I don’t know the answer to that question, but I am speculating that GOED (Governor’s Office of Economic Development) is pushing this project.
We know that the data center will drive up water and electrical costs for consumers in that service area. It will also NOT create hundreds of jobs. For example, ADP has a data center in Sioux Falls. Do you know how many people work there? It’s about a dozen. It will only create jobs for out of state contractors to build it. A friend who works on data centers all over the country (technical builds) told me you could actually operate the facility remotely and have a local contractor if they have to actually show up and do repairs etc. In other words it could create ZERO permanent jobs. Most data centers run this way throughout the world with a central command center instead of having individual command centers at the actual physical locations.
So why do I think GOED is behind this? I found it odd that Brandon rolled over almost overnight, so did the Sioux Falls city council and planning commission. Yes, they are all famous for rubberstamping, but I have never seen this kind of unification behind a project unless someone has the foot on the pedal and a boot up their asses, and my guess it is Rhoden pushing this (and he wears boots).
Ironically, it sounds like this may not have been even a project that was on GOED’s radar, but once dumped in their laps they are probably trying to claim a win.
I’m not naive, WE NEED DATA CENTERS and they have to be somewhere, but don’t approve a project because of pressure from the governor based on false promises from a shadow foreign LLC, especially a governor that is even dumber then the person(s) who appointed him. What a Larry!
There was a time when South Dakota was the nations bread basket. Then came high interest credit cards. Now, there’s a watchdog for destroying democrats and stealing from senior citizens. New snooping brings no jobs but doesn’t need food and minimum wage. Just air conditioned rack rows that can’t be serviced with clean energy. The future is Musk Grok that feeds artificial intelligence but nothing biological. Oh well, hug the 3D images even tho they already know bedtime stories because they don’t sleep. All you get back is a steady full time hum that makes you die from tendinitis. You can’t give this kid a bath. Only a halon shower when there’s a fire. Fortunately, there’ll no longer be a need for dishonest politicians or a king like Trump.
I’m going to give my perspective as someone who’s been in IT for over 30 years and who works for one of the world’s biggest IT Infrastructure companies*.
First, you are ABSOLUTELY right – Building a big datacenter will not bring hundreds of jobs. Anyone who says it will does not understand how datacenters work or is lying through their teeth. Datacenters are not designed for people to physically work there. Everything is designed for racks and racks of servers. The only time you go into the datacenter is when you need to rack servers, plug or unplug cables, and fix things that are physically failing. A half dozen or a dozen local full time people or local contractors can handle that. This includes people to shovel snow/mow the lawns, and to maintain the HVAC system. The data scientists, the programmers, the senior network administrators – they can do their work from anywhere in the world. AND let’s be honest, for most young professionals, why would they want to live in Madison, or in Brandon, or in Sioux Falls. They can work from their home or from an office in…Omaha/Des Moines/The Twin Cities IF they need to be close. Or closer to their corporate headquarters where they get facetime with the big-wigs to advance their careers. Or in India, or China, or the EU…They don’t need to be HERE.
Power and water usage could also be a major issue. This could have a big impact on local economies. Water usage varies dramatically based off center design. Better designs will use less water, but they are more expensive to build out. Depending on who is actually paying for the datacenters…this may be a small issue or a huge massive problem depending on multiple factors. Some companies will build out local renewable resources – banks of solar panels and wind power. This has been done in other sites where datacenters have been built out. Google and Meta have both discussed plans for building small scale nuclear reactors to provide always on power supplemented with wind and solar. This would be 3-5 years from happening- best case – but if they did it would actually make electricity cheaper in the local area because they would sell off extra capacity to the local grid. BUT we have no assurance that we’ll get one of the “better” companies like Meta or Google. They could be looking to build the data center and screw the local populations. We don’t know.
But there IS value for South Dakota. They will need to invest in expanding backbone network infrastructure to whatever are they are in. I’d much rather have Google, or Amazon, or Meta pay to do this kind of dramatic bandwidth increase as opposed to having Midco/SDN/whoever ramp up prices. This expansion will be needed eventually and I’d rather have them pay for it. It will add a few service provider jobs – and these will be highly paid professionals. Again, not many, but some.
*Official disclaimer, these opinions are my own, and do not reflect the positions or statements of my current or any of my past employers.
AR- You probably work for the same company as my friend. I was just having a convo this morning with a Fed about this and how you can build a solar farm around the facilities to create it’s own energy, they could also dig their own wells and the place could be entirely contained with little to no impact on the environment. And while we may miss out on jobs we would get property tax revenue from a facility that is a zero sum for the community essentially. Like I said, we need them, and rural, unpopulated areas are a good fit, but we can make them even better by making them self-sufficient and self-contained. I say build a 100 of them around Sioux Falls, as long as we use this model. My fear is we will allow this one and all of a sudden we have a whole industrial park of them sucking juice from the residents.