North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum announced Wednesday a $1.9 billion construction project is underway to build a data center, which he said will be one of the largest in the world once completed.
Burgum said the center will be a site for cryptocurrency mining, among other things, with an eye on additional innovative uses down the road.
“It’s going to further cement North Dakota’s growing reputation as a global hub for data centers,” Burgum said Wednesday during a news conference. “Those data centers can be used for a lot of things. Cryptocurrency mining, of course, but the power that’s in these servers is going to create all kinds of opportunities down the road when we’ve got this kind of computing power here, whether it’s for artificial intelligence and lots of other things that are coming along. There’s going to be a lot of uses.”
The center is expected to create more than 30 permanent new jobs and require at least 100 workers to build over the course of two years, said Richard Tabish with FX Solutions, the company responsible for the construction.
The data center is being built on a 77-acre site west of Williston and initially will consist of 16 buildings housing tens of thousands of servers, according to the governor’s office. It will start out using 240 megawatts of electricity and eventually expand to 700 megawatts, adding more buildings and servers along the way, according to a news release.
Construction began in early January and will continue through winter, aided by an inflatable dome that will be built over the site.
North Dakota’s affordable power supply and favorable climate that affords lower cooler costs were some of the reasons why the state was chosen as the location, Burgum said. Heat is always an issue when there’s an abundance of servers that need to remain cool, the governor said.
“With our all-of-the-above energy approach and nation-leading efforts in carbon capture, utilization and storage, we are well-positioned to support data centers and other energy-intensive industries with environmental stewardship while attracting high-paying jobs and diversifying our economy,” Burgum said.
The data center will be owned and operated by Atlas Power, which already operates a 75-megawatt data center in Montana, according to the news release.
“Building on the success of our Butte, Montana location, Phase One of the Williston site alone will become Atlas’s largest center of operations, while also ensuring we draw on a diversified mix of alternative power sources,” said Kevin Washington, founder and president of Atlas Power.
