Farmington residents push back against massive data center projected to double city's water use
A group of Dakota County residents is pushing back on plans for a massive data center, and it's one of many such campaigns in communities across Minnesota.
In Farmington, developers received local approval for a 2.5 million square foot "hyperscale" data center on land once reserved for a new school, as well as a former golf course.
"If we don't pay attention to what's going on and advocate for ourselves, no one else is going to," said Kathy Johnson, a Farmington resident and founder of the Coalition for Responsible Data Center Development. "I think money is driving this and quality of life is not being considered. We have to do that. Quality of life matters to the people that live here and it matters to me."
Data centers aren't new to Minnesota; a 2011 law passed by state lawmakers created incentives for major tech companies to move servers here. Their footprints, however, aren't nearly as large as what's being proposed in Farmington.
Even Meta's $800 million project in Rosemount, at roughly 700,000 square feet, pales in comparison.
Mo Feshami, another Farmington resident who works in tech, said he first supported the idea of bringing a new data center to Dakota County.
"I thought if a data center comes in there won't be as many houses or cars or strain on the school system - until I realized this is a hyperscale data center," he lamented. "The data centers I used to work in, at most they used 10 megawatts. This is 708 megawatts. We used to have it in one or two floors of a large commercial building. This has its own 340-plus acres facility."
Hyperscale data centers are currently on the table in nearly a dozen other sites in Minnesota: Hermantown, Bemidji, Monticello, Lakeville, North Mankato, Faribault and Pine Island.
The group of residents in Farmington have filed suit to block construction, first on technical grounds but later added to the complaint with concerns about the environment.
The Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy has likewise filed suits on behalf of five other communities, as well as becoming a party to the Farmington case.
"I think there is a place for data centers in Minnesota," Feshami added. "Putting it in the middle of a residential neighborhood is not the right place for it."
According to court documents, the City of Farmington's current water use is around 2.14 million gallons of water a day, and the hyperscale data center would more than double that demand.
The machines, moreover, would need 700 megawatts of energy to keep running, and most power plants in Minnesota don't even produce that capacity in a day.
"It is going to affect the wells. It's going to affect the air quality, the sound quality, or our entire end of this community," Kathy Johnson lamented.
Managers at Tract, the Denver-based land development company pushing the Farmington project, did not return WCCO's calls or emails. A spokesman for the city said officials can't comment amid ongoing litigation.
At a city council session last summer, a Tract executive promised the data center could bring up to 300 permanent jobs to Farmington, as well as an extra $16 million in property taxes.
A judge in November denied Farmington's motion to dismiss the case. There is no timetable yet for the next steps in the process.