JANESVILLE, Wisconsin — A contaminated, abandoned parcel of land in this southern Wisconsin city is all that remains of a General Motors plant that, a half century ago, was a proud symbol of American auto manufacturing. But it could soon be home to a new industry: artificial intelligence.
A Colorado-based real estate and investment company has proposed to buy the 250-acre site, clean it up and build a massive $8 billion data center campus.
It’s a test case for a plan hatched by the Trump administration to entice this generation’s industrial titans to clean up the mistakes of the last one.
The administration is pitching the idea of redeveloping blighted manufacturing sites as a win-win for hollowed-out cities in need of jobs and the AI industry it is seeking to boost. But it remains to be seen whether it can create enough goodwill to overcome the wave of local opposition that has stymied data center projects from Ohio to Virginia to Arizona and is being seized on by Democratic candidates in the midterm elections.
With data center developers scrambling to find low-priced land with access to water and power infrastructure, former industrial properties — broadly classified as brownfields — and even heavily contaminated Superfund sites with those amenities look increasingly appealing.
The hope is that even costly environmental cleanups can pencil out when developers are pouring billions into hyperscale projects. For those willing to take the risk, EPA is pledging to expedite environmental reviews and provide guidance on the remediation and redevelopment process.
“There really is no greater demand for industrial properties than data centers right now,” said Bruce Rasher, who works on cleanup and redevelopment of auto manufacturing sites at the Racer Trust, which oversees other old GM properties. “The larger the data center, the smaller the total percentage cost [is] comprised by cleanup, and then the more feasible it becomes.”
The Trump administration is selling the idea of redeveloping blighted manufacturing sites — broadly classified as brownfields — and heavily contaminated Superfund sites as a win-win for hollowed-out cities and the AI industry it is seeking to boost.
But it remains to be seen whether projects can create enough jobs and good will to help overcome local opposition that has stymied data centers from Ohio to Arizona and is being seized on by Democratic candidates in the midterm elections.
Officials in Janesville say the data center could be a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the city 75 miles outside Milwaukee.
The hometown of former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan, Janesville’s economy was once defined by its General Motors plant. Employing 7,000 people at its peak in the 1970s, the plant shut down during the Great Recession.
Today, the city owns the site and its decaying buildings, fences and old rail tracks. Located close to homes in the residential, working-class Fourth Ward, the tract is layered with concrete to keep in place soil contaminated with pollutants from nearly a century of auto manufacturing. While city officials want to make use of the land, it can’t be redeveloped without a major cleanup.
Now, Colorado-based Viridian Partners is offering to buy the parcel and remediate soil tainted with hydrocarbons, heavy metals, “forever chemicals” and other pollutants — a cleanup estimated to cost $30 million. The site would then be converted to an 11-building, 800 megawatt data center campus.
Supporters say the project is the most viable option for the dilapidated site and Janesville’s 66,000 residents.
“We’ve had 200 interested parties to redevelop that haven’t moved forward because of the contamination,” said Claire Gray, director of policy and strategic initiatives at Forward Janesville, a business association. “No other opportunities have panned out.”
The project has won the backing of the local chapter of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers thanks to Viridian’s estimates that it would create roughly 600 permanent jobs, as well as 13,000 jobs during construction.
But others in Janesville aren’t sold.
Cathy Erdman, a firefighter who has lived in the city since 2008, said she’s not convinced the project would help with the community’s pressing issues, including a lack of housing and grocery stores.
Just because the land is a former industrial site does not mean it’s the best spot for a data center, said Erdman, whose home is just over a half-mile away. She also worries about the city becoming financially dependent on the still-evolving AI industry in the same way that it was once dependent on GM for jobs and tax revenue.
“I don’t think all brownfields are created equal,” Erdman said. “This particular brownfield is literally surrounded by thousands of people — folks whose property values may very well be impacted by the construction process, which has a yearslong duration, as well as the post-construction usage and what it ends up being.”
Energy and health concerns
The data center would need about as much electricity as all the homes in the Milwaukee metro area. Viridian and its development partner, Virginia-based Abbleby Strategy Group, would work with Alliant Energy and American Transmission Company to develop a new electrical substation for grid interconnection and “modest” water and sewer upgrades, per their proposal.
Critics have raised concerns about how the project and others in Wisconsin — including a colossal, $15 billion Stargate data center backed by OpenAI and Oracle — could affect electricity bills and increase emissions. Utility We Energies has proposed two new natural gas peaking plants elsewhere in Wisconsin to keep up with demand from data centers.
