When Microsoft announced its intention to build a data center in Mount Pleasant back in March, one of the first questions that popped into the minds of community members was how many jobs such a project would create.
According to an executive summary for the village’s Plan Commission, the facility is expected to have 200 employees in its first phase. When fully developed, the data center is expected to have 460 jobs, including 330 first-shift jobs and 130 second-shift jobs.
Construction of the data center is expected to begin this year. The full build-out of the data center is expected to be complete in 2034.
At a Racine County Board Meeting in April, Paul Englis, principal program manager at Microsoft, said the job count at the Mount Pleasant facility “will be in the hundreds, not in the thousands. A data center doesn’t employ the number of people a manufacturing plant or big warehouse would. Around 300 to 400 is what we’ve seen at a typical campus. Typically, with a standard building, there’s about 50 people per building.”
The data center project is located on 318.6 acres of land within the Foxconn development area. It is located in the east section of Area III, within the village’s Tax Increment District No. 5. The parcel of land is south of Braun Road in the village of Mount Pleasant, north of Highway KR (1st Street), east of the Canadian Pacific Rail right-of-way, and west of 90th Street.
Microsoft purchased the land from the village for $50 million and plans to spend $1 billion to build the data center.
Microsoft operates approximately 200 data centers globally. The company did not provide any further information on job numbers when asked this week and instead re-issued a general statement on the project.
“Our data center campus investment plans with the village of Mount Pleasant and Racine County are part of Microsoft’s long-term commitment to the local communities in Wisconsin. We look forward to our work there,” said a spokesperson for Microsoft.
