Walker was then Speaker of the House, and his fortunes were closely hitched to Trump (Wisconsin having unexpectedly flipped Repub in 2016, and being critical to Trump’s re-election chances). The Verge, I think, summarized the situation best:
> But the most plausible explanation I heard is that Foxconn’s secret is that it has no idea what it’s doing in Wisconsin.
> “In China, people announce projects like this all the time, and some of them get built, and some of them don’t,” said Willy Shih, a Harvard business school professor who consulted in the screen industry for several years. They’re called “state visit projects,” he said. Politicians get a photo op, and companies to get some political goodwill, but everyone knows the announcement is extremely preliminary. Ultimately, the company will do whatever makes economic sense, and sometimes, that turns out to be nothing.
> Foxconn has done this in the past, announcing large factories in Pennsylvania, Brazil, and elsewhere that never materialize. But unlike Pennsylvania, which offered Foxconn no incentives and built no infrastructure, Wisconsin politicians threw a tremendous amount of money at the company and rushed to acquire land and start building.
> Further complicating matters, the trade war with China still looms, and Trump has personally called Foxconn CEO Terry Gou when the company wavers. This time, Foxconn can’t simply vanish without risking a backlash, but it also makes no sense for it to build what it initially promised.
tl;dr Foxconn made a bunch of empty promises in Wisconsin to curry goodwill with a US administration whose trade wars threaten Foxconn, probably expecting the hot air would be understood as such by the politicians, as they would be in China. Wisconsin, under Walker, grossly overcomitted to Foxconn’s silly promises, and now both the State and Foxconn are trapped in a deal that makes no real sense for either party.