Vantage’s $15B Data Center Project Gets New Partner

November 3, 2025

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Upon completion, the campus will provide a gigawatt of AI capacity.

Vantage Data Centers and the Wisconsin Building Trades Council—an umbrella for 40,000 union workers—pledged to partner on the Lighthouse data center campus in Port Washington, Wis., a northern suburb of Milwaukee.

Vantage Data Centers is investing $15 billion to build The Lighthouse data center campus in Wisconsin. *Image courtesy of Vantage Data Centers*

Vantage Data Centers is building the project in partnership with OpenAI and Oracle. The company estimates that the development will need more than 4,000 skilled workers over a period of three years.

Upon completion in 2028, the campus will feature four data centers providing close to a gigawatt of AI capacity.

The new development will be part of OpenAI and Oracle’s investment in the Stargate Project, which was created by those companies together with SoftBank and investment firm MGX. The project underscores the surging AI data center demand across emerging U.S. regions.

The venture plans as much as $500 billion in AI infrastructure in the U.S. by 2029, totaling 10 gigawatts of capacity. Besides Wisconsin, projects under the Stargate umbrella are underway in Texas, New Mexico and Ohio.

In conjunction with the Lighthouse data center campus, Vantage will be developing new zero-emission energy capacity in Wisconsin, including solar, wind and battery storage. Seventy percent of this new energy capacity will be allocated to the Lighthouse campus, while the remainder will be sold on the open market.

The complex will use a closed-loop liquid cooling system, according to Vantage, in an effort to curtail water use.

For the four data centers, the company is developing 500 of 672 total acres of the site. The rest will be green space, where Vantage says it will plant more than 2,000 native trees and plants to achieve a net gain in biodiversity for the site.

Once complete, Vantage and Oracle will create an estimated 1,000 long-term jobs and thousands more indirect jobs.

Together with a Texas data center campus in Shackelford County, Vantage is investing more than $40 billion in digital infrastructure. The largest investors in the firm’s North America platform are DigitalBridge Group, an alternative asset manager, and tech investor Silver Lake.

Data center development expands outside larger markets

Data center development, driven by AI’s insatiable demand for computing power, is still strong nationwide, with expansion into areas not traditionally associated with the property type.

For example, while Northern Virginia still has the nation’s largest concentration of data center capacity, the nearby market of Richmond, Va., has seen the largest expansion in data center capacity thus far in 2025, up 720 megawatts, according to Avison Young.

Nearly half of the largest transactions in the U.S. data center market in the second quarter of 2025 occurred in rural or non-traditional markets, AY reported. The movement illustrates how data center growth is increasingly expanding beyond established metros, especially because of power supply constraints and local pushback against the development.

“As demand for data centers expands beyond traditional hubs, the upper Midwest has become a critical and strategic market,” Vantage President of North America Dana Adams said in a statement.