Even city officials, who are largely enthusiastic about the project, say consumers need binding protections to avoid price hikes.
“One of the most glaring needs that has not yet been addressed is statewide legislation to clarify that data centers pay for 100% of their costs,” said Janesville City Manager Kevin Lahner.
Viridian declined to answer questions, and Abbleby did not respond to inquiries. But other similarly sized data centers have relied on diesel-powered generators for backup electricity, which can release harmful air pollutants like nitrogen oxides.
In November, voters in this historically Democratic-leaning city in Wisconsin’s Republican-leaning 1st District will face a ballot initiative put forth by locals who want to stop the project, and at least two candidates for city council are running on an anti-data center platform.
Ray Jewell, a pastor whose father worked at the GM plant and who now lives a few blocks away, worries about how the project might affect his health and property values. Like other skeptics, he feels that the proposal has been rushed without sufficient input from community members who’d be most affected.
“My main concern at first was environmental and continues to be environmental and health,” Jewell said. “I know data centers make a lot of noise, and it’s a 24/7 thing. I have Parkinson’s and one of my symptoms is tinnitus — ringing in the ears constantly.”
A longtime Republican, Jewell said the prospect of a data center next door and concerns about AI have encouraged him to look “elsewhere” politically. Wisconsin Assemblymember Francesca Hong (D), a gubernatorial hopeful and Democratic socialist who has called for a data center moratorium, has gotten his attention, he said.
An ‘ideal opportunity’ for brownfields?
It’s not clear how many brownfields beyond Janesville could be turned into data centers, but the Trump administration is working to sell the idea.
Following a directive from the White House, EPA released guidance in January for potential reuse of brownfields and Superfund sites. The agency has identified 335 languishing brownfields that could be candidates for sprawling data center campuses due to their size and infrastructure access.
Many of those sites are also in the Midwest, which some experts view as the next epicenter broadly for hyperscale projects. That’s because grid access has become scarce in Virginia, and the Midwest’s temperate climate can make it less expensive to power facilities whose computer servers must be kept cool at all times. Wisconsin’s data center tax breaks are also a draw.
“Hyperscalers are targeting the Midwest, particularly Wisconsin, in part because cooler climates reduce cooling costs, which directly improves their margins,” said Julia Towne, a research fellow on AI at the Nature Conservancy who previously worked for Microsoft and Google.
Driven in part by a desire to advance AI and other high-tech industries, some lawmakers are trying to expand EPA’s modest brownfields grant program that supports redevelopment. House Republicans have introduced legislation to make corporate developers eligible for federal brownfields loans and grants and to exempt them from reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act.
The promise of bringing new jobs to an area that’s experienced economic and environmental distress is key to the pitch.
“We’re admittedly biased, but firmly believe that data centers provide an ideal opportunity in leveraging and repurposing brownfield sites to grow investments, jobs, tax revenue and supply chain ecosystems,” David Robinson, general counsel at Texas-based Aligned Data Centers, said during a House hearing this month.
‘We view this as a responsibility’
By all rights, the Janesville property should have been cleaned up on GM’s dime after the company declared bankruptcy during the recession. It was only because of a technicality that the site was ineligible for a $773 million environmental trust set up to remediate former plants and bring them back to productive use.
But while the reason for its ongoing contamination is unique, the property’s cleanup challenges are typical of what data center developers stand to face with brownfield sites.
The parcel is contaminated with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), a class of chemicals that occur in gasoline and some of which are carcinogenic. Lead, arsenic, volatile organic compounds and small concentrations of “forever chemicals” are also present.
If the data center or another project were to move forward, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources would need to sign off on cleanup plans to ensure proper management and disposal of contaminated soil. That’s typical of brownfields, whose cleanup is managed by state and tribal regulators rather than EPA.
Disturbing the concrete cap could expose workers on site to pollutants, said Issac Ross, a remediation and redevelopment manager at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. With the land adjacent to the Rock River, regulators would also need to ensure proper management of groundwater, he said.
“We’ve certainly redeveloped ‘dirtier’ sites with success,” he said. “It’s more the scale of the footprint involved.”
Originally, Janesville had considered other uses for the site. In late 2024, the city applied for a $20 million community change grant from EPA to foster sustainable redevelopment in the area. But that program funded by the Inflation Reduction Act was canceled under the Trump administration.
That prompted the city to seek out potential data center developers for the site last year.
“We view this as a responsibility to review the opportunity and weigh the risks, and that’s what we’re trying to do,” Lahner said.
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