‘Like being hit between the eyes with a sledgehammer’: Meet the one town in America that defied election trends and voted in favor of data centers

In a midterm election punctuated by America’s overwhelming distaste for data centers, one small town in North Dakota has bucked the trend.

Of the 45 ballot measures on data centers this past election, only one went the pro-data center way, according to data from Redbud Consulting. That initiative belonged to Harwood, a North Dakota town 10 miles from Fargo and home to about 940 people, which overwhelmingly voted against a ballot measure that would place limitations on large-scale industrial developments such as data centers. About 75% (325) of the 430 votes cast on Tuesday opposed the measure.

Data centers were a major flashpoint of the midterm elections. With a new wave of moratoriums and restrictions, AI companies like OpenAI are scrambling to rebrand the buildout and market construction alongside promises of perks and community benefits to woo both local governments and residents.

The Harwood initiative proposed an amendment to the town’s Home Rule Charter that would impose requirements limiting how the city evaluates, approves, and administers development or building projects, such as requiring independent reviews and holding public hearings for industrial projects.

The measure was introduced following the ground-breaking of a 160-acre data center in Harwood, which Applied Digital Corp. was overseeing with Oracle as the end-user. The project was scheduled to be fully operational next year, and could possibly expand to 900 acres.

Michael Swartz, a senior software developer who’s lived in Harwood for nearly 20 years, said the town’s relationship with data centers perhaps isn’t as cut-and-dry as the election results suggest. 

“Long term, there’s some really serious implications that I don’t think have been fully fleshed-out, or vetted, or even are getting talked about, at the scale that I think they need........

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