Data center land buy-up tops 980 acres for $53.9M

Vantage Data Centers has spent almost $54 million to buy 980.2 acres of land on Port Washington’s north side for a planned data center campus, according to Wisconsin Department of Revenue records.

The company has purchased 43 parcels as it continues to work toward development of an almost 2,000-acre data center campus.

The company has not yet submitted plans for the complex to the city, but it is negotiating a developer’s agreement with Port officials that will govern the campus, Port Mayor Ted Neitzke said.

Port officials had hoped to meet next week to discuss the agreement but that meeting has been delayed, Neitzke said.

“We are being diligent in our discussions and negotiations,” he said. “There’s been no snags, but I’ve been told with this large a project there are unique details that come up and we’re working our way through them.

“We should be set by Aug. 6 — that’s our target.”

Neitzke said he expects that once the agreement is in place, Vantage will move quickly to submit plans so work on the project can begin in the coming months.

He noted that city staff and consultants it has hired are working on engineering for the streets and utility extensions required for the project, something he said he expected will cost “tens and tens of millions of dollars.”

  The agreement is expected to cover a plethora of details, including timelines for construction, infrastructure improvements  and potential tax incremental financing to extend services such as utilities to the site, which only recently was annexed to the City of Port.

Gov. Tony Evers recently signed a bill that will allow any TIF district created for the data centers in Port Washington and Beaver Dam to be excluded from a state-imposed cap on these districts.

Communities can only create TIF districts that total 12% or less of their equalized property value, but this bill would exempt Port and Beaver Dam from counting a data center TIF district in that total.

That, Neitzke said, is “huge” because the valuation that could be included in a data center TIF district would easily exceed the cap.

“It allows us to create a tax incremental district for other projects, if we need it,” he said.  “It basically creates an island for the (data center) TID.”

Meanwhile the Plan Commission on Thursday is expected to consider petitions to annex 753.25 acres and rezone them for the second phase of the data center project. The commission will make a recommendation to the Common Council on whether to approve these petitions.

The commission will also consider a request by the company to discontinue a portion of Highland Drive for the data center.

Neitzke, who recently visited a Vantage data center campus in Louden County, Va., said he was impressed by the buildings there and hoped the Port plan would follow in that mold.

“Those were really nice looking buildings,” he said. “And I think those are their standard design.”

Vantage Data Centers, a rapidly growing global developer of hyperscale data center campuses, was identified in June as the end user that plans to develop the Port data center complex, which could be one of the largest in the world.

Vantage, based in Denver, has 35 data center campuses, either in operation or under development, in 14 countries on five continents, and has been focused on expanding throughout the world to capitalize on the increasing demand for cloud computing and artificial intelligence capacity.

In Port, Vantage has been rapidly recording land purchases for its proposed data center.

The data center is expected to be built on land that stretches from the City of Port’s north border to Dixie Road between I-43 and the Ozaukee Interurban Trail, over the next five years.

Members of the Karrels family and their business, R&B Karrels Farms LLC, are the largest seller of land. According to the state, the family sold five parcels totaling 404.2 acres for almost $21 million.

Weiss LLC was paid $3,555,720 for 82.3 acres, while Sarah Hunter was paid $2.8 million for five acres, Paul Krauska was paid $2.6 million for five acres and Amy Kornely was paid $2.2 million for three acres.

While not among the largest sellers, Welton Development, owned by Town Supr. Greg Welton, was paid $299,900 for 1.6 acres, according to the state.