A data center is a warehouse full of computers that runs every hour of every day. The computers make heat. Removing that heat costs either electricity or water. Almost every question worth asking about one of these projects comes from those three facts.
START HERE
This page explains what a data center actually does to a community, in numbers a person can check, and what to do about it if one is proposed near you.
It is written to be useful whether you end up supporting a project or opposing it. Most of what follows is not an argument. It is the set of facts and questions that determine whether a specific project is a good deal for a specific place.
The first half explains the impacts: power, water, noise, backup generators, and what happens when a facility closes. Each one includes the number that matters and where to get it.
The second half is about action: what a good project looks like, which five bodies actually decide things, what you can do in the next month, and the seven statewide standards that would close the current gaps.
Read it straight through in about fifteen minutes, or jump to the section matching your concern. Every figure is sourced at the bottom of the page, along with a note on how confident each one is.
THE BASICS
Not all of these buildings are the same, and the difference changes almost every number on this page.
A traditional data center stores files, runs websites, and handles ordinary business computing. These have existed for decades. They are typically measured in single-digit or low double-digit megawatts, they draw steady moderate power, and most communities never notice them.
An AI data center runs specialized chips that train and operate artificial intelligence models. The chips draw far more power in the same floor space, run closer to full capacity around the clock, and generate much more heat per square foot. This is what the current wave is. It is the reason a single building can now need as much electricity as a mid-sized city.
Cryptocurrency mining facilities are a third category and behave similarly on power and noise. Some North Dakota sites began as blockchain facilities and converted to AI work.
Computers turn electricity into heat. The more computing, the more heat. Removing that heat costs either more electricity or more water, and the choice between those two is the single biggest decision in a project's design.
So a facility has two power demands: running the machines, and cooling them. Nearly every impact in this guide traces back to those two numbers and to which cooling method the operator picks.
POWER
Projects get described in megawatts. That single number drives how much new power the grid has to supply and who pays to build it.
A watt is a unit of power, meaning the rate at which electricity is used at any given moment. A megawatt is a million watts. A hair dryer draws about 1,500 watts while it is running. A megawatt is roughly 650 hair dryers running at once, continuously, forever. Data centers are unusual because they run near their maximum almost all the time, which is why their megawatt rating translates so directly into annual energy use.
North Dakota homes use about as much electricity as one megawatt of round-the-clock demand.
Based on average North Dakota household use of 1,029 kWh per month (EIA Form 861, 2024) and continuous operation. For scale, 50 megawatts is roughly every household in Grand Forks County, which has 31,295 of them. Facilities operating or announced in this state run from about 106 to 530 megawatts, so the bottom of this chart is not the realistic case.
This is the part that surprises people. The AI facilities being built now are not somewhat bigger than the data centers communities were used to. They are in a different category.
Why the gap is so large. It comes down to how much power a single rack of equipment draws. A rack of traditional servers uses roughly 5 to 15 kilowatts. A rack of AI chips draws 50 to 140. Same floor space, close to ten times the electricity, and close to ten times the heat to remove. Published ranges for what counts as a "typical" data center vary quite a bit, so treat the first two bars as general scale rather than precise figures. The North Dakota range is specific to facilities operating or announced here.
These campuses get built in stages. A developer buys or options a large parcel, then constructs one building at a time as customers and financing line up. The first building is Phase 1. The finished campus, which might be four or five buildings, is called full build-out.
The problem is that a county often votes on Phase 1. The noise study, the water estimate, and the traffic count were all run against that first building. Then Phase 2 arrives, and Phase 3, on a site that was already approved, sometimes without another public vote.
One North Dakota campus began at roughly 180 megawatts and is now built out to three buildings and up to 530. A separate site elsewhere in the state runs about 106. Same company, very different scale, and the difference is how many phases got built.
WATER
Two buildings of identical size can differ in water use by orders of magnitude. It depends entirely on how they are cooled.
Evaporative cooling boils water into the air to shed heat. Industry-wide, 70 to 80 percent of that water never returns to the local supply. Closed-loop cooling seals water in a circuit and reuses it, so day-to-day cooling needs almost none.
North Dakota lets a farmstead use water with no permit at all up to 12.5 acre-feet a year, which is about 4 million gallons. A large evaporative campus can exceed that in a single day.
Read the gaps carefully. The distance between the first bar and the others is the cooling choice. The distance between the second and third is mostly facility size. Both matter, and only one of them is something a permit condition can influence. Enterprise range from the Environmental and Energy Study Institute; upper figure from Vantage Data Centers, 2026. Use varies widely with climate, design, and scale, which is exactly why the number has to come from the applicant rather than from a chart.
NOISE
Cooling fans and transformers produce a low hum twenty-four hours a day. The problem is character, not volume.
Low-frequency sound travels farther and passes through walls more easily than higher pitches. And the standard measurement, A-weighted decibels, deliberately under-weights low frequencies because it models human hearing. A facility can meet its limit on paper and still be clearly audible in a bedroom at two in the morning.
