Microsoft buys more Mt. Pleasant tracts for data campus. Latest sites are north of Highway 11

Microsoft Corp. is again expanding its Racine County data center campus with another farmland purchase in Mount Pleasant.

The software maker paid $5.73 million for 28.6 acres at 13231 Louis Sorenson Road. The seller was the Nancy Rothering Trust, according to a new deed posted online by the Wisconsin Department of Revenue.

That transaction was recorded on Aug. 29.

That follows an Aug. 16 purchase of a 1.4-acre lot and ranch house at 2615 S. U.S. Highway 41, near Louis Sorenson Road. Microsoft paid Barbara and Thomas Rinke $800,000 for that property.

The company has made a series of purchases since May, with several of those transactions recorded this summer.

Including the two latest purchases, they total 306.7 acres − with the company spending $55.1 million.

Those additional tracts will "support data center construction already underway in the area," said Bowen Wallace, Microsoft vice president of datacenters/Americas, in a July statement to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The company in December bought just over 1,000 acres of nearby farmland that's being developed for data centers. The three transactions totaled nearly $176 million.

The land purchases on Louis Sorenson Road are north of Durand Avenue/Wisconsin Highway 11. Most of Microsoft's development is initially planned for south of that highway.

Microsoft says it will spend $3.3 billion by 2026 to build the initial phase of its data center development. Much of the investment is driven by growing demand for artificial intelligence-related applications.

Tom Daykin can be emailed at tdaykin@jrn.com and followed on Instagram , X and Facebook .

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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Microsoft buys more Mt. Pleasant tracts for data campus. Latest sites are north of Highway 11