(SAUKVILLE, Wis.) — Tom Uttech has lived on his 52-acre property in Saukville, Wisconsin, for nearly 40 years.
From outside Uttech’s home art studio, the landscape is filled with rolling hills, topped with wildflowers that build to the highest point in the township, where rows of evergreens that Uttech says he planted by hand in 1988 have since grown into mature trees.
“That kind of scares me because I didn’t think I was that old,” Uttech said of the trees that he’s watched grow over the decades.
The 83-year-old renowned landscape painter, whose work has been displayed at museums across the country, has spent hundreds of hours and years of work over the last few decades maintaining and curating his land into a sweeping prairie that has come to serve as the inspiration for his work and his livelihood.
It’s a lifetime of work that Uttech now says has come under threat after receiving a letter in the mail from his utility company informing him that a massive power line would need to be built through his property, undoing years of work and stripping away the muse for his art.
“I couldn’t believe it, and I still don’t,” Uttech told ABC News correspondent Elizabeth Schulze when asked what his initial reaction was to the news. “They’d be putting power lines that are 300 or something feet tall, taller than apparently the Statue of Liberty.”
Uttech later learned that the transmission line would be used to help power a massive $15 billion data center campus that’s set to be built on over 500 football fields’ worth of farmland in nearby in Port Washington — a signature part of the Trump administration’s $500 billion Stargate partnership with OpenAI and Oracle, which President Donald Trump hopes will help supercharge the artificial intelligence revolution.
Uttech is facing what other residents in his town — and others around the country — are facing more and more: the risk of losing parts of his land to eminent domain, the government’s legal authority to seize private property for public use, in support of the growing expansion of AI data centers as the demand to power them continues to grow.
The threat, in some ways, is a physical manifestation of what many people like Uttech fear the artificial intelligence boom could mean for their work.
Across the United States there currently more than 3,000 data centers, and that number will soon grow by 1,200 more now under construction, according to Data Center Map, an industry service that tracks data center development.
”These facilities are so energy-intensive,” Ari Peskoe, who directs the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard University, told ABC News. “A single sort of warehouse can use as much electricity as a large U.S. city. The amount of new infrastructure that has to be built to power that facility is unlike anything we’ve seen in generations.”
The Trump administration has pushed to rapidly build and deploy AI with urgency, arguing it will be vital to stay ahead of rivals like China and protect national security.
“I’m going to help a lot through emergency declarations, because we have an emergency, we have to get this stuff built,” Trump said at a White House event announcing the Stargate initiative last January. “So they have to produce a lot of electricity. And we’ll make it possible for them to get this production done easily, at their own plants if they want.”
‘It’s going to transform our community’
In nearby Port Washington, Mayor Ted Neitzke wants to make sure that investment is made right in his town, which he says is desperate for it.
“It’s exciting because it’s going to transform our community, it’s going to create a tax base and jobs and secondary and tertiary workforce and opportunities that we have not even envisioned, and it’s going to lead us into a real renaissance,” said Neitzke, who told ABC News the project would bring thousands of new jobs and much needed tax revenue.
“In a few years when the financing and everything is all done and the deal solidifies, they will pay the overwhelming majority of property taxes for the citizens of the city of Port Washington,” he said.
A representative for the industry group Data Center Coalition, when asked about the Port Washington project, told ABC News that the industry is making “multi-billion-dollar investments across the nation, including Wisconsin, to advance the digital economy, and in the process, provide significant benefits to local communities.”
“These include creating hundreds of thousands of high-wage jobs, providing billions of dollars in economic investment, and generating significant local, state, and federal tax revenue that helps fund schools, transportation, public safety, tax relief for residents and small businesses, and other community priorities,” the group said.
On top of outcries from the community over growing eminent domain concerns, the project has ignited backlash from some residents who are fearful that, as has been the case in some other communities around the country, the data center’s potential stress on the current electrical grid could lead to higher electric bills.
Nationwide, electricity prices jumped 6.9% in 2025 — more than double the inflation rate of 2.9% — according to new analysis by Goldman Sachs economists, who said they “expect data centers to boost electricity demand significantly, accounting for about 40% of total power demand growth over the next five years.”
