You May Have to Move to Minnesota to Escape the Data Center Epidemic

Data centers are taking over the world, and the chances are high that someone is, at this very minute, planning to build one in (or near) your backyard. That’s because the AI boom is ongoing, and to produce AI, you need cloud, and to make cloud, you need rows upon rows of servers. There is apparently one location in the U.S. where you may be safe from these friendly little server farms, and that place is Minnesota.

The Minnesota Star Tribune reports that, despite the fact that companies are champing at the bit to build over a dozen new data centers in the state, several such projects have recently stalled. For example, the company Oppidan, a real estate firm involved in data center development, recently paused work on two of its three data center projects in the state. Why? The newspape