Foxconn wants to add roughly 700 jobs at its Mount Pleasant facility by renovating the plant to churn out more AI servers, according to documents filed with the village. Foxconn has proposed renovating the facility.
The filing marks the latest twist for a company that promised Wisconsin 13,000 jobs back in 2017 and delivered far less, as Urban Milwaukee reports. Foxconn currently has more than 1,000 employees in Racine County and plans to expand AI server production, with about 700 additional jobs planned.
An AI Pivot Years in the Making
The push into AI hardware did not happen in isolation. In November 2025, Foxconn and OpenAI announced a strategic partnership to co-design and manufacture next-generation AI data center hardware and server racks at Foxconn's U.S. facilities, according to AP News. Foxconn serves as a key hardware contract manufacturer for tech companies including Nvidia. Foxconn also plans to grow operations in Texas, Ohio, California, Taiwan and Mexico.
Speaking on an investor call, Foxconn's Michael Chiang said the company's expansion plans respond to growth in artificial intelligence, adding that Foxconn is seeing extremely strong customer demand for AI and that capital expenditure is expected to continue increasing. On the ground in Mount Pleasant, those plans translate into concrete construction requests: Foxconn also plans to add 26 loading docks to its Braun Road building, with the application filed on the company's behalf by EUA in Milwaukee.
State Incentives Tied to Verified Hiring
Wisconsin and Foxconn aren't relying purely on goodwill this time around. The Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. and Foxconn announced in 2025 a plan to spend $569 million expanding manufacturing operations and grow the company's Racine County workforce to more than 2,600 employees by the end of 2029.
That figure is a fraction of what was once on the table. Foxconn's original contract with Wisconsin was scaled back from a $4 billion deal to an $80 million contract in 2021, following the company's failure to deliver on its 2017 promise of 13,000 jobs. The original 2017 project was valued at $10 billion and included a promise of 13,000 jobs.
Local financial safeguards remain part of the picture too. In 2025, Foxconn paid a $15 million shortfall payment to the Village of Mount Pleasant after an assessed-value shortfall. Despite the scale of the new renovation plans, Samuel Schultz said the village of Mount Pleasant did not expect to offer tax increment financing for the renovations, and that the changes should not affect existing tax increment financing agreements with Foxconn.
Land Once Meant for Foxconn Now Hosts Microsoft's AI Campus
Foxconn's manufacturing footprint sits beside a very different kind of AI investment. In May 2023, Microsoft completed a $50 million purchase of 315 acres in Mount Pleasant that had originally been acquired for Foxconn's development, launching what grew into a multibillion-dollar AI data center campus, according to FOX6 News Milwaukee. Mount Pleasant had agreed to refund a share of property taxes to Microsoft as part of that initial site deal. By January 2026, Microsoft had submitted plans for 15 additional data center buildings in the village, pushing its total planned investment there past $20 billion across nearly 9 million square feet, per Facilities Dive.
Microsoft's purchased parcel sits inside Tax Increment District No. 5.
The scale of the original 2017 Wisconn Valley project is easy to forget amid the current AI buildout.
