Construction of the Polaris Forge 1 data center in Ellendale, N.D., employs 2,000 workers who are putting a strain on the area’s housing supply.

Ellendale, N.D., is a place most Americans couldn’t pinpoint on a map. The town of 1,100 is hardly a tourist attraction: Its faded center includes boarded-up buildings, an old grain elevator and a dilapidated opera house. 

But good luck trying to book a hotel room or find a place to rent in a 100-mile radius. 

On a recent family trip to nearby Aberdeen, S.D., it was virtually impossible to find a place to stay. For locals, rents have doubled almost overnight. And residents used to peaceful drives through fields of soybeans and corn are now complaining about a very California phenomenon: traffic. 

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Ellendale’s new tenant, Polaris Forge 1, an $11 billion data center that, when completed, will encompass approximately 2.5 million square feet and deliver 400 megawatts of computing power — enough to run hundreds of thousands of homes. Swarming trucks carry more than 2,000 workers to the construction site, which is active 24 hours a day, six days a week, and illuminated at night by immense floodlights. A nearby bitcoin mining facility emits a low, persistent hum.

Welcome to the new American frontier.

Artificial intelligence and the data centers that power it are the latest chapter in a familiar American story about industry. Railroads, oil, coal, data-center construction: They provide high-paying working-class jobs in economically strapped communities, even as they take a toll on workers’ bodies and sully natural resources. In California, Democrats have reaped the financial bounty of AI and cheered AI office leases while largely decrying the data centers that sustain them as costly, extractive and polluting. That’s easy to do when the facilities aren’t in your backyard. 

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But in the Dakotas, hyperscale data centers are not an abstract concept. They’re real. 

So, what do the locals think?

Coming from California — where polls show that 70% of residents oppose data-center construction in their area and conversations often trend toward hyperbolic denunciation of billionaires — I expected universal criticism. 

Some residents are........

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