President Biden will travel to Wisconsin on Wednesday to announce the creation of an artificial intelligence data center. In doing so, he highlights one of his administration’s greatest economic achievements in a crucial embattled state – and points to a significant failure of his immediate predecessor and challenger in 2024.
At a technical college in Racine, Mr. Biden will announce that Microsoft will invest $3.3 billion to build the center, which the tech giant estimates will create 2,300 union construction jobs and 2,000 permanent jobs, according to the White House . The project is part of Mr. Biden’s “Investing in America” agenda, which focuses on bringing billions of dollars from the private sector to manufacturing and industries such as clean energy and artificial intelligence.
In his fourth trip to Wisconsin this year, Mr. Biden will continue an aggressive campaign to draw a contrast between himself and former President Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee against whom his criminal trial over payments is in its fourth week to a pornographic film star. While in Wisconsin, Mr. Biden will also attend a campaign event where he will speak to Black voters about the stakes of the election.
In a fact sheet released by the White House, the administration said Mr. Biden’s visit to Racine would “show a community at the heart of his commitment to investing in places that have historically been overlooked or failed by the last administration’s policies.” .
The Microsoft data center will be built on the site where Mr. Trump, as president, announced in 2017 that Taiwanese electronics maker Foxconn would build a $10 billion factory to make LCD panels. The Foxconn factory was expected to be one of Trump’s biggest successes in domestic manufacturing: the electronics supplier’s first major factory in Wisconsin, with a promised 13,000 jobs.
Instead, the ill-fated project never materialized as promised, even after receiving millions in subsidies and razing homes and farms to build the factory. The company abandoned its plans and produced only a small fraction of the promised jobs. It was a major blow to Trump’s promise to revitalize American manufacturing and to Racine, who lost about 1,000 manufacturing jobs during his four years in office. According to information released by the White House ahead of Mr. Biden’s visit, the new data center would add to the more than 4,000 jobs created in Racine since the president took office.
Mr. Trump seized on negotiations over the Foxconn project, which he promised would be the “eighth wonder of the world.” When Mr. Trump and then-Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou announced the project at the White House in 2017, Mr. Trump boasted about his importance in getting the electronics supplier to Apple and other tech giants to invest in Racine .
“I saw Terry and said, ‘You’ve got to give us one of these huge places,'” Trump said. “If I wasn’t elected, he definitely wouldn’t spend $10 billion.”
Microsoft promises to invest in workforce development in Racine and throughout Wisconsin in addition to its data center, the White House said.
According to the White House, the company plans to work with Gateway Technical College to develop a “Datacenter Academy” that will train 1,000 employees nationwide for data center and science and technology roles by 2030. The company also announced it will expand its Girls in STEM program to two additional middle schools.
“Wisconsin has a rich and storied legacy of innovation and ingenuity in manufacturing,” Microsoft Vice Chairman and President Brad Smith said in a statement. “We will leverage our resources, scale and expertise to complement these strengths with the world’s most advanced AI and the skills training to deploy it.”
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2024-05-08 09:31:06
www.nytimes.com
