President Joe Biden traveled to Racine, Wisconsin, Wednesday to the future site of a new AI data center, where he announced Microsoft’s $3.3 billion investment in the location. The project is expected to generate 2,000 permanent jobs and 2,300 additional union jobs during construction.
The new facility is a victory for Biden’s economic policies and a big boost for the local area, but this specific plant offers a particularly stark contrast because it’s being built on the site originally designated for a massive factory for Chinese manufacturer Foxconn. When Donald Trump announced the Foxconn plant in 2018, he called it “the 8th wonder of the world” while promising that it would bring 13,000 jobs.
That did not happen. Now Biden is finally bringing Wisconsin the high-tech facility that Trump promised, but never delivered.
During his 2018 appearance at the Racine groundbreaking, Trump waved a golden shovel and claimed that the site was the result of his 2017 tax cuts and his tariffs on imported steel.
“You know, 18 months ago this was a field,” Trump said, “and now it’s one of the most advanced places of any kind you’ll see anywhere in the world. It’s incredible.”
Except it was still only a field—and it has largely remained a field.
Before this new announcement, the site in Racine was mostly empty. The Washington Post reported in 2023 that despite Trump’s promises, all that got built was a decorative glass dome and a handful of small buildings that have recently been available for rental as event spaces.
Locals told jokes about the site, which is three times the size of New York City’s Central Park. However, the humor was diminished by the roughly $500 million that state and local governments spent to clear hundreds of homes and farms from the area, bulldoze it flat, and prepare the land for what was to be a manufacturing “megasite.”
The jokes are ending as Microsoft breaks ground on the new facility that will build a data center, expand the tech giant’s cloud services, and serve as a research location for AI technologies. The $3.3 billion the company expects to invest over the next two years is only the first of a series of planned investments.
The Microsoft facility is proof that Biden’s policies are delivering on Trump’s hollow promises. And that’s not just true in Wisconsin: It’s also happening in Ohio, where Intel is building a new $20 billion chip plant. Micron is building new plants in New York and Idaho. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is expanding its operations in Arizona with an investment of $6.6 billion.
The CHIPS Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act are delivering the kind of results Trump, who had no real policy other than imposing tariffs, giving tax cuts to the wealthy, and bragging, never could. In fact, Biden’s results are even greater than what Trump promised,
The White House announced Wednesday that private companies have committed to spending $866 billion on clean energy and manufacturing projects. That’s in addition to 51,000 other infrastructure projects.
That means actual jobs for actual people, restoring both technological and manufacturing leadership in the U.S. Because Biden isn’t just making promises: He’s delivering results.
Navigator collects, analyzes, and distributes real data on progressive messaging. The Hub Project’s Bryan Bennett and Gabriela Parra talk with Kerry about what they are seeing in their research this election cycle, and which messaging can help progressive candidates win elections in 2024—and beyond.
