Things like this have had me scratching my head for decades.

Why would local governments annex property, upgrade utilities, and build new roads without moving that burden to the entities driving those things? They routinely do this for new residential developments in many jurisdictions, refusing to annex subdivisions until the residents have paid for the utilities and roads.

There seems to be no reason that the current residents of a region should consider paying for these things to benefit the owners of facilities that do not generate enough tax revenue to support the added costs. Hospitals, schools, water treatment facilities, roads for their own use may merit issuing bonds that can be paid off based on new or existing taxes. But asking folks making standard wages to pitch in over decades for a company which could pay for the needed upgrades with a few weeks of revenue makes little sense. It seems disingenuous on its face or downright negligent at worst.

Does anyone have a bead on resources that could help me learn more about how all this works [or doesn't]?

Wisconsin runs mostly on coal power plants. It's a terrible place to build data centers.

My guess is that the locals have proven themselves easily dazzled by the contract dollar amounts and arent thinking about the future. Remember the FoxConn debacle? That was WI.

It's the standard municipal playbook now: obscure the deal until the ground is broken to avoid NIMBYism, then present it as a fait accompli for jobs. The interesting part will be the resource strain. These centers guzzle water and power at a rate most small municipal grids aren't scoped for. I wonder if the secrecy deals include clauses about priority access to utilities during peak load events?

Capitalism as we're taught from economics textbooks does not exist in our reality. The theory is that sellers are supposed to compete among themselves to attract consumers. Instead we have local, state, and even national governments competing among themselves to attract sellers. And of course political election campaigns are mostly privately funded, so even the kind of competition that does exist is rarely "meritocratic," and it's certainly not democratic (small d). The wheels are greased in various ways, with campaign contributions in office and cushy corporate jobs afterward. You might say, "the public should stop electing corrupt representatives," but again, our political system is based on private funding of election campaigns, so the system practically requires financial corruption. The political duopoly is an advertising duopoly: politicians can't spread their message without money, which is why alternative parties are trapped forever in obscurity. Advertising is the price of admission to the debate. The for-profit news media conspires in this system by refusing coverage, and media-sponsored debate invitations, to candidates without money, allegedly because they're not "viable," a Catch-22 situation.

I’m having trouble with the football-field to acre conversion in this article. It talks about the complex being the size 12 football fields and the data center being 520 acres. I could believe it if those numbers were swapped and there was a 12 football field data center in a 520 acre complex. So I don’t know if they swapped the sizes of the complex and the actual data center or the author thinks football fields are much larger than they really are.

Almost everything in our society should be by-right not discretionary. We should make a set of rules (ideally policing by outcome - e.g. x dB and y NOx) and then allow anything that meets the rules. Our current approach allows for too much rent extraction.

This is happening all over the country. This is the Disney World playbook; people in these towns should understand what their land is worth to companies like Meta et al, and make a decision after having all the facts laid out for them in public.

These data centers are causing people with specific (probably autistic) hearing (disorders or specialties) to go insane. It is unfortunate that these data centers are being considered by only the electric and water issues, but not direct insanity that it causes some residents that hear the "hummmmmmmmmm"