In response, activists in Wisconsin, led by the community group Great Lakes Neighbors, have organized protests including a rally at the state capitol earlier this month. The tensions in the city were on full display last December when multiple anti-AI data center protesters were arrested, and one was dragged out of the city council meeting after chanting “Recall, recall, recall,” directed at Mayor Neitzke, after her allotted time had ended.
“I did go to the council meeting purely intending to speak. I had a speech prepared. Again, I had spoken earlier in other council meetings,” Christine LeJeune, the protester who was forcibly removed from the council meeting, told ABC News about the incident, adding that from her perspective, “the message was if you speak out, then this is what will happen to you.”
Pressed on the arrests at the recent council meeting, Neitzke, who faced a failed recall attempt over his support for the data center project, defended law enforcement when asked about the incident, while adding that incidents like that are “not the norm here.”
“I stand right next to our police department,” Neitzke said. “I thought they were very kind. They were very cordial, multiple warnings. Please, please, please.”
The mayor told ABC News that amid the backlash over the project, he’s been on the receiving end of threats to him and his family.
“I can play you the voicemails of the threats I receive from all over the country to my family’s safety,” he said. “What I did not see coming was that our officers following the law and enforcing the law would lead to people threatening our physical safety. That’s not OK.”
Paying their own way
With the construction of the data center already underway, local activists around Port Washington are hoping to push for commitments from companies to cover increases to their bills and not pass any increases on to customers.
Both OpenAI and Oracle said in statements to ABC News that they were committed to paying their own way and said they would mitigate the impact of these data centers on customers and their electricity bills by pledging to build out renewable energy sources to create more power.
“In Wisconsin, and across all of our U.S. Stargate sites, we are committed to paying our own way on energy so that our operations do not increase local electricity prices,” OpenAI spokesperson Jamie Radice said in a statement. “Our Port Washington site will help support AI services used by millions of people and businesses across the country — the majority of whom use it for free — and it will bring jobs and long-term investment to the region.”
In a statement to ABC News, Oracle said, “In partnership with WE Energies, we’re paying our own way on energy so ratepayers’ bills and electric grid reliability are never impacted by our data center. Seventy percent of the energy used for the Port Washington campus will come from zero-emission sources, including wind, solar, and batteries. The project will add about 2,000 MW of new zero-emission power to Wisconsin’s grid, which means more reliable, affordable energy will be available to local families and businesses. Oracle — not ratepayers — will fund these electrical infrastructure upgrades.”
The fate of Uttech’s land rests with whether the American Transmission Company (ATC) moves forward with what the company has called either the “preferred route” for the new transmission lines — or the “preferred alternative route,” the latter of which follows existing transmission lines. The Public Service Commission of Wisconsin, the state agency that regulates utilities, will review ATC’s project application for the data center, including the proposed route options, and will select the final route.
Vantage, the data center operator, told ABC News in a statement that it supports the alternative route and that they are “committed to being a good neighbor” and are “prioritizing investing in sustainable energy, minimizing local impact and partnering closely with the community to be an economic driver for the state while enhancing the daily lives of residents.”
“Residents and businesses in Port Washington will not see an increase in their electric bills due to this project,” the Vantage statement said.
A representative from ATC told ABC News that they consider “several factors such as cost to ratepayers, landowner impacts, environmental sensitivities, and engineering considerations when studying power line routes and locations for supporting infrastructure” and that “The route designated as ‘preferred’ offers a lower cost to ratepayers and maximizes the use of existing corridors.”
“We understand that others may favor the alternative route for different considerations,” the ATC representative said.
‘I’m not going to just roll over’
Uttech, who at 83 still regularly jumps on a four-wheeler to traverse his sprawling property in search of inspiration, is working with the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a conservative law firm, to take on the data center that could cost him his land.
“The use of eminent domain power must be the absolute last resort … This is not such a case,” the firm wrote in a letter to ATC. “We will do all we can to protect the Uttech family’s private property rights.”
“Building the power lines on their land would cause irreparable damage to the natural beauty and wildlife the Uttech family has spent decades developing, and which Tom enjoys as inspiration for his work,” WILL deputy council Lucas Vebber said.
While Uttech says he understands that AI is a growing billion-dollar industry that is already in motion and can’t be stopped, he is vowing to continue his fight.
“They brought the fight to me and I’m not going to just roll over,” he told ABC News, saying he plans to fight “right to the end.”
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