The new rules for killing a data center
A retired tech exec beat Microsoft in his Wisconsin village. Now he's teaching the rest of America how to do the same
by Issie Lapowsky
The summer grass grows high in rural Caledonia, Wisconsin — so high that it was easy to miss the nondescript sign that popped up in the midst of one empty field there last July.
The sign was there to notify village residents — albeit, quietly — of a potential zoning change to a plot of land that had for years provided a buffer between the local power plant on one side and a residential area on the other.
Prescott Balch got word of the sign when a neighbor called to say he’d spotted it and had since learned what was being proposed there: a sprawling data center on a 244-acre plot of land, big enough to fill 180 football fields. Neither Balch nor his neighbor knew it then, but the proposal, codenamed Project Nova, was backed by Microsoft.
The neighbor thought Balch might be interested in the news, not just because he lived about a mile and a half from the site, but also because he spent his nearly 40-year career working in tech, including as senior vice president of technology at US Bank. If anyone in the quiet midwestern community seemed poised to welcome this kind of development, it was Balch.
“I’m the last person on paper you’d think would be opposed to a data center,” he said. “I made a good living using them.”
But the proposal alarmed him. Caledonia, a village of 25,000 residents bordering Lake Michigan, is rich with open farmland and 26 miles of horse trails. It’s what Balch, who owns horses of his own, calls the “last bastion of open space” in the region, and he and his neighbors like it that way. To allow a noisy, energy guzzling server farm to invade that space — particularly when other parts of Caledonia were already zoned for industrial development — felt like a threat to the very character of the community.
Balch said he was “blissfully ignorant” to the operations of local government in the past. But this seemed like a fight worth having. He was one year into retirement (a career stage he confesses to be “very bad” at) and figured he had the time and the technical knowhow to lead the way.
So began Balch’s informal career as one of the growing number of local organizers rallying their friends and neighbors in opposition to data center developments. All across the country, people like Balch are crowding into town halls, organizing rallies on Instagram and covering their cul-de-sacs in yard signs, all in an effort to prevent their communities from being transformed by data center sprawl.
These movements have their NIMBYs, yes. But they’re also sweeping in newcomers in red and blue districts alike, making opposition to data centers a rare bipartisan issue. In March, an appeals court blocked a planned rezoning for a massive data center in Prince William County, Virginia. In April, voters in Festus, Missouri ousted half their city council for approving a $6b data center. In 2025, dozens more projects estimated to cost at least $156b were blocked or stalled, according to Data Center Watch, a group that tracks such opposition.
And last October, Balch and Caledonia’s data center opponents scored a win of their own when Microsoft backed off its plans for Project Nova, saying it wanted to “listen to community feedback.”
“We are committed to being a responsible neighbor in the communities where we operate, and that commitment begins with listening,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Transformer, noting that the company continues to seek out “future developments that reflect community priorities and shared goals” in Southeastern Wisconsin.
But activists like Balch aren’t just enjoying the spoils of victory. Increasingly, they’re also spreading the word, writing and sharing a common blueprint for how ordinary citizens can take on the world’s most powerful tech companies and win.
After receiving that phone call last August, Balch’s first task was to figure out how the village government worked. In Caledonia, whether you’re trying to add an attached garage or repurpose a piece of property more than twice the size of Disneyland, the process is the same: The village planning commission decides whether to rezone the land — in this case, from agricultural to industrial — before sending the proposal to the village board for a vote.
From the time he got word of Project Nova, Balch estimated he had just eight weeks for that process to play out, making it essential to apply pressure where it counted. That meant winning over a majority of the seven-member village board, which would cast the final vote on rezoning. “One hundred percent of what we do has to contribute directly or indirectly to that goal,” he said.
Balch and his fellow concerned citizens gathered in a private Facebook group, which expanded quickly by word of mouth. Together, members of the group researched each board member. Who were they and did they know any of the organizers? What issues animated them and what did they do for a living?
The group approached the board members with talking points designed to appeal to each of them. For climate-focused members, Balch focused on the risk to open spaces. For the financially-oriented, Balch tried to dismantle the popular idea that data centers are a boon to the local tax base. Instead, Balch argued that staking the village’s economic future on a single taxpayer was too great a risk. What happens if the AI boom goes bust or when the data center’s value declines? “You start to insert into the theory that this one big project with one big revenue number is maybe too good to be true,” he said.
Early on, Balch met with two board members — Nancy Pierce and Fran Martin — at Martin’s home. He arrived with documents detailing the typical lifespan of a data center and outlining the technological advancements that can make them obsolete. This argument resonated with Martin, a retired lawyer. “My approach is analytical. That’s my training. His approach was also analytical,” she said. “It was as precise as he could make it.”
