One very busy construction site

As a group of senior citizens toured the Vantage Data Centers Lighthouse Campus on May 15, Ramon Perez, the company’s environment, safety and health manager, pointed out one of the four buildings under construction.

“At 10 this morning, we started to lift our last piece of steel for that building,” Perez said, noting many of the workers were able to sign that piece. “That was a big milestone for us.”

The massive building will be about 560,000 square feet when complete, he said.

The largest of the buildings, which will be about 760,000 square feet, is just a building pad right now, he added.

Port Mayor Ted Neitzke noted that work on the site paused to commemorate that milestone before continuing the project, which began on Dec. 21.

“This is the busiest road in Ozaukee County,” he said of the construction road the busload of seniors traveled on through the site as truck after truck passed by.

Busy is an understatement. Perez said that there were 1,583 workers on the construction site the previous day.

“There’s been a big influx of people,” he said, noting work is done from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays.

All the equipment operators are from Wisconsin, Perez said, and about 10% are women and 16% are veterans.

He noted that Vantage flies drones over the site four days a week to check on the site, and the company has equipment that tracks drones that other people fly over the site.

To keep the dust down on the construction site, eight water trucks drive in circles around the property, misting the dirt.

The water, Perez added, is purchased from the city.

“We don’t get a discount,” he said.

When completed, he added, there will be 48.3 miles of water pipes underground on the property.

Perez also pointed out the retention ponds on the property and areas marked off as wetlands.

“If you add up the volume of all the ponds on site, we can hold more water than Random Lake,” he told the group.

That has already helped the city, Neitzke said, noting the headwaters for Valley Creek are on the site. Where field tiles used to send water flowing into the creek, which often flooded in the city, the retention ponds are now holding back the water and releasing it slowly, preventing flooding, he said.

Perez said work on the 50-acre electrical substation was expected to begin the following week, as well as work to pave a helipad to be used in case of a medical emergency. There are three medical companies on the site, he noted.

The mountains of dirt on the site are “coming down,” Perez told the group.

“This used to be a mountain,” he said, pointing. “Now it’s barely a hill.”

Work to create a berm around the data center has begun on the far south side of the property, Perez said.

Trucks make about 2,200 trips to and from the site each day, he said, hauling gravel to the site and dirt out of the site. At one point, there were more than 500 pieces of equipment on the property, but that number now totals about 300.

While the data center campus has proven controversial in many respects, Neitzke touted the project’s economic impact, noting Michels Corp. purchased $120 million in equipment for the project. The base wage of many workers is more than  $60 an hour, he said.

And Perez noted that when Vantage’s crews were working around the clock, the company was spending $15 million in materials a day.

When asked why data centers are needed, Perez told the group that they are essential to everyday life now.

“In the digital world we live in, pretty much everything you do runs through a data center,” he said.

The Port data center will be used for artificial intelligence and is part of the Stargate program.