During a visit to Wisconsin Wednesday, President Joe Biden praised a planned $3.3 billion investment from Microsoft to build an artificial intelligence data center on land once slated for development by Foxconn in Mount Pleasant.
The plans also include a manufacturing-focused AI Co-Innovation Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee as well as a partnership with Gateway Technical College to develop a “Datacenter Academy” that will train 1,000 people by 2030, according to a statement from the White House.
“It’s all part of Microsoft’s broad plan to build an artificial intelligence system right here in Racine and it’s going to be transformative, not just here, but worldwide,” Biden said during a speech near the future site of the data centers Wednesday morning.
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“It’s not only a significant investment in infrastructure in Racine, but for the people of Racine,” Biden added. “It means folks are getting trained in new high-paying, high skill jobs that don’t require a four-year college degree and don’t require you to leave home.”
The project is an expansion of previous plans Microsoft announced last year to construct data centers on land Foxconn was going to build an LCD screen manufacturing center. Foxconn said it would invest $9 billion at the site and employ 13,000, but those plans never came to fruition.
Brad Smith, vice chairman and president of Microsoft, said between now and the end of 2026, the company will invest and spend $3.3 billion at the complex. Smith said the site will be the home of “among the world’s most advanced AI and cloud data centers.”
The project is expected to bring 2,000 union construction jobs to the area by the end of the year.
“We are creating manufacturing jobs across the state of Wisconsin as we get steel from near Wausau, as we get chillers from La Crosse, as we get generators from near Madison,” Smith said. “This is literally creating jobs across the state of Wisconsin.”
The company will also team up with the startup accelerator Gener8tor to train 1,000 business leaders to “adopt AI in their operations, so that Wisconsin manufacturers can seize AI’s promise,” the White House said.
The U.S. Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy said data centers are one of the most “energy-intensive building types” and consume 10 to 50 times the amount of energy per floor space of a typical office building. Data centers currently account for approximately 2 percent of the nation’s total electricity use. Some of the largest data centers require more than 100 megawatts of power capacity, or enough to power around 80,000 U.S. households.
The announcement comes nearly seven years after plans for Foxconn were first announced. Former President Donald Trump touted those plans at the time, calling the planned Foxconn plant the “the eighth wonder of the world.”
“Look what happened. They dug a hole with those golden shovels and then they fell into it,” Biden said Wednesday. “Foxconn turned out to be just that, a con.”
Nick Fick, president of membership development at International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers 430, said Microsoft’s plan is exciting after years of waiting for the Foxconn partnership to come through.
“After all that hype and all that hope, the promises made by Donald Trump failed to come to in Racine County,” Fick said. “But now, our luck has changed.”
Fick said IBEW workers are already installing power and lighting and doing underground work needed for the Microsoft project.
Racine County Executive Jonathan Delagrave said the new data center project still needs to be approved by local officials.
Biden made several references to his economic policies on Wednesday being the reason behind Microsoft’s expansion. But Republican leaders in Wisconsin painted a different picture during a virtual press conference before the president arrived.
“The reason President Biden is here to hijack this awesome announcement for Wisconsin, for Racine, for the workers, the people that are going to be working in their data centers and doing the production is because he’s failing everywhere else,” Sen. Julian Bradley, R-Franklin, said.
With the 2024 presidential election just six months away, both Biden and Trump have made Wisconsin a key campaign destination.
Biden’s Wednesday trip was his fourth stop in Wisconsin so far this year. While Trump was in Waukesha to fire up his base last week during a break from his criminal trial in New York. He hammered Biden’s economic agenda during that visit.
A recent Marquette University Law School poll found Wisconsin voters favored Trump on the economy over Biden by a 52-34 margin. But Biden was narrowly leading Trump in the latest polling from NPR and Marist College. That national poll found Biden leading Trump 50 percent to 48 percent among registered voters.
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