FRI AM News: WisBusiness: the Podcast with Ryan Hunter, QTS Data Centers; Bill authors say requiring PFAS notifications would better inform communities

December 19, 2025

— This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Ryan Hunter, chief operating officer at QTS Data Centers.

Hunter shares details on the company’s planned $12 billion data center project in Dane County, which is expected to create about 700 full-time permanent jobs in operations, maintenance, security and other areas. That’s in addition to the 5,000 expected construction jobs supported by the project.

QTS has yet to sign leases with those seeking to use the data center, though Hunter noted the company is seeing plenty of interest from potential tenants.

“In the wave of AI, there’s a lot of demand,” he said. “But it’s not always AI, right, it could be compute services, if you think about typical cloud use cases, it could be enterprise users.”

He also addressed some of the controversy around the QTS project and other hyperscale data centers planned in various Wisconsin communities, which have seen some pushback from locals concerned about energy costs, water usage and other environmental impacts.

Hunter noted the company plans to use a closed-loop cooling system in the Dane County project, which only uses the water needed to originally fill the mechanism. Once it’s filled, the water doesn’t leave the system, unlike other evaporative approaches to data center cooling.

“It’s probably more efficient from a water use perspective than the current use of that land today, like agriculture is actually more water usage-intensive,” he said.

He also acknowledged worries about the data center boom driving up utility prices due to rising energy demand. QTS approached the project alongside Madison-based utility company Alliant Energy to identify locations where existing infrastructure could support a large data center, he noted.

“The land that we’ve chosen intersects with that transmission and distribution, so that we don’t have to build miles of transmission to intersect with the data center,” he said, adding “if Alliant does have any cost to serve QTS, that cost burden will be paid solely by QTS.”

After an initial public hearing and filing an annexation proposal in November, the company has reworked its plans to combine two planned annexation filings into one “to give a holistic view of the project,” Hunter said.

The company hopes to get approval for that by around March before submitting a building permit and starting construction after that, with the center coming online by late 2027.

“We’re going to be transparent in what we do,” he said. “We come to a community to serve there, we’re going to be a long-term member of that community.”

Listen to the podcast and see the full list of WisBusiness.com podcasts.

— Co-authors say a bill to create new requirements for DNR to notify communities of PFAS contamination will help ensure Wisconsinites are made aware of contamination in their area in a timely manner.

Rep. Jill Billings, D-La Crosse, at a Senate Natural Resources, Veteran and Military Affairs Committee hearing yesterday said she first introduced the proposal after the Department of Natural Resources failed to notify La Crosse County of nitrate contamination the agency discovered in 2005. She said the county didn’t find out until 2016.

Billings said the bill aims “to prevent such a serious information-sharing failure from happening to another community in Wisconsin.”

SB 628 would require the Department of Natural Resources to notify county health departments, tribal health departments and county land and conservation departments in counties where there is an exceedance of groundwater standards or any standard for PFAS in a proposed or promulgated DNR rule. The proposal would also mandate that DNR notify the departments in any adjacent county the agency determines could be negatively impacted.

The notices would have to be issued within seven business days after DNR verifies an exceedance.

Billings said she’s been working with stakeholders to craft an amendment to make several changes to the bill. That includes eliminating the provision applying the notification to a proposed standard for PFAS and clarifying multiple notifications for the same exceedance aren’t required.

Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce and the Wisconsin Paper Council both raised concerns about the current version of the bill, such as the provision allowing for notifications of violations of proposed standards, and about ensuring notifications aren’t based on unverified or preliminary information.

WMC Director of Environmental and Energy Policy Adam Jordahl said Billings had addressed many of WMC’s concerns. Wisconsin Paper Council President Scott Suder raised qualms the bill could create “unnecessary legal and reputational risk” for the industry and questioned the cost that could be associated with the change.

He also singled out the provision on proposed standards.

“Such vague and arbitrary language could lead to premature compliance expectations and increase legal exposure before standards are finalized,” Suder said.

Some Wisconsinites who have grappled with contaminated water in their communities spoke in support of the bill.

Nelsonville resident Tarian O’Carroll said he found out his well had nitrate contamination when Portage County offered free testing. He said he currently travels 45 minutes round trip on a weekly basis to get five 7-gallon jugs of water from an artesian well for his household.

He noted his wife has breast cancer, which he doesn’t think is linked to the contamination, and is careful about what she puts in her body. He said he personally knocks doors to tell new residents about contamination in the area.

“The truth of the matter is this should be common sense. Everybody deserves to know, and if you want to hide it, it’s going to come back to bite you eventually,” O’Carroll said.

— A slate of bills supporting Wisconsin’s energy production and storage capacity received a largely favorable reception at a Senate hearing.

Senators asked few questions yesterday and listened to almost entirely positive testimony on three energy bills at a Utilities, Technology and Tourism committee meeting.

One bill, SB 502, would create a host of nuclear energy development incentives including a nuclear generation tax credit.

Lead sponsor, Rep. Shae Sortwell, R-Two Rivers, said the bill would allow Wisconsin to meet rapidly growing energy needs from new data centers without relying on outside generation, and maybe even make the state into an energy exporter.

“I want to be selling our power to Iowa and Canada and Minnesota instead of having to input it,” Sortwell said.

Committee members offered only positive commentary, with committee Chair Julian Bradley, R-New Berlin, noting that he could recall when work began on the bill a decade earlier.

Todd Stuart, executive director of the Wisconsin Industrial Energy Group, raised concerns over a provision that would allow utilities to recover construction costs before nuclear plants begin operating.

Stuart noted there was a pending amendment to the bill that could address his concerns, however.

Top headlines from the Health Care Report…

— Wisconsin House members split along party lines on a Republican health care bill this week as Dems decried the GOP-led body’s failure to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies that expire at the end of the month.

And the Department of Health Services announced two children have died due to respiratory illness, the first such deaths of the 2025-26 season.

For more of the most relevant health care news, reports on groundbreaking research in Wisconsin, links to top stories and more, sign up today for the free daily Health Care Report from WisPolitics and WisBusiness.com.

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