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 below, sponsored by UW-Madison:
