By Transformer
Publication Date: 2026-05-21 16:00:00
by Issie Lapowsky
The summer grass grows high in rural Caledonia, Wisconsin — so high that it was easy to miss the nondescript sign that popped up in the midst of one empty field there last July.
The sign was there to notify village residents — albeit, quietly — of a potential zoning change to a plot of land that had for years provided a buffer between the local power plant on one side and a residential area on the other.
Prescott Balch got word of the sign when a neighbor called to say he’d spotted it and had since learned what was being proposed there: a sprawling data center on a 244-acre plot of land, big enough to fill 180 football fields. Neither Balch nor his neighbor knew it then, but the proposal, codenamed Project Nova, was backed by Microsoft.
The neighbor thought Balch might be interested in the news, not just because he lived about a mile and a half from the site, but also because he spent his nearly 40-year career working in…
