Microsoft Fairwater Wisconsin data center, Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin

Microsoft's Fairwater data center in Mount Pleasant, in Racine County, Wisconsin, is operating, and three neighbors in Sturtevant are suing the company over its noise. The class action, filed in early July 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, seeks to represent everyone living within 1.5 miles of the campus, which the suit says includes more than 1,000 households.

Fairwater sits on 315 acres of the former Foxconn site and has three buildings with a combined 1.2 million square feet under roof, according to Microsoft, which calls it the largest AI data center it has built. Microsoft says more than 90 percent of it is cooled by a closed-loop liquid system that is filled once, with 172 20-foot fans chilling the water.

Equipment began coming online in April 2026, and the company said in June that the first building was fully operational with close to 550 full-time staff and vendors on site. A second building next door is under construction and set to be finished by 2028. Microsoft bought the 315 acres inside the village's Tax Incremental District 5 for $50 million in 2023 and guaranteed a minimum assessed value of $1.4 billion by 2028, the Racine County Eye reported.

The noise started with the fans. "Once you hear it, you can't unhear it. It's like ringing in your ear. You can't get rid of it," Sturtevant village president Mike Rosenbaum said in April, when residents north of the campus reported a humming they could hear inside with the windows shut.

Microsoft adjusted fan speeds, added sound-reduction parts and says the problem is resolved, and the village of Mount Pleasant said it had received no formal complaints about Microsoft's properties since those adjustments. The lawsuit disagrees, saying much of the "low hum" noise is low-frequency infrasound that is not detected and reflected in dBA measurements.

Plaintiff Garret Ostergaard says the noise forced him to move from third shift to second because he could not sleep. Neighbors of the construction also complain of dust, lights and traffic; Larry Neumiller, across from the third-phase site, said the lights are "just super lights that even my blinds in the windows can't keep out". Sturtevant was never consulted before the project was approved and had no vote on it, the Racine County Eye noted.

On January 26, 2026 the Mount Pleasant Village Board unanimously approved site plans for 15 more data centers: nine at 12023 Durand Avenue, about 5.2 million square feet, and six at 2700 International Drive, about 3.5 million square feet.

Village attorney Chris Smith told the meeting the land had been zoned for industrial uses including data centers since 2017, and that the board was only judging whether the site plans met the technical code: "This is not something that can be legally denied by the board as long as the approval shows all the requirements or it's approved with conditions that they meet the requirements."

Tony Martino of Mount Pleasant told the board the expansion "should not be approved until the other data centers come online and we see the real-world effects on the environment and the residents of the Village of Mount Pleasant and surrounding communities".

WEC Energy Group, parent of We Energies, projects its regional electric demand will rise about 45 percent over five years, driven mainly by the Microsoft campus and the Vantage campus in Port Washington, and in April 2026 the Wisconsin Public Service Commission approved tariffs requiring data centers to pay the full cost of the energy infrastructure built for them.

Eight miles southwest, in Kenosha, residents are pushing the city for a moratorium on a Microsoft data center planned on about 240 acres the company bought in early 2025. Jacqueline Semm told a city meeting: "Kenosha County should not be Microsoft's guinea pig."

As of August 2026, the class action noise lawsuit remains open with no ruling issued. Construction of the 15 newly approved buildings cannot begin until Microsoft meets the site plan conditions and gets further permits from Mount Pleasant. Sturtevant, where most of the noise complaints come from, has no vote on any of it.