Voters in a Wisconsin city of 12,000 overwhelmingly backed a novel ballot measure on Tuesday to crack down against artificial intelligence data centers, similar to the massive facility planned for construction with President Donald Trump’s backing.
Port Washington, Wisconsin, voters approved the first-in-the-nation referendum proposed in response to the city’s planned $15 billion OpenAI-Oracle-Vantage data center campus by about a two-to-one margin, with 66% voting “yes,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. While the measure does not stop the construction of the Trump-backed center first announced in October 2025, it adds a requirement for the public to approve hefty tax incentives for developers involved in future multi-million or billion-dollar projects in the area.
Brad Tietz, the state policy director for the Data Center Coalition — a membership organization that supports such facilities, told Politico that he is “not aware of another ballot referendum” on the issue “that has been taken directly to the voters yet.”
“If this trend continues and grows, it’s going to have significant consequences for our economic competitiveness [and] our national security,” Tietz added in his comments to the outlet.
However, the city’s residents who proposed and organized the successful ballot measure disagreed with this premise.
Carri Prom, a Port Washington mother who co-founded Great Lakes Neighbors United, the group behind the referendum, told Politico, “None of us are specifically anti-development.”
“We’re not even really anti-tech,” she continued. “It’s just that we want responsible development, and we want responsible tech moving forward.”
The group’s effort notably drew attention from Wisconsin-born comedian Charlie Berens, who has nearly three million subscribers on YouTube, and grew up less than an hour’s drive from the Lake Michigan city.
“We have more regulations on a bratwurst than the entire artificial intelligence community,” the comedian said at a February town hall opposing the OpenAI-Oracle-Vantage data center hosted by Great Lakes Neighbors United. “At the end of the day, I’m just all about the community deciding for the community.”
Berens, who is also an Emmy-winning TV journalist, is well known for his observational humor and satire regarding his native Midwest and is the creator of the popular web series Manitowoc Minute.
He has also used his YouTube channel as a platform to speak in favor of data center regulation. In one January three-minute-long YouTube short that received 100,000 likes, Berens used his signature comedic style to criticize a proposed Wisconsin bill for not going far enough in cracking down on the AI centers, quipping, “We got bigger bills at the bar,” and “there’s more regulation on cheese curds.”
The planned Trump-backed Port Washington data center campus “will feature four cutting-edge data centers providing close to a gigawatt of AI capacity,” according to Vantage Data Centers’ website.
“Construction will begin soon and is scheduled for completion in 2028,” the website continues. “The project expects to create more than 4,000 skilled construction jobs, most of which will be union jobs. Once complete, Vantage and Oracle will create more than 1,000 long-term jobs and thousands more indirect jobs.”
The planned center is part of the much-larger half-trillion-dollar Stargate project, which also has the president’s support. OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, announced the sweeping initiative on the first full day of Trump’s second term.
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