The 22-year-old was finishing college and was a newly elected councilwoman in Menomonie, a city of about 17,000 in the lush plains of north-western Wisconsin. Weeks into the new job, she was invited to a meeting with consultants pitching a $1.6bn AI hyperscale datacenter campus that an undisclosed big tech company wanted to build just outside of town. The project’s numbers were eye-opening: a 320-acre site that would use an estimated 75,000 gallons of water per day, making it the most significant development in Menomonie’s nearly 150-year history.
Brennan had her concerns about datacenters and that the company was keeping its identity secret. One of the consultants told her that the developer was Balloonist LLC, a shell company incorporated in Delaware. The identity of the parent corporation bankrolling the project was known to only a handful of people, including two city officials who had signed nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) with Balloonist.
Brennan and her fellow councilmembers were in the dark. As tech giants scour the nation in a relentless pursuit of cheap land and energy to build hyperscale AI data centers, critics say they have relied on secrecy through use of shell companies and NDAs to push through multibillion-dollar mega-projects in cash-strapped cities like Menomonie. In Wisconsin alone, NDAs were reportedly signed in at least four other cities.
Officials in one of those cities, Beaver Dam, also signed NDAs with Balloonist LLC. The tech company behind that $1bn datacenter project was later revealed to be Meta, the parent company of Facebook. Brennan peppered the two Balloonist consultants with questions about water use, noise pollution and the strain of such a massive facility on the city’s electrical grid.
The plan for the datacenter would include buffer zones to reduce noise, and Balloonist promised to fund any necessary upgrades to Menomonie’s grid and water system. The company’s goal was to be “water positive”, or eventually replenish more water that it consumed, by 2030. The consultants showed Brennan charts that projected up to 1,000 temporary construction jobs, along with hundreds of contractors and between 50 to 75 high-paying permanent jobs, a potential economic boon for the struggling city that was once a major center of the nation’s lumber industry.
What Brennan did not know was that the city had already signed a pre-development agreement with Balloonist after the city council approved it in closed session that March, a month before she took office. The relationship between Balloonist and Menomonie began in February 2024 when two Menomonie city officials, Atkinson and David Schofield, the city’s director of public works, signed NDAs with the developer. The one-page agreement, obtained by the Guardian, makes no mention of a datacenter.
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