In Beaver Dam, city officials took steps for more than a year to conceal from the public development of a data center. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch) Massive data center proposals are often developed in secret. Wisconsin has now joined several states with legislative proposals to make the process more transparent. Editor’s note: On Jan. 27, the village government in DeForest announced that a data center “is not feasible,” indicating that the previously proposed project will not move forward. How did a $1 billion, 520-acre data center proposed by one of the world’s richest companies go unnoticed in tiny Beaver Dam, Wisconsin? A key reason: In a city that lists “communication matters” atop its core values, officials took steps to keep the project hidden for more than a year. Now Meta, the trillion-dollar company that owns Facebook and Instagram, is building a complex as big as 12 football fields in a city with a population of 16,000, enough to fill only a fifth of Lambeau Field. It’s one of seven major data center projects pending in Wisconsin that combined are worth more than $57 billion. In four of them, including Beaver Dam, local government officials kept the massive projects

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