Let's talk data centers.

Last month I was home in Duluth, Minnesota. The last time I’d been back was over Christmas. I’ve been talking to friends back home about AI since I got into the field over a dozen years ago. Last Christmas was the first time it felt like people had really started to form their own opinions based on substantial personal experience with AI. These discussions kept circling back to the same topic: The proposed data center project in a suburb of Duluth called Hermantown.

Duluth is a small city of under 100,000 people and Hermantown has a population of about 10,000. For the past year or so, a bunch of the people in Hermantown has been trying to stop the city from building a hyperscale datacenter there. One year ago today, Minnesota's biggest paper, the Star Tribune, broke the story that the big proposed “communication services facility” development was in fact a data center, confirming local residents suspicions. At the time, the mayor had already known this for over a year.