Data center size ‘is insane’

A group of about 40 people touring the Vantage Data Centers Lighthouse Campus on Port Washington’s north side Friday walked into a 550,000-square-foot building under construction, and the reaction was immediate.

“This is insane,” one person said.

The cavernous building stretched out into the distance, the workers at the far end seemingly miles away. Steel beams outlined hallways in the distance.

Mayor Ted Neitzke told the group that the building could be compared to a “gigantic warehouse.”

“In the center of this warehouse is going to be just rack upon rack upon rack upon rack of servers and computers,” he said. “You will not be able to see from one end to the other.”

The group, which walked around the structure during the tour, logged almost one mile, according to Neitzke’s fitness tracker.

“That’s the scale and size of it,” he said.

Town of Cedarburg Administrator Eric Ryer, a Port resident and member of the city’s Plan Commission, noted the building is so large it doesn’t seem like hundreds of people are working there.

Work on the campus is “moving fast,” Neitzke said, adding that the site is the largest construction project in Wisconsin and one of the largest in the country.

“I just want you to understand what’s actually going on out there,” Neitzke told the group, adding then they can share the information based on their own experiences.

Spencer Myers, vice president of construction for Vantage, said the company expects to turn the four data center buildings, which will total about 2.5 million square feet, over to Oracle and OpenAI, which will occupy them, beginning at the end of 2027.

“There will be multiple phases of turnover as we get each building done,” Myers said. “Portions of the building will go live as we’re still finishing construction on the rest.”

Right now, the $15 billion project is 20% to 25% completed, he said, and there are between 2,800 and 3,000 workers on site each day.

The building that was toured, which is being built by general contractor The Weitz Co., is the most complete of the four data center structures on the campus. 

The company started pouring the concrete foundation of the building on Jan. 19, with work to erect the steel framework starting on March 5, Garrett Schurman of Weitz Co. said. The last piece of steel was placed on May 12.

He noted that 11,000 tons of stone was used to support each of the three large “blocks” of the building, with the smaller administrative area supported by 5,000 tons of rock.

As the group walked throughout the building where hundreds of workers were busy with a variety of tasks, Schurman pointed out where the various mechanical rooms will be and talked about how the closed loop cooling system will operate.

Although the building is a work in progress, Schurman noted that care is taken to keep it as clean and tidy as possible.

“There’s hundreds of thousands of dollars of materials we’re walking by,” Neitzke noted.

Schurman praised the work of local contractors, saying, “We’ve seen awesome craftsmanship from the local guys.”

The building isn’t the largest data center structure being built on the campus. The largest one is 759,000 square feet.

Each of the buildings is being constructed by a different general contractor, and they each do things differently, Ben Huston, a Port native working for Michels Road and Stone, said.

“They’re trying to see which systems and methods work best,” he said.

The tour was the 13th that Neitzke has organized of the data center since construction began in earnest in January.