Summertime is a celebration in Minnesota’s northland. There is the promise of cabins on lakes, fishing, camping and s’mores over campfires during lingering evenings. If you’re lucky, northern lights or a shooting star may add additional magic to an already idyllic scene. Minnesotans love the outdoors.
A proposed hyperscale data center will change this way of life in Hermantown. The proposed data center is 178 acres and 1.8 million square feet. It’s the size of U.S. Bank Stadium, and the location is deeply problematic. Still privately owned, that property is home to generations of agricultural and farming lands, old growth oak trees, prairie lands, wetlands, abundant wildlife and designated trout streams. It’s also home to hundreds of families.
Residents, who were informed about “Project Loon” when a Twin Cities-based newspaper broke the story, assert that local decision-making was clandestine. A Data Practices Act request yielded 1,600 pages of planning for over a year-and-a-half prior to the newspaper announcement about the project in September. The data requests also showed that Harmony Group LLC (i.e., Google) was willing to pay legal fees related to lawsuits against the city for keeping the project secretive. There were 22 non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) signed including local (the city of Hermantown in entirety) and regional (including elected St. Louis County commissioners) entities.
Related: Minnesota residents opposed to data center developments look to legislators for moratoriums and transparency
Just as in the Pine Island, Minnesota, hyperscale data center partnership with the utility company Xcel Energy, the proposed Hermantown project is a partnership with Minnesota Power. However, there is distinction in that Minnesota Power/ALLETE was purchased by Global Infrastructure Partners, a subsidiary of BlackRock, the largest private equity company in the world, in October. BlackRock also owns a 5%-7% share of Google.
Insidiously, there are recent land sales in the Adolph corridor (adjacent to the proposed hyperscale data center location), to Minnesota Power, for an “urgently needed upgrade to support grid stability.”Additionally, at the end of January, four parcels were sold to Harmony Group LLC (i.e., Google) for $5.9 million. When landowners approached the city in April 2025 to ask directly about why they had been approached by a developer, they were denied information (as the city was under NDA).
One resident summarized this well; “BlackRock now owns land (ALLETE/Renfield Land) and infrastructure that produces the power and the transmission lines to bring this energy to Hermantown. [The company] becomes instrumental in building a plant it partners with (Google). It owns major holdings in the company that makes the infrastructure which goes into the data center. Then they own the company that are the end users of the majority of data produced at that center. I call this a monopoly, but they call it capitalism and business as usual.”
Minnesotans, we have a Goliath, one that doesn’t fight fairly, and we need your help.
Residents didn’t ask for the developer to knock on their door, for betrayal by their elected representatives or for a private equity company to purchase their utility. They certainly didn’t ask for the health effects of chronic stress.
Related: Data centers consume massive amounts of water – companies rarely tell the public exactly how much
One report on data center impact projected that by 2028, there will be a $20 billion annual public health burden nationwide, with 1,300 premature deaths and 600,000 new cases of asthma. The air pollution from diesel data center generators in Virginia was modeled to cause public health effects as far away as Florida.
Minnesota needs data center reform, including repeal of tax breaks for data center development and time to study the effects of unregulated data center development on water, utility and public health, by enacting a two-year moratorium.
While there were halfhearted jokes about welcoming Google to Minnesota with a hot dish, the reality is that the state is trafficking landowners to exploitation by one of the wealthiest companies in human history. This center is not a win-win, it’s a subversion of democracy. Minnesota needs better guardrails in place before rolling out the red carpet of economic development to the large-scale data center industry.
Rebecca Gilbertson is a Hermantown, Minnesota, resident. She lives a half mile from the proposed hyperscale data center.
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