The public demanded data center news, and Wisconsin Watch is delivering 65%
By Tom Kertscher83% Wisconsin Watch11%
7/22/2026, 12:00:00 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 14 faulty reasoning types, including Hasty Generalization, Attempt to Sell a Product or Service, and Availability Heuristic, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 24.9% saturation with 78 hits. Analysis detected 466 faulty-reasoning hits from 313 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 59.6% and a BS Rank of 65% (7,408 of 21,173 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 65.00% of the article peer group.
For six months now, Wisconsin Watch has made a concerted effort to report on data centers.
We’re publishing major stories at WisconsinWatch.org and, each Monday, we provide data center news nuggets in our Forward newsletter ( subscribe here ).
Here’s a month-by-month summary of what we’ve reported.
January: Wisconsin Watch revealed that officials in at least four Wisconsin communities (the number has since grown) signed nondisclosure agreements that hid details of billion-dollar data center proposals from the public.
February: We detailed how a $1 billion data center is being proposed for Grant County in the Driftless Area of southwest Wisconsin.
March: In a sign of the impact of artificial intelligence data centers, we reported that just three Wisconsin companies have done more than $1 billion in business supplying the facilities.
We also disclosed more NDAs and other ways local governments have tried to keep data center details secret .
April: We were the first to report on an official estimate that state government will forgo $2 billion in revenue because of a sales tax exemption for data centers that was adopted in 2023.
June: We spent months gathering behind-the-scenes details on what happened to the Driftless Area proposal.
July: We detailed how land sales for the data center under construction in Port Washington turned homeowners and farmers into millionaires and, in some cases, created generation-changing wealth.
More stories are in the works.
If you have suggestions for future data center coverage, please let me know: tkertscher@wisconsinwatch.org .
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom.
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The public demanded data center news, and Wisconsin Watch is delivering is a post from Wisconsin Watch , a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009.
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Analysis
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