Residents of Menomonie mounted a successful protest against a huge campus proposed by Meta – and community resistance to the AI boom is growing In the spring of 2025, Sydney Brennan was riding high. The 22-year-old was finishing college and was a newly elected councilwoman in Menomonie, a city of about 17, 000 in the lush plains of north-western Wisconsin.
Weeks into the new job, she was invited to a meeting with consultants pitching a $1. 6 bn AI hyperscale datacenter campus that an undisclosed big tech company wanted to build just outside of town. The project’s numbers were eye-opening: a 320-acre site that would use an estimated 75, 000 gallons of water per day, making it the most significant development in Menomonie’s nearly 150-year history.
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