Secret Deals, Shell Companies, and the Small Towns Fighting Back against Data Centers

Secret Deals, Shell Companies, and the Small Towns Fighting Back against Data Centers

August 1, 2026

Data centers are popping up all over the country in ever-increasing numbers. According to Axios, there were about 3,000 new data centers being built or planned nationwide as of October 2025.

Across small-town America, we’re seeing the same pattern.

Tech companies hide behind shell companies and non-disclosure agreements. Local officials sign away transparency before residents even know a deal exists. By the time the public learns who’s really building next door, the land is already rezoned.

But two towns show it doesn’t have to end that way. In Menomonie, Wisconsin, and Coweta, Oklahoma, residents uncovered the secrecy, organized fast, and forced a reckoning. Neither fight is fully over. But both prove that public pressure can still beat corporate opacity.

Residents Resist Meta’s Secret Investment in Menomonie

Wisconsin is a popular destination for data centers: there are already about 40 in the state, with new proposed projects worth over $50 billion. This is the story about one of them.

Balloonist LLC, a Delaware-registered shell company, proposed a $1.6 billion data center on more than 300 acres of farmland in Menomonie in July 2025, after closed-door meetings with city leadership. The city council had already annexed and rezoned the land, yet neither council members nor the public knew which company was actually behind the project. Menomonie City Administrator Eric Atkinson signed a single-party non-disclosure agreement (NDA) 18 months before the public found out about the project, which allowed the true owner to conceal its involvement.

It turns out that Meta was the owner of the shell company in Menomonie. Residents learned that Meta had used a similar playbook the previous year in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, after reporting from Bloomberg revealed the link between Balloonist and Meta. The same shell company using the same tactics in a different town.

Residents raised concerns about the opacity of the deal, as well as its negative impacts on Menomonie. The proposed data center would use about 75,000 gallons of water per day and require significant amounts of electricity to run, which would strain the city’s water supply and electric grid and raise utility bills for residents. Drawing on the experiences of other towns, residents also pointed out that the data center would increase noise, light, and air pollution while offering few jobs or tax revenue.

Concerned citizens organized at Jake’s Supper Club, and a “Stop the Menomonie Data Center” Facebook group swelled to over 10,000 members by September 2025, more than half the town’s population.

On September 22, 2025, Mayor Randy Knaack announced the city would refuse to negotiate a development agreement or establish a tax increment district, cutting off the subsidies the project required. On January 5, 2026, the council rewrote the rules, voting unanimously for a new data center zoning classification. The ordinance closed the warehousing loophole that had allowed the project to advance, and the Balloonist proposal remains on hold. On August 3, the city council reviewed a draft ordinance on data center zoning to include strict limits on water use, height, noise, and electricity. The city council aims to present the second draft in September, and the final draft to the Planning Commission in October.

The work of organizers in Menomonie goes far beyond the town’s limits. Activists made connections with others protesting data centers in Wisconsin to build a statewide coalition that can help other towns fight back. Organizers from Beaver Dam gave a town hall presentation in Menomonie to share their community organizing strategies, and a coalition of civil society organizations created the Big Tech Unchecked Toolkit, which provides information on what data centers are, their impacts on communities, and success stories.

These local efforts are already having an effect at the state level: following advocacy efforts by local organizers, Menomonie’s state representative, Republican Clint Moses, introduced a bill to prohibit nondisclosure agreements for data center proposals in Wisconsin.

The Public Demands Disclosure in Coweta

In Coweta, Oklahoma, a similar pattern of corporate opacity has played out. Coweta’s city manager and council signed NDAs in 2024, keeping details of “Project Atlas,” a 270-acre data center campus proposed by Beale Infrastructure, secret for over a year. Developers across Oklahoma briefed officials one or two at a time to stay below the quorums that trigger public meetings under state law. Officials in Luther, Yukon, and Stillwater signed similar pledges.

In response, Coweta residents built a sustained public pressure campaign, citing fears regarding the amount of water needed for cooling of such a large data center and frustration with the secrecy. Community organizer Allen Prather hosted a town hall on December 11, 2025. Officials and Beale Infrastructure declined to attend, but state lawmakers and residents frustrated by a year and a half of NDA-enforced secrecy turned out en masse. That momentum carried into a heated city council forum on January 6 this year, where more than 60 residents showed up with signs and shirts opposing the project. The nearly 1,800-member “Say NO to Coweta, Ok Data Center” Facebook group served as an organizing hub throughout.

Beale Infrastructure played dirty to undermine this grassroots campaign. This summer, Coweta leadership uncovered evidence that hundreds of emails in support of the data center were faked by the company, using the real identities of Coweta residents. When confronted by the Vice Mayor, Beale Infrastructure reportedly acknowledged it was behind the emails.

In spite of this astroturfing effort, the organizers succeeded. The campaign culminated on January 19, when almost 250 people packed a four-hour planning commission hearing that ended in a 4-1 vote against rezoning. Two months later, Beale Infrastructure withdrawing its proposal for the project entirely.

What You Can Do

When residents organize and push back against opaque deals that seem driven by corporate profits rather than the public interest, local officials and companies are forced to pay attention.

The developers behind these projects were counting on speed, secrecy, and small-town deference. Yet Menomonie, Coweta, and many more towns have proved that people working together to protect their homes and futures can rewrite the data center story.

Here’s how you can do it too:

  • Demand to know who is behind the LLC. Before any vote, require officials to disclose the actual company behind a data center proposal, projections for water and power use, and benefits like subsidies and tax breaks.
  • File open records requests. Request all correspondence, NDAs, and draft agreements. 
  • Pack the room. Show up to meetings, or call your own if officials don’t want to hear what you have to say. These in-person meetings really make a difference: 250 residents produced a 4-1 vote in Coweta, while 9,000 opposition members reversed course in Menomonie.
  • Pass common sense data center ordinances. Bring Menomonie’s ordinance as a model to your city council before the next proposal arrives.
  • Use existing community toolkits. The Big Tech Unchecked Toolkit we mentioned above, built by Sierra Club, Midwest Environmental Advocates, Healthy Climate Wisconsin and Wisconsin’s Green Fire, is ready to use. Learn from those who came before, and share your experiences with activists trying to organize against data centers for the first time.
  • Contact your federal representatives. Data centers are part of a bigger issue when it comes to public contracts under the Trump administration. In June 2026, Senator Warren and Representative Crow demanded that the White House explain apparent interference in Pentagon contracting to benefit companies in the 1789 Capital portfolio. Donald Trump Jr. is a partner at 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm that invested in Cerebras Systems, an AI chip company that benefits from the nationwide expansion of data centers. Ask your representatives whether they have examined the relationship between Trump family financial interests and the federal contracts and executive orders that benefit them.