Janesville hopes to attract data center proposals for abandoned GM site

Once, thousands of workers built tractors and trucks on the General Motors site in Janesville. Now, saplings grow among its concrete rubble.

In the future, at least part of the site could host a very different user — a data center.

Janesville Economic Development Director Jimsi Kuborn will ask the City Council on Monday to open a 30-day window for proposals from data center developers interested in the 240-acre site.

“This is not a site that would support a mega, super data center project,” Kuborn said.

According to a memo to the council, the former industrial site could support 25 megawatts of power within two years of upgrades. Within four years of upgrades, “early analysis” indicates the site could support 200 megawatts of power.

Two hundred megawatts is enough to power 160,000 U.S. households, but it is a smaller number than proposed for other data center sites in Wisconsin.

A data center in the works for Port Washington could use up to 3.5 gigawatts of power, and the first phase of Microsoft’s Mount Pleasant data center is expected to use about 450 megawatts.

“The redevelopment of the GM/JATCO site as a modern data center campus is a forward-looking opportunity that balances our industrial past with our technological future. It aligns with the City’s commitment to industrial development, job creation, and long-term fiscal health,” Kuborn’s memo to the City Council reads.

Though their construction can employ thousands, data centers rarely need more than 200 workers once built.

At its peak in the 1970s, Janesville’s GM Assembly Plant employed 7,000 workers.

Data center a departure from city’s previous plans

The GM Assembly Plant closed in 2009 and was purchased by a Missouri redevelopment company in 2017.

Last fall, Janesville moved to take ownership of the site, citing lack of redevelopment and delinquent taxes. The previous owners, Kuborn said at the time, had not proposed any redevelopment plans “you would want in the middle of the neighborhood,” WPR previously reported.

Those plans included a train-to-truck intermodal cargo facility.

The city envisioned something different — new housing, parks and a community center. It applied for a $20 million federal Environmental Protection Agency grant to fund that project on the site’s southern end, which is less polluted, and planned to do more environmental testing on polluted areas of the site in the future.

But they never heard back, Kuborn said. Janesville is not listed among selected projects on the EPA’s website for that grant.

In the meantime, city officials were getting calls from “several” data center developers and brokers, Kuborn said.

She said housing is still “potentially” in the picture for the site, and she said the city is still committed to creating a big-picture redevelopment plan.

A data center, she said, could be part of that. She said opening a window for official proposals would help the city evaluate whether it’s a good idea without committing to any proposal.

“This is a process for us to collect data and to see if this is a conducive use for the future of the site,” she said.

Fielding competing proposals from developers is not how other Wisconsin communities have approached data center development. In Mount Pleasant, Port Washington and Beaver Dam, city officials started development processes in response to interest from single companies. In the case of Port Washington and Beaver Dam, those companies stayed anonymous for months.