​“Control-Alt-Delete,” and her website says that ​“if a community decides it wants to proceed with data center construction, it needs to be powered by clean energy.” She says taxes paid by data center developers should be invested in a green bank to fund energy and climate solutions, and utilities should be forced to report how much energy large customers use, to ensure regular customers aren’t footing the bill. Hong also advocates for the expansion of public utilities, which her campaign says currently provide 11% of the state’s power and charge significantly lower prices than We Energies does.

Joel Brennan, a civic leader and former official in Evers’ administration, wants to make data centers invest in larger transmission upgrades and clean energy. At the town hall, he said the legislature needs to pass a law codifying the commitment to 100% carbon-free energy by 2050 that Evers set with a 2019 executive order. He also said data centers should use battery storage instead of diesel generators for backup power.

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley said he’d order data centers to bring their own 100% clean energy to the grid. Crowley had dropped out of the race July 8, then reentered 10 days later, and won Evers’ endorsement when another candidate — Lieutenant Gov. Sara Rodriguez — withdrew.

State Sen. Kelda Roys pledged to work with the legislature to ​“immediately pass” a bill introduced by Democrats in the last session that would — among other things — require data centers to get at least 70% of their energy from renewables in order to qualify for tax breaks. (Republicans backed a separate data center bill in the last session that likewise did not advance.)

Roys previously told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which sponsored the town hall, that she would require ​“significant upfront payments from large data center projects, hundreds of millions of dollars each, to capitalize a public clean energy infrastructure bank,” which would provide zero-interest revolving loans for clean energy upgrades to public buildings.

Longtime environmental justice advocate and former Lieutenant Gov. Mandela Barnes was also at the town hall and pledged to demand a renewable energy commitment from data centers. But he withdrew from the increasingly chaotic primary contest the day after the event.

It appears the November election will be a close one. Polls show Hong and Tiffany evenly matched, with people largely voting along party lines. Wisconsin is a purple state, with Republicans modestly outnumbering Democrats, and independent voters making up about a third of the electorate.

Coal plant concerns mount

Wisconsin Rapids residents Aryana Khan and Cloey Hilliker drove nearly three hours to attend the town hall. A proposal for a data center on the site of a defunct paper mill has drawn controversy in their town. Khan has asthma and worries that fossil fuel generation that is built or continues to run to fuel data centers will have serious health impacts on Wisconsinites.

“Why should a Silicon Valley man that was born into wealth get to dictate whether or not I can open my windows because the air is so bad I can’t breathe?” Khan told Canary Media. ​“This is an industry that will not last long. Something new will come along that is shiny, and people will flock to it, and we will have overbuilt for an obsolete technology.”

During the town hall, Peg Sheaffer, spokesperson for the public interest law firm Midwest Environmental Advocates, lamented that utilities are rolling back their plans to retire coal plants because of data centers.

“What actions would your administration take to hold utilities accountable and to keep Wisconsin on track to retire coal-fired power plants?” she asked the candidates.

Hong suggested that a public health expert should be added to the state’s Public Service Commission, whose three members are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state Senate, for staggered six-year terms.

Multiple candidates emphasized the role that the Public Service Commission plays in deciding where data centers get their energy, and who pays. Brennan called the commission a ​“black box for people outside state government” and ​“one of the most powerful entities inside state government.”

The commission has long been criticized for acquiescing to utilities’ requests to raise rates and invest in fossil fuels. Roys referred to the body under former Republican Gov. Scott Walker as ​“lapdogs for utilities.”

But the regulatory body has recently taken some steps to limit data centers’ impacts. In April, the commission instituted a special electricity rate for data centers in the Milwaukee-area service territory of We Energies to prevent regular customers from paying for the energy to serve data centers, a move praised by environmental and consumer advocates.

Tom Content, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board, a consumer watchdog group, thinks the gubernatorial race helped influence the commission to reject We Energies’ original proposal and institute a standard that goes further to protect ratepayers.

“You had candidates on the right and the far left that said the Public Service Commission is not doing its job,” Content told Canary Media. ​“I think the commissioners themselves were like, ​‘We’re going to side with the consumer.’”

Content and other advocates said that data centers underscore Wisconsin’s need for integrated resource planning, a centralized process that many other states use to ensure demand is met with the most cost-effective and cleanest energy. Currently, Wisconsin regulators consider utility proposals piecemeal.

Roys is in favor of such a reform. At the town hall, she said, ​“The fastest, cheapest new sources of energy are wind and solar, and I’ll add geothermal in there, too.”

She noted that energy efficiency, grid improvements, and virtual power plants can help utilities retire coal plants even as electricity demand grows.

“There’s so much that we can do, some of it enabled by modern technology and AI to actually make better use of what we’re already generating, and to waste less,” she said. ​“This is absolutely within our reach.”