SOUTHEAST WISCONSIN — Flanked by several leaders of the 13 building trades unions whose members are constructing a massive artificial intelligence data center in a rural area south of Milwaukee, Mitch Landrieu, the co-chair of Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign and former White House infrastructure czar, had what looked like an easy task before him.
The hundreds of hard hat-clad union members gathered in the dining hall, now eating bagged lunches courtesy of the Harris campaign, held some of the thousands of jobs that sprang indirectly from President Joe Biden’s investments in infrastructure and his commitment to using union labor. Landrieu was there to remind them of that.
The soon-to-be-running data center — whose construction was commissioned by a multinational corporation that did not grant permission for a reporter to be present at the luncheon — sits next to a complex of facilities run by Chinese electronics giant Foxconn, a company whose history in…