Community pushback forces DeForest Village Board to reject plans for massive data center

 

Rendering:  WTMJ, Milwaukee

Headline:  Wisconsin State Journal, 2/4/2026

Nicole Pollock reports for the State Journal:

Plans for a vast data center campus north of Madison are officially dead — at least for now — after the DeForest Village Board voted unanimously Tuesday to reject the annexation of nearly 1,600 acres of farmland currently in a neighboring town.  

The village had difficulty negotiating a pre-annexation agreement with QTS Data Centers that would address all of its goals, Bill Chang, DeForest’s village administrator, said at Tuesday’s meeting. 

[snip] 

Residents began organizing against the project in the fall, creating a Facebook group that has amassed more than 4,000 members and packing public meetings to give what amounted to hours of public testimony. Many opponents said they were unhappy about the loss of farmland, distrustful of QTS and its owner, Blackstone, and concerned about environmental damage and infrastructure costs.

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