One family in Port Washington, Wisconsin sold 173 acres for $10.2 million. On the county’s books, that same ground was valued at $590,000. That comes to roughly $59,000 an acre, about 17 times the assessed figure, according to a Wisconsin Watch analysis of Ozaukee County property records.
It is tempting to read it as pure luck. Somebody’s farmland turned out to be worth twenty times what the tax roll said, the buyers overpaid, and a few landowners got rich. Parts of that are true. But the 17x gap is telling you something more specific, and the distance between what the assessor saw and what a data center developer would pay is the real story.
This article is for general information only, not financial, tax or real estate advice, and it is not a property appraisal or valuation. The prices discussed reflect particular transactions and should not be used to estimate what your own land is worth. Consult a qualified local appraiser or adviser before making property decisions.
What a 17x number is really measuring
A fair market value on a tax roll estimates what a buyer would pay for a parcel used the way it has always been used. In Port Washington, that meant farmland priced as farmland. It was never meant to capture what the same dirt is worth to a company assembling a site for a giant computing campus a mile inland from Lake Michigan.
The developer is Denver-based Vantage Data Centers, which broke ground on a 672-acre campus called Lighthouse on the city’s north side. It is the Midwest site of OpenAI and Oracle’s Stargate project. Vantage describes it as 2.5 million square feet of building, with completion targeted for 2028. A project that size does not want scattered plots. It wants one large, continuous block, locked down before a rival gets there.
That is why the assessed value and the sale price split so far apart. They answer different questions. One asks what the land is worth as land. The other asks what it is worth as the last missing piece of a $15 billion build.
The claim worth pushing back on
The idea that a price this high is just free money is where we’d push back. Not because nobody profited, plainly some people did, but because it treats the gap as proof the buyers were foolish or the sellers simply blessed.
The mayor’s version of the lucky-landowner story is memorable. Ted Neitzke, the project’s most prominent supporter, told Wisconsin Watch that the sellers “woke up one day and they just happened to live in the right spot.”
Right spot, yes. But “happened to” undersells what was being bought. Wisconsin Watch notes that, nationally, data center developers are often willing to overpay for land near electric power, to beat rivals in what has become a land rush. The premium is not a mistake. It is the price of speed and certainty in a market where losing one parcel can strand an entire campus.
Adam Mauro, a valuation director at Altus Group, put this plainly in a study of 80 data center land deals. The high price for well-placed land, he wrote, “is compensation for immediacy and certainty, not an indicator of superior underlying real estate.” That is one firm’s view rather than settled fact, but it fits Port Washington closely. The buyers were not paying for better dirt. They were paying to not lose.
Why single parcels commanded outsized prices
That $10.2 million deal did not happen alone. Wisconsin Watch found developers spent at least $125 million assembling 1,500 or more acres around the project, buying from individual owners at many times the assessed value. Members of the Karrels family and their farming business earned at least $20 million across their deals.
When you have to stitch together that much neighboring ground, every last holdout gains power. As Scott Finfer, a Texas land developer writing for HousingWire, put it, “data centers typically require hundreds of contiguous acres to deploy capital at scale.” If your farm sits in the middle of the block a developer needs, its value is not what farmland trades for. Its value is what the whole project is worth without it, which is nothing.
Altus Group’s numbers show the same dynamic from the other side. Its analysis found a roughly 120-fold spread in per-acre prices depending on parcel size: a median near $3.3 million an acre for sites under 25 acres, versus about $28,000 an acre for tracts over 1,000 acres. Small, well-placed pieces cost far more per acre precisely because the buyer cannot walk away from them.
What the sale price doesn’t capture
The land is the cheap part. A campus this size runs on water and power, and those carry costs the purchase prices never show. Vantage says it is funding a minimum of $175 million in regional infrastructure: water and wastewater capacity, mains, sewer lines, a new water tower and power hookups. Against numbers like that, a $125 million land bill looks more like a down payment than the main event.
The residents’ side is more mixed than either the windfall story or the horror story allows. Ryan Nowak sold his 65-acre Lake Drive property for $1.75 million and now lives about 10 miles north. “On paper it looked OK,” he told Wisconsin Watch, “until you go to replace what you had.”
Curtiss Smith, a crane operator who sold a four-acre property assessed at $258,000 for $895,000, described the strange feeling afterward: “After the fact, you hear what everybody else got.” Neither man says he was cheated. They are describing what it feels like to put a price on something that had never been priced before.
Port Washington is not unusual, which is part of why the multiples look the way they do. Land purchases for future US data centers reached about $6 billion in the first half of 2026, up 79% from a year earlier, according to figures from Avison Young reported by CNBC. Data centers now make up 27% of US development sites, second only to apartment buildings. A local land rush and a national one are the same thing at different scales.
What a fair-market figure can and can’t tell you
An assessed value is a good measure of what land is worth for the use it already has, and a poor measure of what it is worth to a buyer who needs that exact acre right now. The 17x figure does not mean the land was secretly premium. It is the price of speed, of buying a continuous block, of being the one parcel a $15 billion project cannot route around.