For Nancy Pierce, a member of the board who had previously investigated insurance property loss claims for a living, it was the secrecy surrounding Project Nova that bugged her. Data center developments are notoriously opaque, dominated by shell companies and non-disclosure agreements that keep residents in the dark as to who their elected officials are doing business with. In Caledonia, Microsoft didn’t have an NDA, but it didn’t come forward as the developer behind Project Nova until late September either, less than a week before the planning commission voted on rezoning. By then, Pierce said “it was almost too late” to build trust.
In a one-on-one meeting with Microsoft, Pierce peppered the team with questions. How would they manage the energy needs of their cooling system and what would their construction drilling do to local aquifers, she asked.
“They had no answer,” Pierce recalled. A rezoning request is only the first step in a long process, after all, and not all of those details had been hammered out. But to Pierce, it seemed the company hadn’t taken the time to get to know the village they wanted to upend.
By late September, Balch felt confident he had three board members on his side. That left one member still to sway.
Holly McManus, who has served on the board since 2021, was meeting with constituents on both sides of the issue and remained sturdily on the fence. She shared the community’s concerns about water use, electricity rates, noise and the impact on nearby neighbors. But she also heard from local residents who were eager for this massive investment in their community, but were too afraid to speak out publicly because of the sudden statewide attention that Caledonia’s data center fight received.
“Social media coverage, interference by people who did not even live in this community, and misinformation flooded the Village of Caledonia making it impossible to get answers to the questions we were all asking,” McManus said.
She hoped that the village board would have a chance to thoroughly vet the opportunity, but first it would have to pass through the planning commission. Though that vote was only a preliminary step, Balch and his group used the public meetings leading up to it to lodge their concerns with methodical precision.
“It almost felt from the outside like they assigned each other areas of interest: This person might be talking about water. This person might be talking about employment. This person might be talking about construction,” Pierce, who also serves on the planning commission, said.
Microsoft also made its case, including at a public information session where the company pledged to be a good neighbor and shared details of how its data centers were already creating jobs and spurring investments in other parts of Wisconsin.
In the end, the planning commission voted to approve the rezoning, but Balch had worked hard to maintain crowd control, disseminating leaflets urging members of the community to “stay calm.”
“Name-calling and accusations are not effective,” the leaflet warned. “Just help them see what we see.” The real finish line, the flyer said, would be the village board vote, which was still weeks away.
But neither Balch nor the rest of the community had a chance to see how that decision would go, because on October 10, with just days to go before the village board was set to take up the issue, Microsoft pulled out of the proposal. “We view this as a healthy step toward building a project that aligns with community priorities and supports shared goals,” the company’s statement read.
Microsoft has since made a number of commitments as it relates to data center development, which a company spokesperson said were in process before Microsoft withdrew from Caledonia. Those commitments include, among other things, a pledge to minimize water use, pay for data centers’ energy needs, and refrain from seeking property tax breaks for data centers. Microsoft has also sworn off using NDAs in local government negotiations.
“In short, we will set a high bar,” the company’s president Brad Smith wrote in a blog post in January.
Whether it was the noisy community uprising or the prospect of losing in front of the village board that inspired Microsoft to walk away, no one can be sure. Either way, Balch said, “We won.”
For McManus, Microsoft’s decision was frustrating. She worried Caledonia had solidified a reputation for being anti-development and couldn’t help but wonder whether the two sides could have found a productive way forward if they’d only had time to see the proposal through.
“I wanted to find a compromise that could have worked for the nearby residents, the rest of the Village, and Microsoft,” she said. But it was clear to her that, given the public uproar, it would have been a long road ahead. “I just don’t think Microsoft wanted to push the envelope,” she said. “There are other communities who would take the tax dollars.”
Indeed, no sooner was the Caledonia battle over than Balch, who had become the face of the movement, began fielding calls from communities throughout the midwest who were trying to forestall data center development in their towns and were looking to him for answers. One reason why these data center fights have grown so contentious is that they’re no longer purely local. According to Data Center Watch’s latest report, what was once a diffuse network of ad hoc activist groups has morphed into “a national political force,” with different communities cross pollinating and lending one another support.
So far, Balch has traveled to three states and consulted remotely with activist groups in eight others. Like some anti-data center doula, he holds conference calls with their community groups and talks to their city council members about what to expect when they’re expecting a data center fight.
He advises them on the importance of understanding their audiences and their communities finances, and shares the materials he used to win over board members back home. He has testified before the Wisconsin state senate and even teamed up with one particularly civic-minded comedian, Charlie Berens, who’s taken up the issue as well. “He’ll start off with a comedian act that’s half-serious, half-comedy,” he said, “then I’ll come in with my boring content.”
To Balch, the data center ordeal was ultimately a wakeup call about the impact of local government. “They really can flip your community upside down in a hurry,” he said.
The fight so inspired Balch that earlier this year, he ran for and won a seat on Caledonia’s village board, ousting a member who had seemed inclined to support rezoning. In a sign of the community’s distaste for data centers, Balch won the vote by nearly 60%. In a Facebook post following the election, he wrote, “Thank you all. I won’t let you down.”