Rural nighttime ambient noise is very low, which makes an added constant hum more noticeable in the country than the same hum in a suburb, not less.
Distance and limits, not opposition. Sound drops by about 6 decibels every time you double the distance from the source, which means setback is the most powerful tool available and it is entirely within local control.
Stutsman County worked this out the empirical way. It surveyed residents living within two miles of an existing data center, found that enough of them reported problems with sound and light to take seriously, and doubled its proposed setback from one mile to two before adopting the ordinance in February 2026. Mercer County uses a half mile from the noise source to the nearest home.
Neither county banned data centers. Both decided how far away one has to be. That is the decision in front of most communities, and it is a much more productive question than whether the industry is good or bad.
BACKUP POWER
A data center cannot tolerate an outage, so it does not rely on the grid alone. It keeps its own bank of diesel generators that start automatically the moment grid power drops.
These are not connected to the grid and they do not supply anyone else. They exist to carry the building through an interruption, and they run briefly every month for testing to confirm they will start when needed. Every facility of this size has them, and they are necessary equipment.
Diesel generators proposed at one North Dakota site. That may be entirely proportionate to the load, and an engineer would say so. The number is here to convey scale, not alarm.
Two things follow from a bank that large, and they are the reasons this is worth a section of its own.
They are the loudest thing the site does on a normal day. Testing runs above 90 decibels near the equipment. Monthly, predictable, and much louder than the constant hum discussed above.
They are permitted somewhere else entirely. Any single generator is small, but added together, a fleet's emissions can approach the threshold that would make it a major air pollution source. Most large data centers are permitted instead as synthetic minor sources, meaning the operator accepts enforceable limits to stay under that line. The federal rule that keeps these engines classified as emergency equipment caps them at 100 hours of operation per year.
That distinction has a public consequence. A major source permit carries a mandatory 30-day comment period and federal review. A synthetic minor permit does not carry the same automatic process. So the approval covering 60 diesel engines can pass with less public visibility than the zoning hearing on the same site. A 2025 state law also removed Public Service Commission siting review for onsite backup generation not connected to the grid, which took away another layer.
END OF LIFE
Data centers are windowless, heavily reinforced, single-purpose buildings. If the operator fails or the technology moves on, they are very hard to lease to anyone else.
What remains is the structure plus batteries, cabling, cooling infrastructure, and thousands of servers. Without financial security posted up front, the cost of removal lands on the landowner or, in practice, on the county.
Oil and gas operators must post a bond with the state before site construction begins. It covers plugging and site reclamation, it is reviewed periodically and can be increased, and transferring the property does not release it. There is also a state fund, created in 1983, fed by forfeited bonds and penalties, for cases where the security falls short.
The structure transfers directly to data centers. The one lesson to learn from it: the fixed dollar amounts written into the oil and gas program proved far too low against real costs and stayed there. Set the amount by a schedule that gets updated instead.
Nobody knows, and that is not a reason to skip the requirement. It is the reason to write it a particular way.
There is no reliable public figure for demolishing a hyperscale data center and disposing of its contents, because very few have been demolished. Any number quoted today would be a guess, and a guess written into statute becomes obsolete quickly. That is precisely what went wrong with oil and gas bonding.
The better fix is for the state to answer it once, properly, rather than making every county and every applicant fight about it separately. Commission a real cost study, covering demolition, equipment removal, electronic waste handling, and site restoration, and publish a schedule that sets the required security by facility size. Update it on a fixed cycle so it does not go stale the way the oil and gas figures did.
That approach is cheaper for everyone. A developer knows the number before it applies, which is exactly the predictability the industry says it wants. A county does not have to hire its own engineer or take the applicant's word for it. And the amount stops being a negotiation, which is where small jurisdictions lose.
THE TRADE
This is the section that explains why a community would want one of these in the first place.
North Dakota has exempted data center equipment and software from state sales tax since 2015, for facilities over 15,000 square feet that use at least half that space for data processing. Construction materials are not covered. The purpose is recruitment: this equipment is enormously expensive, and a sales tax on it would send the project to a state without one.
What the community gets back is property tax, and this is the part worth understanding clearly. Property tax is local. It funds school districts, county roads, sheriff's departments, ambulance service, and fire protection. A large data center is a very large taxable structure that sends no children to school and generates almost no traffic once it is running. For a rural county with a thin commercial base, that is an unusually favorable ratio, and it can matter more than any other single business in the county.
There is a second piece that surprises people. Because the servers inside get replaced every three to five years, the taxable equipment value renews instead of steadily depreciating the way a factory's machinery would. The base does not erode.
So the trade is real in both directions, and it is worth seeing the actual figures.
Sales tax not collected
All data centers statewide
Year: 2025
Property tax owed
One campus, Ellendale
Year: 2026
Property tax projected
One company, four sites
Year: 2029
Sales tax figures are statewide and rise and fall with construction and equipment purchases. Property tax figures are per site and grow as buildings come online, then continue every year. The exemption is claimed again each time servers are replaced, roughly every three to five years.
