In Menomonie, a small Wisconsin town pushed back against a $1.6 billion datacentre

According to the Guardian, the residents of Menomonie, a town of around 17,000 people in north-western Wisconsin, mounted a successful protest against a $1.6 billion plan for an AI datacentre campus. The paper places the affair within a growing national resistance to the artificial intelligence boom.

The starting point is almost comical. In spring 2025, Sydney Brennan, 22, newly elected to the city council, is invited to a meeting with consultants. They present a "hyperscale" campus to be built just outside the town, on behalf of a large technology company whose name is not disclosed. The figures, according to the Guardian: 320 acres, around 75,000 gallons of water a day, the biggest construction project in the history of a town nearly 150 years old. The article's web address mentions Meta, but the dispatch we have before us does not allow us to confirm it. Nor do we know the details of the mobilisation, or the precise reasons the project was abandoned.

We will therefore stick to what is readable, and this is our reading, not an established fact. First, the secrecy. An unnamed player, consultants acting as go-betweens, a novice councillor invited simply to listen: the classic pattern in which one negotiates with a local authority before it knows what is being asked of it. Capital arrives masked, with investment figures as its calling card.

Next, the material. "Artificial intelligence" sounds like a cloud; above all it has an address, hectares, a power connection and a water tap. Eco-Marxists speak of a metabolic rift: accumulation demands an ever greater flow of energy and materials, and passes the cost on to ecosystems and to populations who have decided nothing. A datacentre is an almost too tidy illustration. The profits flow off to distant shareholders; the water, the land and the strain on the grid stay put.

Finally, class. We will be told that these projects create activity and jobs, and that we must choose between the digital future and the small town clinging on. This jobs blackmail is the usual tool for dividing people who live in the same place. Here, according to the Guardian, residents refused the deal as it was presented to them. That is no small detail: for once, the decision over the use of water and land was contested in public.

Let us keep a cool head. A local victory does not slow the AI race; the project can reappear elsewhere, in a poorer, less informed, more hurried municipality. This is where the fundamental question lies: who plans? As long as the siting of such infrastructure is settled case by case between consultants and councils, it is power relations that decide. Public planning, with open accounts on water and electricity, would spare us from relying on the vigilance of a few neighbours. Menomonie said no. It is time this stopped being a heroic exception.