The City of Milwaukee is not moving forward with a computing facility at the former Midtown Center Walmart site.
A common council spokesperson confirmed the plan was dropped following public feedback and concern about whether the facility would become a data center.
The spokesperson said it was the applicant themselves that removed it from their proposal.
City leaders and a developer faced a skeptical crowd at a community information meeting in June about the proposed redevelopment of the long-vacant site.
Previous coverage: City leaders push back on data center claims:
District 2 Alderman Mark Chambers Jr. pushed back on characterizations of the project at the meeting.
"This isn't misleading [anyone]. The reason we are having these events and two other ones in addition, to tell people what it is and what it's not," Chambers said.
"There's no need to upgrade grids, there's no need for fresh water intake or anything of that nature. Absolutely not," Chambers said.
The developer, Trent Overhue, said the data processing facility would have only taken up a fraction of the entire project and drew a distinction between that and a large-scale data center.
"You're looking at data storage, they do a lot of different things, so those help enable things from cell phones to cloud-based storage, all your internet traffic," Overhue said. "So there's been a narrative that this is a large scale data center, that is simply not the case."
AFS Milwaukee LLC, which owns the property, proposed to redevelop the empty building.
The project would still include 200 affordable housing units, a new Milwaukee Public Library branch, and City of Milwaukee offices.
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