Racine

Racine is a city in south-eastern Wisconsin on the shore of Lake Michigan, in Racine County, with a population of roughly 75,000. It has a significant manufacturing history and sits adjacent to the village of Mount Pleasant, where Microsoft is building its data-centre campus.

Microsoft is building a $3.3 billion data-centre campus in neighbouring Mount Pleasant, one of the largest private investments in the county's history, and Racine County's municipal water system supplies it. The county's development agreement with Microsoft included a non-disclosure clause covering community-impact data, an arrangement broken only when Milwaukee Riverkeeper sued for the records. The figure the litigation surfaced was 8 million gallons a year for the campus's first phase, not a daily figure as earlier reporting on this page had it. Microsoft separately announced a basin-level water disclosure framework in January 2026, committing to replenish more water than it withdraws in the same catchments, though that pledge does not itself carry the county-level transparency the Racine agreement had tried to withhold. The water-disclosure controversy highlighted the tension between local economic-development aspirations and transparency obligations for public utilities serving large industrial customers, a tension that Virginia's own forced water-draw disclosures echoed later in the story.