A Columbia County town chair said he refused to have one-on-one discussions with a developer.
Aug. 4, 2026
by Tom Kertscher / Wisconsin Watch
It didn’t get much attention at the time, but last fall an out-of-state developer proposed an artificial intelligence data center 35 miles north of Madison in Columbia County.
At $10 billion, it would have been the third-largest data center to come to Wisconsin.
The Maryland-based Stonebridge real estate development company isn’t saying why it stopped exploring a site in Pacific, a town of about 2,800 people.
But town chair Steven Pate told Wisconsin Watch there was no follow-up after he told Stonebridge executive Douglas Firstenberg that the proposal would have to be aired publicly.
“You’re going to talk to me, you’re going to talk to all five (town board members) and it’s going to be a public meeting,” Pate said he recalled telling Firstenberg in what he said was their only conversation.
The first mention of the possible data center came last November in a local news report about a solar farm. Columbia County planning director Kurt Calkins said in the article that a developer was exploring a $10 billion data center in Pacific with 400 permanent jobs and an opening in 2027.
Nothing more ever became public.
Here’s the rest of the story.
Madison real estate attorney Kevin Ramakrishna made the first contact with Columbia County last August, according to emails Wisconsin Watch obtained from the county under the state public records law.
Ramakrishna, who represented Stonebridge, wrote that he and Firstenberg first met with county officials in October.
The next month, according to Ramakrishna, Firstenberg met with Pate.
The Pacific town clerk said she had no emails related to any data center.
Stonebridge has since accelerated its involvement with data centers in other parts of the country.
The company is promoting its plans for a $15 billion, 569-acre complex on the site of a former dynamite factory northwest of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. And it has won initial approval for a $2.6 billion, 1,300-acre data center in Fort Meade, near Tampa, Florida.
Firstenberg and Ramakrishna didn’t reply to requests for comment.
Calkins said the county hasn’t heard from Stonebridge in months.
Although Stonebridge’s interest appears dead, Columbia County is bracing for more data center proposals.
Columbia County Board Supervisor Denise Brusveen introduced a policy change, adopted by the board in July, that prohibits supervisors from signing nondisclosure agreements regarding data centers.
The use of data center NDAs by local communities was revealed by Wisconsin Watch in January.
“I wanted to be very clear to the public that they should be able to trust us,” Brusveen said.
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Tom Kertscher / Wisconsin WatchReporter
Tom Kertscher joined Wisconsin Watch as a full-time Milwaukee-based reporter in October 2024 after starting as a freelance Fact Briefs reporter in January 2023. In addition to contributing to Wisconsin Watch’s collaboration with The Gigafact Project to combat online misinformation, he reports on Wisconsin policy, labor, energy and the rapid expansion of data centers across the state. Kertscher is a former longtime reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, a contributing writer for Milwaukee Magazine and the author of two sports books, on Al McGuire and Brett Favre. More by Tom Kertscher / Wisconsin Watch
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