PSC wipes out 10 months of progress on Oracle’s 1.3 GW Wisconsin data center — pushing partial 310 MW power to late 2027 and full load to 2029 | Daily Reports Online
- Oracle’s Wisconsin campus may have finished buildings long before electricity arrived
- Regulators withdrew their completeness finding after ATC filed 564 additional documents
- Ten months of review ended without a decision and restarted from zero
Oracle’s massive 1.3 GW AI data center campus in Wisconsin, dubbed Project Lighthouse, faces severe power delays after regulators restarted the review needed to connect it to the grid.
The campus in Port Washington is being developed by Vantage for Oracle, with four data centers planned across the site.
Construction is advancing, but the campus cannot begin serving customers at scale until the required transmission infrastructure receives regulatory approval and gets built.
Latest Videos FromTechRadar
A review clock reset to zero
In September 2025, American Transmission Company (ATC) asked the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin (PSC) to approve the new high-voltage line serving the campus.
By December 2025, the PSC found the application complete and began its formal review, which started the legal countdown for a decision.
However, between January and July 2026, ATC altered the project and filed 564 more documents that changed routes, introduced temporary bypass lines and updated cost estimates.
An administrative law judge ordered ATC on 1 July to itemize each alteration and found on 15 July that the company had not complied.
Because the PSC lacked confidence about the exact scope under review, it withdrew its completeness finding in August 2026, ten months after the case opened.
Such late additions would need further environmental review that the legal deadline left no room for, so the project risked approval by default.
The PSC closed the case on September 10 2026 without ruling on the merits, and ATC refiled on September 18, restarting the statutory clock.
Buildings can advance before electricity arrives
Construction itself does not appear to face the same scheduling problem affecting the transmission connection serving the Wisconsin campus.
“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, Aterio.
Permits have been secured, work has continued since December 2025, and imagery from September shows two buildings already enclosed.
The remaining structures are still undergoing construction, while equipment installation continues inside portions of the completed buildings at the site.
Vantage describes the campus as carrying 902 MW of IT demand, whereas utility records describe 1.3 GW of total electrical requirements.
Those figures differ because the larger measurement includes cooling and other consumption beyond electricity reaching computing equipment.
The first transmission stage could provide only partial service, and Vantage previously asked ATC about supplying roughly 310 MW during 2027.
That request also projected 438 MW of peak demand during 2027, followed by 1.3 GW from 2028 onward across the campus.
Consequently, initial grid access would not automatically mean every building could immediately support customer workloads at its intended capacity.
A longer regulatory review would shift partial service toward June 2028 and full 1.3 GW availability toward April 2029, well beyond Oracle’s guidance.
“Based on the public record, we see a meaningful risk that load arrives later than Oracle’s current guidance,” Reyes added.
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.
