ACTION: Community Voices Needed to Push for Data Center Moratorium

MCEA’s Kathryn Hoffman speaks at a February rally at the State Capitol about a data center moratorium

I’ve worked at the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy (MCEA) for 15 years, the last ten as CEO. It’s hard to recall another environmental issue in my tenure that has led to the kind of widespread community resistance and outrage that I’ve seen unfold against hyper-scale data center development in our state.

Residents across Minnesota, from Hermantown to Farmington, have organized, rallied, and turned out in huge numbers at city council meetings, some for the first time. It’s why hyper-scale data centers and the surge in AI development continue to make headlines. And it’s why MCEA has filed six lawsuits and counting to challenge the woefully inadequate and secretive environmental review process used to hurry many of these proposals along.

Now this wave of concern is hitting the State Capitol, presenting lawmakers with an opportunity to inject what is sorely needed into the hyper-scale data center surge impacting communities across our state: a pause, and the chance to get this right.

Minnesota has never had hyper-scale data centers before, and we have no framework to govern them. Any development that happens here should give the public a fair chance to weigh in, include a complete environmental study, and put our natural resources and communities ahead of the bottom line of big technology corporations. But we need time to build that framework in state laws and rules.

As it stands, data center proposals are moving faster than policy in Minnesota. The pace of AI investment is outstripping the state and communities’ ability to protect themselves. Part of what makes this so difficult is that many of these projects are moving forward under a cloak of secrecy.

Secret code names are used (“Project Bigfoot”), and proposals are often described in vague terms such as “technology park” or “light industrial development.” Even when city officials confirm a data center is planned, it’s hard to get details beyond that basic fact. Elected officials and city staff have signed non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) with private companies to keep the public in the dark.

Worse still, there is no state government agency that decides whether to approve a data center, nor does any agency have the overall authority to impose guardrails on a facility’s water use, energy use, or other aspects of its operation. No state agency considers the cumulative effects that a host of these facilities would have on our resources. There is no permit for a simple reason: this is new.

My organization is tracking at least 21 potential data center proposals in Minnesota.

Unless powered from new renewable energy sources, the energy demand will increase carbon emissions at a time when we must be lowering them, and could very well drive up our electricity bills in the process. Press releases promising clean energy, as Google recently issued in Hermantown and Pine Island, contain good ideas, but they aren’t enough. Minnesotans deserve regulation and binding commitments, not public relations.

Further, data centers’ water demand could deplete groundwater resources — affecting private and municipal wells and even lakes and rivers — as groundwater and surface water are often connected in the land of 10,000 lakes. The cumulative impacts of 10 or more data centers — let alone 21 — could make these impacts far worse.

That’s why MCEA and other environmental and grassroots community groups are calling on the legislature to pass a two-year moratorium on hyper-scale data center development. We need to press pause to give Minnesota time to study these significant impacts, develop recommendations to protect our natural resources and communities, and create a statewide strategy and the accompanying policies needed to ensure any development that happens does so fairly, transparently, and with the right accountability mechanisms in place to protect Minnesota.

There is a suite of other important data center bills on the table this session as well: 

• One bill would ban the kind of NDAs that shield these proposals from public scrutiny.
• Another bill would ensure big technology corporations that want to do business here pay their fair share [currently they get substantial tax breaks from the state].
• A third would require large water users like hyper-scale data centers to get their own individual water permits so that Minnesota Department of Natural Resources is equipped to protect our state’s water supply.

My organization supports all of these bills.

Undoubtedly, data center developers and the technology companies behind them will insist Minnesota can’t afford a pause — that common-sense regulation will drive investment elsewhere, that we’re on the brink of missing out on the technology boom. But if AI truly represents a fundamental shift in our economy, the demand will still be there in two years.

The United States already has ten times as many data centers as any other nation. We are not falling behind.

I’ve spent 15 years fighting to protect Minnesota’s environment, and I’ve never seen an industry operate this quickly or secretly here.

Call your representatives and Governor Walz. Tell them we expect Minnesota to lead on the standards needed to protect our state. Minnesota can get this right, but only if we’re willing to slow down enough to think this through. Tell Walz and your elected officials to put a pause on data center development. Tell elected officials to stop allowing NDAs in data center development.

To support our ongoing coverage about data center development:

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Moratorium passed by Seminole Nation

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