'Gonna take everyone's jobs': Charlie Berens takes stand against Port Washington AI data center
PORT WASHINGTON, Wis. (CBS 58) -- Charlie Berens is one of Wisconsin's best-known comedians. But recently, he's taken to a new cause, showing us a side of him we don't often see. He's taking a stand against an artificial intelligence (AI) data center coming to Port Washington. While Berens is against the facility, others are for it. CBS 58's Jessob Riesbeck sat down with Berens, and the mayor of Port Washington, to get both sides.
After watching the city council meeting, what Berens saw, didn't sit well with him. He took to his platform, Manitowoc Minute, to share his thoughts.
"You had all these people saying they didn't want something and yet the city council went in a different direction," said Berens. "So I was just trying to amplify the voices of these people that I don't think had their voices heard."
"I saw the video," said Port Washington Mayor Ted Neitzke in reference to Berens' Manitowoc Minute that he posted in late August, fighting against the data center. "It was brought to my attention over the weekend. I kind of looked at it with a sad face, like ugh, all the work we've done to try and communicate the truth and reality of our project now is in question."
The project is a gigantic one, years in the making, spearheaded by Port Washington Mayor Ted Neitzke.
"It means that we are going to be in a position to sustain our community's future," said Mayor Neitzke.
Sixteen-hundred-acres, three miles north of downtown Port Washington, bought by Vantage Data Centers for $8 billion to build at least 3.2 million square feet of AI data centers.
Port Washington
"The economic impact for our city is significant because right now just the minimum guarantee of $8 billion in investment, that's their minimum guarantee -- that's eight times what our city is currently worth," Neitzke said.
"We're losing the thing that makes Wisconsin, Wisconsin, America's Dairyland. The tech companies are seeing this as like, 'Oh we've got all this fresh water.' You can quickly see how this is going to turn into America's motherboard," Berens said.
Port Washington Mayor Ted Neitzke
"Well, the famers willingly sold their properties," Neitzke said. "Because family farms are not sustaining anymore. They're corporate farms. My nightmare would be Port Washington and the north side of town being a gigantic corporate farm where they're leaching things into the soil and they're sucking the ground water dry, and they're polluting our creeks."
Water usage is a big concern with these data centers. Mayor Neitzke says, theirs is a closed loop system that will use about 22,000 gallons of water a day, or around 8 million gallons a year. That's the equivalent of about 65 homes, or 12 Olympic size swimming pools brought from the city sourced from Lake Michigan.
"At the end of the day, it's not going to have a significant impact, it's not going to disrupt our environment," said Neitzke.
"The data center is just the beginning," said Berens. "Because if you have a data center it's like having a big shop vac, you know? And the shop vac, what do you need? You need an extension cord, so you throw that out over all these farmlands. And those are the utilities, and the utilities own them and they can take land through eminent domain. You quickly see how people don't have much of a choice in this."
Where the power lines will land is still being figured out with several communities fighting against them.
"That is beyond my control. It is a massive amount of energy," said Neitzke.
Port's data center is a 1.3-gigawatt facility -- enough to power around 1 million homes.
Charlie Berens
"What I do appreciate about Vantage is their commitment to using 70% renewable energy to power their facility," Neitzke said.
Mayor Neitzke also touted what Vantage is doing with the land around the data center. The initial project will take up about 40% of the land, or 673 acres of the 1,644 acres they bought.
They'll build retention ponds, restore wetlands, and plant over 2,300 trees on eight-foot berms to hide the facility from public eye.
"Our zoning was designed and developing so it had to basically disappear in a forest that they will create," said Neitzke.
"We are sort of trading our farmland for a 'thing' that's gonna like take everyone's jobs. That's the trajectory. That's the stated goal in a lot of ways so it doesn't make sense to lose our farmland to lose our jobs," said Berens.
Friday night at 10 p.m. on CBS 58 News, we'll bring you part two of this special report. We'll discuss job creation, the effects of AI, and the big mystery that the public may never get an answer to.