Foxconn’s giant glass dome in Wisconsin is back, baby

Fox­conn nev­er does any­thing in Wis­con­sin with­out first announc­ing, can­cel­ing, and then announc­ing it again. So right on , the has refiled to build a net­work oper­a­tions cen­ter (NOC) in the shape of a giant glass dome.

The dome, which will con­tain both the NOC and an audi­to­ri­um, was ini­tial­ly revealed in ear­ly Sep­tem­ber — but Fox­conn yanked the plans on lit­er­al­ly the same day, and did­n’t com­ment on whether the dome would come back. Now it’s back — Fox­conn appar­ent­ly reworked the plans for the data cen­ter next to the dome to make it a more per­ma­nent struc­ture.

“The glass dome struc­ture is large­ly the same; what they did do was flesh out the design for the relat­ed serv­er build­ing,” Sam Schultz, com­mu­ni­ty devel­op­ment direc­tor for Mount Pleas­ant, the Racine Jour­nal Times.

Sad­ly, the dome noth­ing like the fan­tas­ti­cal video ren­der­ing of the cam­pus Fox­conn first released last year — a video that was qui­et­ly pulled from Fox­con­n’s mate­ri­als after Wis­con­sin state rep­re­sen­ta­tive Gor­don Hintz point­ed out that sev­er­al scenes were actu­al­ly footage of a park in Eng­land. It’s still on Mount Pleas­an­t’s YouTube , though:

Fox­conn first plans to build a mas­sive Gen­er­a­tion 10 LCD fab­ri­ca­tion facil­i­ty in Wis­con­sin, only to can­cel those plans and then final­ly agree to build a small­er Gen 6 LCD fab after a per­son­al call from Pres­i­dent Trump to then-Fox­conn chair­man Ter­ry Gou. The mil­lion square-foot Gen 6 fac­to­ry, which is one-twen­ti­eth the size of the orig­i­nal­ly promised fab and about the size of an Ama­zon ware­house, is cur­rent­ly under con­struc­tion. How­ev­er, no cus­tomers for the pan­els it will pro­duce have been announced, and Wis­con­sin’s gov­er­nor says it will only pro­duce 1,500 jobs, not the 13,000 jobs orig­i­nal­ly promised.

Fox­conn has said that it will build auto­mat­ed cof­fee kiosks and old-school alarm sys­tem con­trols in a dif­fer­ent fac­to­ry on the site, in what an exec called a “high-mix, low-to-medi­um vol­ume” pro­duc­tion strat­e­gy. And, of course, the com­pa­ny’s “AI 8K+5G ecosys­tem” strat­e­gy and “inno­va­tion cen­ters” around Wis­con­sin are still a mys­tery — it’s been 193 days since Fox­conn promised a state­ment or cor­rec­tion regard­ing The Verge’s report­ing that the inno­va­tion cen­ters were actu­al­ly emp­ty.

In relat­ed news, Racine Coun­ty has issued $110 mil­lion in bonds to refi­nance the debt it took on buy­ing land for Fox­conn as part of the project — debt that ulti­mate­ly led to a reduc­tion in the coun­ty’s cred­it rat­ing.

Accord­ing to Reuters, the prospec­tus issued the bonds says “no assur­ance can be pro­vid­ed as to the spe­cif­ic type, size, scope or gen­er­a­tion” of Fox­con­n’s fac­to­ry. But at least Wis­con­sin is get­ting a giant new dome.

Read More

Leave a Comment