‘Like being hit between the eyes with a sledgehammer’: Meet the one town in America that defied election trends and voted in favor of data centers

In a midterm election punctuated by America’s overwhelming distaste for data centers, one small town in North Dakota has bucked the trend.

Of the 45 ballot measures on data centers this past election, only one went the pro-data center way, according to data from Redbud Consulting. That initiative belonged to Harwood, a North Dakota town 10 miles from Fargo and home to about 940 people, which overwhelmingly voted against a ballot measure that would place limitations on large-scale industrial developments such as data centers. About 75% (325) of the 430 votes cast on Tuesday opposed the measure.

Data centers were a major flashpoint of the midterm elections. With a new wave of moratoriums and restrictions, AI companies like OpenAI are scrambling to rebrand the buildout and market construction alongside promises of perks and community benefits to woo both local governments and residents.

The Harwood initiative proposed an amendment to the town’s Home Rule Charter that would impose requirements limiting how the city evaluates, approves, and administers development or building projects, such as requiring independent reviews and holding public hearings for industrial projects.

The measure was introduced following the ground-breaking of a 160-acre data center in Harwood, which Applied Digital Corp. was overseeing with Oracle as the end-user. The project was scheduled to be fully operational next year, and could possibly expand to 900 acres.

Michael Swartz, a senior software developer who’s lived in Harwood for nearly 20 years, said the town’s relationship with data centers perhaps isn’t as cut-and-dry as the election results suggest.

“Long term, there’s some really serious implications that I don’t think have been fully fleshed-out, or vetted, or even are getting talked about, at the scale that I think they need to be addressed,” Swartz told Fortune.

As the champion behind the ballot measure and the year-long fight against campus’s continued construction, Swartz believes the local data center expansion has the potential to harm the area, and that efforts to push the initiative were hampered by local authorities.

Harwood residents only learned about the data center construction about three weeks before construction for the data center began in Sept. 2025, according to Swartz. At the time, the Fargo Forum reported that then-Fargo Mayor Tim Mahoney and Harwood Mayor Blake Hankey both signed nondisclosure agreements with Applied Digital Corp. in July.

“When all of this came about, it was like being hit between the eyes with a sledgehammer,” Swartz’s wife Amanda told Fortune. “People deserve a say in projects of this scope.”

Nick Phillips, the executive vice president of external affairs at Applied Digital Corp., told Fortune the developer chose Harwood for its cooler climate and access to energy, as well as its “pro-business landscape and the ability to have a positive impact on the community, from job creation to economic benefits.”

“While our projects may seem fast to get going, they also involve an incredibly large amount of community conversations through both legally required as well as company-led events,” Phillips said in a statement. “We work very hard to provide a large amount of opportunities to learn about our potential projects before they are built including through town halls, one-on-one meetings, public forums, well above and beyond the public meeting requirements that exist.”