Two things worth knowing about how this plays out locally. Abatements are a separate local choice and they are not automatic: one operator declined a ten-year property tax break it was offered, saying it wanted the town to have adequate roads, police, fire, and schools for the workers it was asking to move there. And construction itself generates local sales tax, reported at more than a million dollars at one site.
A data center can be one of the best things that happens to a rural county's budget. It can also leave behind a building nobody can use, a water supply drawn down, and neighbors who cannot sleep.
The difference is not luck and it is not the industry's character. It is whether the specific commitments got written into the permit before the vote. Everything else on this page exists to make the good version the likely one, so that a community can say yes with confidence rather than saying no out of caution.
This is where public conversations go wrong most often, because the big number and the lasting number are not the same number.
ONE PROPOSED SITE, ABOUT 430 MEGAWATTS
PERMANENT JOBS SCALE WITH SIZE, SO ASK ABOUT YOUR SITE
Reported figures for existing and announced North Dakota facilities at full staffing. Notice that these do not line up neatly: the 430 megawatt site above projects about 200 permanent jobs, fewer than the 280 megawatt campus does. Staffing depends on what the building does and who operates it, not just its size. That is the point. Do not scale these numbers to your project. Get the figure for the specific site, in writing. Statewide, the Tax Department counted 332 permanent positions created or retained from 2021 through 2025, a backward-looking figure covering facilities already built.
WHAT TO ASK FOR
Communities that only know how to say no lose the projects worth having. Most of what follows costs a serious developer very little, which is exactly why the ones who refuse all of it are telling you something.
In January 2026 a working group published a North Dakota Model Data Center Zoning Ordinance. It was written jointly by the Association of Counties, the Planning Association, the Township Officers Association, the League of Cities, the Greater North Dakota Chamber, and Tech ND. The League of Cities posts it publicly.
Because industry helped write it, a developer has a hard time calling it hostile. It already requires an engineer-signed acoustic study before approval, written confirmation of electric and water capacity, disclosure of cooling method and construction traffic, mapping of nearby homes and parks, and generator testing limited to daytime hours.
Its own authors call it a starting framework rather than a finished product. Five things it does not cover: numeric noise limits, decommissioning, water quantity, who pays for grid upgrades, and setback distance. Those five are exactly what the standards at the end of this page address.
Demand response, meaning the facility agrees to power down when the grid is stressed. Electric systems have to be built for the worst hour of the year, usually a deep cold snap or a summer peak. That worst hour is what drives the cost of new power plants and lines. A data center that contractually agrees to cut its draw during those hours is not adding to the peak, so it does not push the utility toward building new capacity. Some computing work can genuinely be paused or shifted by a few hours; other work cannot.
There is a second version of the same idea that cooperatives themselves make: a very large steady customer can improve use of infrastructure that would otherwise sit underused at certain times, spreading fixed costs across more sales. One North Dakota cooperative has argued exactly that publicly.
Either way, this is a question worth asking directly, because it converts the biggest objection to these projects into the strongest thing an operator can say for itself. Willingness to even discuss it tells you something.
Waste heat reuse. These buildings reject enormous amounts of low-grade heat. In a state with a long heating season, that heat can warm greenhouses, a district system, or an industrial process. It only works if a co-located user is planned at the siting stage, so it has to be raised early or it never happens at all.
WHERE DECISIONS GET MADE
These are the bodies that decide whether a project happens and on what terms, and they are who to contact. Most people find the first one and never learn about the other four.
In North Dakota the only approval a developer must obtain before building is local zoning permission. There is no single state agency reviewing the project as a whole.
IF A PROJECT IS PROPOSED NEAR YOU
The Legislature's Artificial Intelligence and Data Center Committee accepts written testimony, which interim committees usually do not, and posts submissions with the meeting minutes. It reports to Legislative Management in November 2026, ahead of the session that opens in January. Written testimony goes to edohm@ndlegis.gov.
ACTION AT THE STATE LEVEL
Attending a county meeting addresses one project. These seven change the rules for every project, and they are decided in Bismarck, not at your courthouse.
Some problems genuinely cannot be solved county by county. Utility cost allocation crosses service territories, and no county can set a utility's contract terms. Decommissioning is a solvency question that outlasts any board. And a township with no planning staff facing a well-resourced applicant is not in a fair negotiation.
All seven are written as a floor, not a ceiling. Any local jurisdiction can go further, and counties with stronger ordinances keep them.
Find your state senator and two representatives at ndlegis.gov. Email or call and name the specific standard you want, not the general topic. "I want a decommissioning bond requirement modeled on oil and gas reclamation bonding" lands. "I'm worried about data centers" does not.
Before January, the same points can go to the interim committee studying this at edohm@ndlegis.gov. It reports in November 2026, so that window closes first.
If only one moves, it should be the second. Decommissioning is the easiest to explain, has the closest North Dakota precedent, and is the hardest to argue against in public.