Looks to develop in Toronto, South Dakota.
Applied Digital is looking to develop a multi-billion-dollar data center in Deuel County, South Dakota.
First reported by Dakota News Now, the data center operator is proposing an AI data center development east of Toronto in South Dakota.
The project could see up to $16 billion in investment and create up to 200 high-paying jobs. In addition, Applied Digital has committed to improving local fiber infrastructure, and to minimize the water and noise impact of the project.
According to Nick Phillips, Applied's executive vice president of external affairs, the project's timeline includes an estimated six to nine months through the zoning and state-level decisions, and 18 to 24 months for construction.
In total, the data center project could offer 430MW of IT capacity. The initial plan would see two buildings developed at 907,000 square feet (84,263 sqm) per building.
In an interview with Keloland News, Phillips said that the company typically chooses Midwest locations for the natural cooling benefits.
“When we take a large amount of energy and we put that energy into these buildings for the computers to do the work that they do, they generate a lot of heat,” Phillips said. “If you have a thing that you’re trying to cool down, whether it’s a data center or really anything, if you look at other markets for data centers such as Phoenix or Dallas or Virginia or other places that are much hotter, you end up putting a lot of either energy or water into cooling those facilities.”
“South Dakota, Toronto is much colder than some of those other places. It becomes less expensive from a power perspective to cool buildings, because it’s cooler, we’re also able to reduce the amount of water that’s consumed, for those buildings,” Phillips said.
In the company's existing data centers in North Dakota, Applied uses around 10 gallons per minute, which is equivalent to an average household.
Applied met with Deuel County Commissioners during an April 15 meeting. It was noted in the meeting that there is currently "no zoning in Deuel County," which would need to be resolved before the project can begin.
In addition, South Dakota is currently working through issues with the state regarding sales and property taxes, and who pays them.
Phillips said during the meeting that, currently, 38 states in the US have tax incentives or similar programs. South Dakota previously considered one, but the bill SB 177 failed in the Senate in a 17-18 vote.
South Dakota has a very small data center market currently, with DataCenterMap listing just four facilities in the state, all located around Sioux Falls. Toronto is located north of Sioux Falls, also along the boundary with Minnesota.
Applied has an existing campus in Ellendale, North Dakota. The company closed $375 million in financing with Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC) for the facility in February this year.
Applied Digital (formerly Applied Blockchain) has more than 100MW of capacity under construction for its HPC business in North Dakota and a planned pipeline of more than 1GW. In addition to Ellendale, the company has a 100MW facility in Jamestown, known as JMS01.
The company does not mine its own Bitcoin, but hosts hardware on behalf of other cryptomining firms, as well as now pivoting to hosting HPC and AI hardware amid demand for capacity. Applied is also offering its own cloud services and has previously said it will host and offer access to Nvidia Blackwell GPUs.
Applied Digital is also planning a 200MW facility in Iowa.
