As governor, I will immediately stop the unregulated development of hyperscale data centers. I have the strongest plan to protect Wisconsinites from the significant potential harms posed by AI and data centers. Immediately upon taking office as governor, I will:

• Issue an executive order on Day One to direct state agencies, including the PSC and the DNR, to use their lawful authority to enforce strong consumer, worker, and environmental and water use protections, protect ratepayers from increased energy costs, and properly vet all proposals for new energy or transmission required by data centers.

• Pass strong statewide standards like those outlined in SB 729 to establish binding regulations protecting workers, ratepayers, local residents and transparency, and our environment from reckless data center development. This will prohibit any data center development from moving forward unless it meets necessary standards for environmental protection of our air, land and water, and prioritizes Wisconsin union workers who earn prevailing wage, puts local communities in control and requiring transparency, and protecting ratepayers from increased utility costs. No more secret backroom deals, no more polluted or disappeared water, no more skyrocketing energy bills. This bill already has broad support, with 49 Democratic legislators in both the Senate and Assembly cosponsoring it -- we can build upon that support and strengthen it, and pass it immediately when the legislature reconvenes in January.

• Repeal tax subsidies and incentives for data center developers -- they should be paying us, not the other way around!

• Establish a Wisconsin public negotiation team that can assist local communities being targeted by data center developers, so that volunteer local elected officials and municipal staff don’t have to go up against powerful, sophisticated attorneys from Meta, Google, and other Big Tech giants without support or expertise. We will strengthen the bargaining power of our local communities so they have the freedom to say NO to data centers, or to make their own demands above and beyond our strong state standards.

• Require significant upfront payments from large data center projects, on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars, to capitalize a public clean energy infrastructure bank, to provide no-interest revolving loans financing clean energy upgrades to public buildings. Upfront payments also discourage speculative development and protect Wisconsinites from being left holding the bag for future damages if the development goes belly up.

• Every school, every public building should get energy efficiency upgrades – to be heated and cooled by geothermal or heat pumps, and powered by solar panels on the roof – but to do that, they need upfront capital that has been out of reach given the state’s paltry funding for schools and municipalities. The public infrastructure bank, funded by data center payments, can make this a reality. Recipients can pay back the loans over time with the energy savings, helping Wisconsin get cleaner energy and air while saving taxpayer dollars now and into the future. In addition, we can make real upgrades to our grid's reliability and efficiency, so that we are able to move clean, renewable energy around with minimal loss and friction.

• Establish differential rates for big energy users and require large load flexibility. As a condition of building in Wisconsin, large-scale data centers and other big energy users should pay higher rates than Wisconsin families and small businesses. In addition, they should be prepared to have their access to the grid limited during times of unusually high demand, such as extremely hot or cold days.

• Increase shared revenue to local municipalities. The reason local communities are so desperate for funds is because for decades, Republican politicians have starved them of resources from the state budget. That means higher property taxes to fund critical local services like fire and police, water and roads, and parks and libraries. When our municipalities get the funding they need to serve their residents, they won't need to desperately chase money from data centers.

• And because data centers are built to meet the perceived demands of the AI revolution, we have to regulate AI itself. No legislator in the state has authored more bills to protect Wisconsinites from potential AI harms and Big Tech than I have. As governor, I'll stand up for Wisconsinites and make sure technology works for all of us -- not the biggest, wealthiest, most powerful companies in the world.