Harwood, North Dakota, didn’t want to lose a data center’s tax revenue to the city next door. That prospect helped persuade residents of the 845-person town to vote 3-to-1 against a measure requiring additional reviews and public hearings for large industrial projects, with a $3 billion facility at stake.
The Washington Post reports that many residents had concerns about the proposed 1.8 million-square-foot data center, including noise, environmental damage and the backroom dealings that helped move it forward. Their vote nevertheless cleared a potential hurdle for Texas-based Applied Digital, the company behind the project. Acceptance, in this case, didn’t necessarily mean enthusiasm.
For Mayor Blake Hankey, the choice was less about whether the facility would be built than which municipality would collect its taxes. He expected neighboring Fargo, North Dakota’s most populous city, to land the project if Harwood turned it away.
“It was always going to get built right around the same area that it was now,” Hankey told The Washington Post. “If the data center is going to get put in this similar location, we might as well get the tax benefits and the tax revenue from it.”
Once construction is complete, Hankey estimates the facility would generate $1.65 million in property taxes for Harwood. That’s six times the town’s total tax revenue in 2024. By his reasoning, Harwood would end up near the data center anyway, while Fargo collected the money.
Applied Digital says the project will also create 200 jobs, a sizable figure for a town this small. Futurism cautions that such employment forecasts often prove unreliable, especially once the construction work ends.
Electricity bills were the sticking point for Mark Kerkvliet, who has lived in Harwood for 40 years. Assurances that the facility wouldn’t increase power costs won his support, but didn’t change his feelings about AI.
“As soon as I was comfortable with the power use, I was on board,” Kerkvliet told The Washington Post. “Not because I like data centers or I like artificial intelligence or anything like that, but because this was very good for the city of Harwood.”
Futurism sees a bleak, narrowly local logic in that decision: blocking a data center within town limits doesn’t stop the next town from taking it. But that logic also depends on accepting the mayor’s premise that construction nearby was inevitable.
Moving a facility out of view might satisfy someone whose main concern is having it in their backyard. It does much less for those worried about environmental harm during an accelerating climate crisis. As Futurism argues, forcing a multimillion- or billion-dollar company to use a less convenient location isn’t much of a victory on those terms.
Public opposition also gives reason to question that sense of inevitability. In exit polls, 76 percent of voters said they opposed new data centers in their communities, and 56 percent called AI and data centers a crucial or major consideration in their vote. Separately, 57 percent of Americans now believe AI is bad for society. Texas governor-elect Gina Hinojosa campaigned on a moratorium on data centers.
Futurism’s counterargument is that resistance may have reached critical mass. Harwood voted on the assumption that rejecting the project would merely send it elsewhere nearby, but broader opposition could challenge that assumption rather than just shift construction across a town boundary.
