was summer in Wisconsin, and Foxconn seemed to be everywhere. But also: nowhere at all.
Starting last June, officials with the Taiwanese tech
manufacturing giant began popping up in all corners of the state and
announcing new projects. It had been almost a year since then-Gov. Scott
Walker (R-WI) offered the company a subsidy package that came to total
$4.5 billion. Both Walker, who was in the midst of a reelection
campaign, and Foxconn, which had just confirmed that it would build a far smaller factory than it had initially promised, seemed eager to make a good impression.
First, there was Louis Woo, special assistant to Foxconn
CEO Terry Gou, announcing a new headquarters and “innovation center” in
Milwaukee. Days later, Gou was standing in a field 40 minutes south in
Mount Pleasant, digging gold shovels into the dirt with Walker, Paul
Ryan, and President Trump, who declared Foxconn’s factory the “eighth
wonder of the world.” Then it was off to Green Bay, where Foxconn
announced another innovation center, and then Eau Claire, where Foxconn
announced two more — a full “technology hub.”
Next came a $100 million gift to the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, and a venture fund, and competitions to design the
innovation centers, with fast turnarounds — just two weeks to submit
proposals — and plans to open in just months. As summer turned to fall,
Foxconn kept going: an innovation center for Racine, and another
groundbreaking, for a Foxconn expansion at a nearby technical college.
More branded ball caps, more gold shovels. One observer quipped that
Foxconn had created jobs in the Wisconsin events business, at least.
Then the announcements stopped.
In January, work at the Mount Pleasant factory came to a
halt, and Foxconn officials began to publicly waffle about their plans.
In the span of a single week, Woo said that the company wouldn’t build a
factory, then that whatever Foxconn was building “cannot be simply
described as a factory,” then, after a call with Trump, that Foxconn
would build a factory after all.
Throughout its gyrations, Foxconn maintained that it
would create 13,000 jobs, though what those 13,000 people would be doing
shifted gradually from manufacturing to research into what Foxconn
calls its “AI 8K+5G ecosystem.” Other than buzzwords for high-resolution
screens and high-speed cell networks, what this ecosystem is has never been fully explained. In February, a Foxconn executive cheerfully likened the company’s vague, morphing plans to designing and building an airplane midflight.
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