A much smaller scale project than Wisconsin's rural mega campuses: developer Trent Overhue wants to convert part of a shuttered 160,000 square foot Walmart at 5825 West Hope Avenue in Milwaukee into a roughly 19,000 square foot data processing facility needing about 7 megawatts of power, alongside a self storage facility, a library branch and affordable housing on the same site. The city has said the commercial pieces cannot move forward until the affordable housing and green space portions are built first.
An operating data center site in Milwaukee County, WI, mapped in OpenStreetMap and the IM3 Open Source Data Center Atlas. About 26,000 square feet of building is mapped.
Transmission upgrades like this are typically billed to every electric customer in the state through transmission charges, not just to the data center that made the new line necessary, which is why the cost allocation question matters for ordinary bills even outside the four counties involved.
American Transmission Company's roughly 1.3 to 1.7 billion dollar transmission project to serve the Vantage data center campus, whose tenants include OpenAI and Oracle, in Port Washington had been deemed a complete application on December 15, 2025. On August 6, 2026 the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin voted unanimously to revoke that completeness determination, the first time in the agency's 95 year history it has done so, citing 564 revised or refiled documents that made the record too murky to review. ATC refiled the application on September 14, 2026 under a new name, the Ozaukee County Distribution Interconnection Project, restarting the roughly six month review clock; broader regional upgrades tied to the project have pushed total contingency cost estimates as high as 2.5 to 2.7 billion dollars.
Every Wisconsin rate case in dollars a month, with hearing dates: willmybillgoup.com, our rate case tracker.
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