Meta Hid Behind 'Balloonist LLC' to Sneak a $1.6bn Datacenter Past a 22-Year-Old Councilwoman

A Balloon With No Air In It

Here's the setup, laid out in reporting from The Guardian. In February 2024, Menomonie's city administrator, Eric Atkinson, and its director of public works, David Schofield, signed NDAs with a developer called Balloonist LLC. The agreement is a single page. It never mentions a datacenter. It does clearly instruct the signers that they cannot reveal which tech company is behind "the project," or that the agreement exists at all.

That's a nondisclosure agreement about the existence of a nondisclosure agreement. It's the corporate version of a mob boss telling a witness not to mention that he told her not to talk.

Balloonist is incorporated in Delaware, which is where you go when you want to be a company on paper and nobody in person. The identity of the parent corporation bankrolling the thing was known to a handful of people. The people who actually run the city by vote were not among them.

Rewriting the Zoning Code With the Lights Off

A month after signing the NDA, Schofield brought the city council a proposed ordinance to define the word "warehousing" in the city code. Boring stuff. Municipal housekeeping. Except the new definition included "establishments used primarily for the storage, management, processing, and transmission of digital data."

Look at that sentence again. That is a datacenter wearing a trench coat and a fake mustache. The council approved the change in April 2024, and it is unclear whether any member knew about Balloonist or a potential datacenter when they voted.

So the first real step toward building a $1.6bn campus was a vote on a definition most councilmembers probably assumed was about storage units. Nobody lied, exactly. They just let everyone vote on the wrong thing.

The 22-Year-Old Who Asked the Questions

Sydney Brennan won her council seat in spring 2025, weeks before finishing college. Shortly after taking office, she was invited to meet consultants pitching a datacenter campus for an undisclosed big tech company. The numbers were enormous: 320 acres, an estimated 75,000 gallons of water per day, and up to 1,000 temporary construction jobs followed by 50 to 75 permanent ones.

She asked about water, noise, and the strain on the electrical grid. The answers were soothing. Buffer zones for the noise. Balloonist would fund any grid and water upgrades. The company would be "water positive" by 2030, which is a promise about a date when everyone currently making it will be gone or promoted. "They're basically telling you everything you want to hear," Brennan told the Guardian.

Here's the part that should make you want to throw your phone. According to Brennan, the city administrator told her the datacenter was just "one of many ideas." What she didn't know was that the council had already approved a pre-development agreement with Balloonist in closed session in March, a month before she even took office. The "idea" had a signed contract.

Closed Session, Open Questions

Wisconsin law lets councils go into closed session to discuss public business that needs to stay secret for "competitive or bargaining reasons." In March 2025, councilmembers used that exemption to consider the pre-development agreement, under which Balloonist would reimburse the city up to $200,000 for site, environmental, and traffic reviews.

Councilmember Cody Gentz told the Guardian he didn't recall having "any real information on it, other than you know this is a thing that we might look into." He described the mood as "pretty neutral." Members weren't opposed. They just wanted to know more about a project that, by design, nobody was going to tell them more about.

That's the trick of the whole operation. You don't need people to say yes. You just need them to say "sure, let's look into it" before they know what "it" is.

Beaver Dam Already Knew How This Ends

Menomonie wasn't a one-off. This is a playbook. In Wisconsin alone, NDAs were reportedly signed in at least four other cities. Officials in one of them, Beaver Dam, also signed NDAs with Balloonist LLC. The tech company behind that $1bn datacenter project was later revealed to be Meta, the parent company of Facebook.

So the same shell company, the same secrecy, and a parent corporation worth more than most countries, all aimed at cash-strapped small cities that would be thrilled to hear the word "jobs." The pitch assumes the town is too poor and too grateful to ask who's paying.

The emails the Guardian obtained cover January through September 2025 and show the city and Balloonist taking each step toward making the datacenter real. They also capture the community backlash arriving in real time, the moment residents stopped being an afterthought and became the problem.

What Happened When People Found Out

The city finally put out a press release about the proposed project in July 2025, after roughly 18 months of private planning. The reporting describes a successful protest that ultimately doomed the campus, part of a growing national resistance to the AI boom's land and energy grab.

Think about what that sequence means. The project survived as long as it stayed hidden. It died the moment the people who'd live next to it got a vote, or at least a megaphone. That is not a coincidence. That is the whole story.