“Eric Adams is in Wisconsin selling data centers” is a Mad Libs-ass sentence, and yet, it’s a thing that happened. According to Hellgate, the former mayor of New York left the Big Apple over the weekend to visit Wisconsin Rapids—population 18,654—and pitch the town on a data center project. He probably could not have found a less receptive audience if he tried.
From the jump, Adams received some Midwest hostility. As he introduced himself, residents who attended the meeting booed and heckled him, saying “You belong in prison!” and alleging “You’re here to steal our water!” When Adams tried to push through by offering to tell a story about how one of his friends used artificial intelligence to help identify her breast cancer diagnosis, someone in the crowd asked if the story was even true.
Former NYC Mayor Eric Adams traveled to Wisconsin Rapids to sell residents on a massive new data center in their town.
They answered with boos.
Turns out leaving New York doesn’t make people any more interested in being lectured by Eric Adams. pic.twitter.com/2YO1MqIeSs
— Brian Allen (@allenanalysis) August 3, 2026
The funniest part about Adams’ disastrous attempt to make data centers palatable to middle America is that it was entirely self-inflicted. Adams, in his post-mayor life, apparently makes his bones doing consultant work for real estate developers. One such developer, PNK Group, wants to set up a 150-megawatt data center in an old paper mill in Wisconsin Rapids. To make that pitch, according to a report from Inc, the company decided to organize a meeting on its own and have Adams headline it.
To be clear: this was not a town hall or a public hearing about the project. This was an event set up completely independently by the data center developer to try to endear itself to the community. And their plan to do that was to fly in a scandal-plagued former mayor of the biggest city in the country to tell folks why they should stop worrying and love the data center.
That probably wouldn’t play in most communities—hell, it probably wouldn’t play in New York City. But there may be no state more hostile to data center projects right now than Wisconsin. Reporter Jasmine Sun recently toured the state, talking to residents involved in the anti-data center movement. She found a reflexively skeptical population unwilling to take companies at their word.
Wisconsin has been repeatedly burned in the past by the over-promising and under-delivering of massive corporations, and the abject failure of the multi-billion-dollar Foxconn factory that never came to fruition is still fresh in the memory of most residents. Plus, the state has a strong history of conservation and environmentalism, so when outside projects come in and want to use local land and water, the citizenry is usually not exactly gung-ho to give it away.
A recent poll of Wisconsinites found that 76% of registered voters said the costs of data centers outweigh the benefits—about a 20-point swing against the projects than where they stood less than a year earlier. And while Adams showed up, other developers are running away from the state. A recent Wisconsin Watch report found that a proposed $10 billion data center project abandoned ship once the developers were told they’d have to go through public hearings.
Luckily for Adams, he seems completely immune to experiencing shame or embarrassment. Maybe he just needs to get home to his crystals and recharge his charm before trying again.
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