Quick Facts
- Wisconsin's Public Service Commission revoked its completeness determination on August 7, forcing American Transmission Company to refile its grid connection application and restart a six-month review.
- Research firm Aterio projects partial power arriving no sooner than October 2027, with full 1.3 GW capacity potentially delayed until April 2029 in the worst case.
- Oracle's Project Lighthouse campus in Port Washington represents the largest single private investment in Wisconsin history at more than $15 billion.
Oracle's massive AI data center campus in Wisconsin is structurally on schedule. The grid connection is not.
The Wisconsin Public Service Commission voted unanimously on August 7 to revoke a completeness determination it had already granted to American Transmission Company, the utility tasked with connecting the 1.3 GW campus to the state's power grid. PSC chair Summer Strand said ATC filed or refiled 564 application documents after the original determination, describing the result as a "moving-target application." It was the first time in the commission's 95-year history it had taken that step.
ATC has since refiled. The PSC's next checkpoint, deciding whether the new application is even complete, falls around October 19. That kicks off a fresh six-month review clock, pushing every downstream milestone further out.
The campus, called Project Lighthouse, broke ground December 18, 2025 in Port Washington. The build covers 674 acres and will house four data centers delivering 902 MW of IT capacity. Oracle and OpenAI anchor the campus as part of the broader Stargate initiative. Construction firms Whiting-Turner, Weitz Company, Michels Corporation, and a Turner-McCarthy joint venture are handling the $8 billion first phase.
Satellite imagery shows two of the four halls already enclosed. The limiting factor is not concrete or steel. It is power.
"Construction at Port Washington is progressing steadily, but power delivery depends on a regulatory process that has restarted," said Javier Reyes, head of data center research at Aterio.
ATC's refiled proposal, the Ozaukee County Distribution Interconnection Project, calls for new and modified high-voltage transmission lines and five new substations spanning Fond du Lac, Ozaukee, Sheboygan, and Washington counties. Core transmission costs are estimated between $1.3 billion and $1.7 billion. Broader regional upgrades push the total to as much as $2.7 billion.
ATC executive vice president Jared Winters said the company "substantially improved" its application based on commission and public feedback. Oracle confirmed it will cover 100 percent of its energy and transmission costs and source more than half its power from carbon-free generation.
Aterio mapped three delivery scenarios based on the public record. In the fastest legal path, partial power arrives around October 2027 and full 1.3 GW capacity around August 2028. The base case, assuming a standard 180-day decision, puts partial power at December 2027 and full capacity at October 2028. In the worst case, a 360-day review, full capacity slips to April 2029. Aterio noted the PSC used its extension option in every comparable large transmission case it reviewed, making the base or worst case more probable than the earliest path.
The project sits inside a wider wave of AI infrastructure spending across Wisconsin. Microsoft is spending $20 billion in Mount Pleasant. Meta committed $1 billion in Beaver Dam. Together with Project Lighthouse, that puts total AI infrastructure investment across the state at more than $36 billion.
For Oracle's enterprise customers expecting compute capacity tied to the campus, the regulatory calendar now sets the ceiling. No amount of construction speed changes that math.
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