Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers • Hacker News Board

Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

#341

Post by mbreese » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 8:56 PM UTC

buttercraft wrote: post #298

b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's worrying that they would consider something without knowing who they were dealing with, economics be damned.

I'm not sure. Cities are supposed to approve or deny applications based on whether they comply with zoning, codes, parking, water availability etc. They can't deny based on who or what the business is alone. A city near me is dealing with a lawsuit for exactly that. It probably varies from state to state, I don't know.

Cities can largely do what they want. They can deny applications for whatever reason they want. Citizen concerns are very important here (they need to keep voters happy to keep their jobs). But their main mandate is to protect the public good. If a project isn’t in the interest of their community, they ca deny it.

Whether or not it’s legal is another question. And NIMBY and… and… there are lots of potential concerns. But this article is about Wisconsin, where the question is really what are we going to do with this land and how are going to power it.

Your post mentions a lawsuit near you. This is a feature, not a bug. Even if the city is unlawfully denying an application, the denial still has the desired effect — a de facto denial for the length of time it takes to resolve in the courts. By dragging out the time for a lawsuit to be resolved, the city hopes that the developer will just go away and find someplace else.

Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

#342

Post by wat10000 » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 9:00 PM UTC

expedition32 wrote: post #330

kjkjadksj wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is surprising is that to me where you see datacenter build out hand over fist isn’t really in the midwest where one might assume due to low land costs. Surprisingly, the heart of the datacenter buildout seems to be northern virginia. Not exactly a cheap land sort of former one horse town.

Latency I guess? I'm seeing this in my own country were everyone wants to be close to AMSIX. Which as you may have guessed also happens to be the most expensive and densely populated part of the country...

Yep, Northern Virginia gets you close to the BosWash megalopolis and pretty close to better than half of the US population. It also gives you access to a highly educated workforce and pretty much no natural disasters of note.

There's also network (pun intended) effects. Northern Virginia has been a major internet hub for a long time, with the first non-government peering point and a bunch of telecom companies, including AOL.

The data center land isn't that expensive anyway. Northern Virginia can be tremendously expensive, but the data centers are built out in the relative sticks. I'm sure the land would be cheaper in Wyoming, but it's cheap enough.

Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

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Post by sneak » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 9:00 PM UTC

yccs27 wrote: post #322

sneak wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that predation if the people in that city democratically elected the mayor who made that choice? Isn’t that representative democracy decisionmaking working as intended?

It‘s preying on the city‘s desperation to get a cash payout, to get space and utilities worth much more. Facebook abuses its market power to pit city governments against each other, while the cities don‘t have many alternatives.

Does the mayor sell land or electricity now? That’s not how one gets space or utilities.

Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

#344

Post by w10-1 » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 9:02 PM UTC

fun fact: insider trading in stocks is illegal, but insider trading in real estate is not.

So if someone is even considering buying a big block of land, anyone who knows about it can buy first in the area. That drives confidentiality agreements (which increase the value of being an insider).

Similarly, for large players to make large stock transactions, proceeding through the public markets led to traders seeing the bid/ask volume and act first, making it more costly. That lead to dark pools and off-exchange trading, which has become the majority (in dollar volume) since roughly 2024. So the "public" markets are now just tracking private ones.

Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

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Post by gosub100 » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 10:20 PM UTC

bargove wrote: post #289

coredog64 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wisconsin (the state FTA) is bounded by two of the Great Lakes and doesn't generally have water problems.

Ummm, I live in Wisconsin (since 1996), and that isn't how that works at ALL.

Can you make more substantive comments besides saying "wrong!" ? I don't disagree with your claim but it's extremely low effort and adds nothing to the conversation.

Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

#346

Post by basket_horse » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 10:39 PM UTC

irishcoffee wrote: post #303

basket_horse wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing chatGPT to ICE and dynamite is reaching… my hunch is that most of the people who who killed themselves at the direction of an LLM were already mentally unstable. What about the people who were planning on committing suicide and were talked out of it by LLMs? Are we counting those anywhere? If it’s truly causing a suicide crisis I would imagine the rate of suicide would be spiking. Is that the case?

> my hunch is that most of the people who who killed themselves at the direction of an LLM were already mentally unstable Your hunch is "meh, couldn't be helped?" :(

Yes, exactly

Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

#347

Post by SpicyLemonZest » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 10:46 PM UTC

ajam1507 wrote: post #312

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a government wants to penalize companies for unethical behavior, they should pass a neutral and generally applicable law that provides for such penalties. Withholding permission to do random things based on ad hoc judgments of the company involved is a recipe for corruption.

Clearly there needs to be room for both things to occur. You should absolutely begin with passing laws, but to think that the laws on the books can cover every situation is naive. When companies skirt the law and cause harm, there needs to be a remedy.

I don't agree. The benefits of a business environment governed by due process and the rule of law far outweigh the benefits of individual government actors having arbitrary discretion to fill the gaps. As we've seen clearly on the federal level this past year, once you create that discretion, the common way for corporate executives to "prove" that they're nice and generous and deserve favorable treatment is not good behavior but open bribery of public officials.

Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

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Post by ljsprague » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 11:03 PM UTC

OGEnthusiast wrote: post #336

upboundspiral wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I've come to realize is that the rust belt states have been in huge trouble for decades. They were living in "benevolent feudalism" when GM, Ford, etc all had factories there. The problem is that these companies effectively owned the cities in which they operated. And then they left. Since the Reagan years we decided to export everything that built our economy so the landlords in power could have even more profi…

IMO it's just regression to the mean. The Rust Belt cities benefitted from being in the right place at the right time (post-WWII US during industrialization) for a few decades, but post-globalization they are just one of infinity undifferentiated land masses competing on cost of land and power (vs e.g. SF or NYC which compete largely on access to social networks and institutions).

[flagged]

Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

#349

Post by Exoristos » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 11:37 PM UTC

dguest wrote: post #39

I'd like to hear the argument for why this is needed. I can imagine a number of reasons, but this is all I found in the article: > If I’m a company considering making strategic investments... I don’t want my competition to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what pace I’m doing it at... You want to make sure everything is buttoned up and bow tied before that type of information is put into the public realm. I'm hav…

The reason is normally that cities are providing sweetheart deals that exploit the local taxpayers and benefit the corps and a handful of city cronies. The poorer or more burdened the taxbase, the more secrecy or other tricks. That said, there's probably more than the normal going on in these particular cases.

Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

#350

Post by grayhatter » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 11:39 PM UTC

eigencoder wrote: post #155

dguest wrote: post #39

I'd like to hear the argument for why this is needed. I can imagine a number of reasons, but this is all I found in the article: > If I’m a company considering making strategic investments... I don’t want my competition to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what pace I’m doing it at... You want to make sure everything is buttoned up and bow tied before that type of information is put into the public realm. I'm hav…

Let me give you an anecdote that illustrates why it was needed in Eagle Mountain, Utah. One of my friends works for the city there and he told me about how the development went down. When the city council first heard that Facebook wanted to build a data center, they shot it down solely because of Facebook's reputation. A year or two later, Facebook proposed the exact same project to the city council, while keeping th…

> Then, when the city council was only considering the economics of it, they jumped at the chance for the tax revenue and infrastructure investment. With essentially the same exact plan as before, one of the council members who rejected it before the NDA said "this is exactly the kind of deal a city should take."

Just think at how much extra money would start coming into the state, if they just allowed $company to build an orphan grinding machine!

> why it was needed in ...

"Needed"

I willingly pay more to participate in the economies that behave ethically. If you have to hide who you are, and by proxy, how you behave, to get what you want... It's exhausting listen to people advocate for, or be apologists for people who are intentionally ignoring consent.