Chali Pittman
A map inside the Town of Vienna town hall.
'You are here,' says a sticker on a map of the town of Vienna, orienting visitors inside the town hall. Dane County's advisory committee was prompted by a data center proposal in the town last fall, which involved a petition to annex land to the village of DeForest.
Dane County Board Chair Patrick Miles says he first wanted to propose a county-wide moratorium on data centers last fall, around the same time he floated the idea of an advisory committee to study the issue. The committee came together but the moratorium did not. Miles dropped it after county lawyers told him that state laws “explicitly” prohibit counties from such a move.
His committee on data centers held its first meeting in February. At the May meeting, members discussed a surprising development: Manitowoc County had recently passed a county-wide moratorium on data centers at the urging of several of its towns.
That spurred Miles to request that attorneys in the corporation counsel office take another look at the state statutes, this time with the language of Manitowoc County’s moratorium in hand.
They found that Manitowoc County’s proposal sidesteps the state’s prohibition on development moratoriums. Now, a Dane County copycat is moving swiftly through county government. It’s a signal to large data center developers that their paperwork won’t yet get approved in Dane County.
“The idea here is to put a pause on proposals for such projects to give the county time. We have the Advisory Committee on Data Centers doing its work on gathering information about impacts around related issues surrounding hyperscale data centers,” said Miles, who introduced the resolution on May 22 and referred it to a county committee on zoning and land regulation.
That committee met May 25 to green light the moratorium. The committee unanimously approved a substitute resolution, updated to refer specifically to permits for large, “hyperscale” data centers.
The moratorium now heads to the Dane County Board for a vote on June 4. Under the proposal, county planners would have 18 months to “fully explore, analyze, and research” aspects of large data centers popping up elsewhere across Wisconsin, and “develop reasonable zoning regulations” to manage them.
If approved, the moratorium would cover most towns in the county. It wouldn’t apply to cities or villages, which manage their own zoning. Nor would it apply to towns that have “opted out” of county zoning. Miles says he hopes those municipalities follow the county's example.
Data center developers wanting to build in Wisconsin have a patchwork of zoning regulations to navigate. Some municipalities are easier targets than others.
“Wisconsin has one of the most complicated systems for land use in the country,” says Brian Ohm, a retired professor who taught land use and planning at UW-Madison for roughly three decades. Ohm wrote the definitive book on Wisconsin land use planning and in the late '90s helped author Wisconsin’s landmark law requiring comprehensive planning in municipalities across the state. Part of the reason Wisconsin’s land use system is “very odd and awkward and complicated,” he tells Isthmus, “comes down to the county‑town relationship.”
Some towns in Wisconsin have zoning regulated by the county they’re in. Some don’t. In Dane County, most towns follow the county’s zoning by “opting in.” But a 2016 state law carved out just for Dane County and signed by former Gov. Scott Walker allows towns to “opt out” of Dane County zoning and create their own rules. Six towns have chosen that option: Blue Mounds, Berry, Westport, Bristol, Sun Prairie and Springfield, according to Dane County planner Majid Allan.
In some Wisconsin counties, there’s no zoning at all. In 2023, the state Department of Administration surveyed zoning regulations across Wisconsin, finding no zoning regulations in 20% of towns (253 total), 25% of villages (104 total), and 2% of cities (four total).
At an annual meeting earlier this month, the Dane County Towns Association signaled its support for a county moratorium. A data center proposal poses a potential threat to towns, which could end up losing town land permanently if private land gets annexed to a village. That’s not a theoretical concern. The QTS proposal in November started in the town of Vienna, with a now-nixed proposal to annex the land to the village of DeForest. In Beaver Dam, a proposal from Meta depended on town land, which was then annexed to the city of Beaver Dam. Near Janesville, a data center proposal from a Meta shell corporation sits along the town line in the town of Beloit.
Data centers are the latest catalysts in a long history of contentious land use fights in Wisconsin, according to Ohm, who listed some of the others during a presentation before the county’s advisory committee on data centers in March. Shopping malls, cell towers, big box stores, concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), frac sand mines, and wind and solar farms have also spurred controversy and battles.
For many communities, the data center boom has meant unraveling complicated land use issues while tech giants, who say they’re trying to win the AI race, seek vast tracts of land for servers, power and other infrastructure. There’s a lot to consider. Over the last four months the county’s advisory committee on data centers has slogged its way through presentations on data center basics, land use and zoning, and farmland preservation. Discussions of economic implications, water impacts, energy consumption, and intergovernmental relations are still being scheduled, according to an update at the panel’s May 12 meeting.
The moratorium would give the committee more time to finish its work, which Miles now thinks will conclude in May 2027. If approved next week, the proposed moratorium would still give the county board until December 2027 to decide how to include data centers in zoning ordinances and the county’s comprehensive plan.
The city of Madison adopted its own one-year moratorium in January 2026. The pause is aimed at giving city planners enough time to research policy options. Planners are working to integrate data centers into the zoning code, and to get an accurate count of the city’s current data centers; there are no hyperscalers, but there are plenty of smaller-scale operations that support single enterprises or allow businesses to rent space through “colocated” centers. The count is tricky: while these data centers exist in Madison, they haven’t had their own zoning category. They’ve been zoned under a smorgasbord of existing uses, including commercial and accessory uses.
Meanwhile, data center developers continue to want to call Madison home. Meagan Tuttle, director of Madison's planning division, confirmed in a March interview that the city has heard overtures from Cloverleaf, the start-up responsible for brokering the land and utility deals for Wisconsin’s largest data center projects, including Microsoft’s campus in Mount Pleasant and Vantage Data Centers in Port Washington. Cloverleaf is interested in siting a data center on the far east side of Madison.
The city is planning to update the public on the moratorium in a virtual information session next week. According to the event listing, the discussion will be general: “At this point in the moratorium process, no policy proposals have been drafted and there will not be a discussion of specific policy options during this meeting.”
