In September, Applied Digital broke ground on Polaris Forge 2, a 280-megawatt (MW) AI computing center in Harwood, north of Fargo in North Dakota. It’s a big project for a tech company whose market value has jumped dramatically in value in 2025.
Asked why Harwood was chosen as the site of the $3 billion data center by the company he runs, Wes Cummins, chairman and CEO of Applied Digital, notes that the company chooses their sites for two reasons: 1) where reliable large amounts of power are available and already exist on the grid and 2) fiber availability. Several locations were scouted near Harwood, located on the North Dakota-Minnesota state line, during the search for the Polaris Forge 2 site. Cummins says the cold climate of North Dakota was important for facility operations, creating a lot more efficiency.
“North Dakota is an energy-rich state,” Cummins says. “They produce six to eight times more energy than they consume inside of the state … And for North Dakota, the sites that we’ve located at typically have a significant amount of renewables. [The] sustainability factor is important to our company, and the carbon load that we create … We try to be driving efficiency through cold weather and then also sourcing power from the lowest-carbon source that we can.”
A rendering of the planned Applied Digital data center in Harwood, North Dakota
Images courtesy of Applied Digital
When asked what the long-term goals are for Polaris Forge 2, Cummins had one choice word: scale.
“That’s the goal in this industry in general — scale,” he says. “How quickly can we scale this project that has moved forward really fast?”
Outside of typical business market pressures in the tech industry, freezing spells also provide the imperative to move nimbly on large data center projects located in places that experience a very cold winter season like North Dakota, where foundations must be poured and set before construction can continue through colder months.
Cummins says Applied Digital is in advanced negotiations with a customer for Polaris Forge 2, lending to the company’s “data center region” it is now building out in the state.
“The goal for the site over time and the goal for us in North Dakota is scale — be one of the leading places for AI infrastructure in the United States,” Cummins says. “Data and regions are different now. It used to be data center regions were at the population centers. Now it’s data itself.”
As sustainability continues to grow in importance and popularity among several large development projects, there is some wariness when it comes to data centers, especially as it pertains to water usage. At Polaris Forge 2, a company-specific closed-loop liquid cooling system will cool the equipment.
“We specifically designed a closed-loop liquid cooling system,” Cummins says. “This is what most of the data center operators are going toward now, which is a much more environmentally friendly and much more sustainable way of running data centers because our entire data center campus will use the same amount of water a typical household would use.”
In a closed-loop liquid cooling system, the liquid being used to cool the equipment is circulated through a self-contained loop near the IT equipment that requires cooling. Water does not evaporate out in the air and need replacing as it does in an open-loop cooling system.
“We’ve made great strides there with customers,” Cummins says. He notes that Applied Digital is set to “turn on through the end of the year one of the largest supercomputing clusters in the world” and potentially have the “largest direct-to-chip liquid-cooling deployment in the world” in North Dakota.
Applied Digital will have three data centers in North Dakota after Polaris Forge 2 is operational, including a 106-MW facility (JMS01) in Jamestown and Polaris Forge 1, a 400-MW data center in Ellendale recently leased to AI cloud computing company CoreWeave. There is a new facility being built in Iowa and also a potential project in South Dakota.
Reaching for Renewables
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in 2024 South Dakota was second only to Vermont in having the highest share of total in-state electricity powered by renewable resources (81%). The natural geography and farmland-heavy industry of the state lends itself to renewable energy sectors (biomass, solar and wind) with hydroelectric options provided by the Missouri River.
POET, a Sioux Falls-based biofuel company specializing in bioethanol and operating over 30 facilities across the American Midwest and Heartland regions, is building a new energy storage facility near one of its existing plants in Big Stone City, South Dakota. Thermal battery manufacturer Antora and Minnesota utility service provider Otter Tail Power are partnering up on the development, coined the Big Stone Energy Storage Project.
Antora Energy Inc., a California startup backed by Bill Gates, develops thermal energy storage solutions using solid carbon blocks that are heated via electricity — the resulting energy produced by this technology creates steam that can be used to power equipment at different kinds of facilities. Sustainability initiatives and legislative changes at the state level helped incentivize the new POET project, which will also be the first time Antora’s thermal batteries will be used on a commercial scale.
POET was founded by Jeff Broin, whose father began exploring bioethanol production on their family farm in Wanamingo, Minnesota, in the 1980s. The company is still privately owned and operated by the Broin family and is now one of the largest ethanol producers in the country after launching its first commercial facility in 1986 in Scotland, South Dakota.
According to the Governor’s Office of Economic Development in South Dakota, the state has seen more than 40 energy-related or manufacturing projects advance over the past two years. Nearly $800 million is projected to be invested in manufacturing expansions and relocations, while energy-related projects are expected to generate almost $600 million in capital investment.
Philip Wind Partners, a subsidiary owned by Chicago-based Invenergy, is in talks with South Dakota regulators to establish a $750 million wind energy farm in the western area of the state. To be located on 70,000 acres in Haakon County, the Philip Wind Energy Center project is expected to generate 300 MW of electricity that will power over 121,000 homes and aims to begin operations in 2027.
Invenergy also received the OK earlier this year to build a 260-MW wind project in the northeastern part of South Dakota in Deuel County, named the South Deuel Wind Energy Center; Invenergy also built the first Deuel Harvest Wind Farm, which was completed and sold to Southern Power in 2021.
