Harwood Rejected a Bigger Say to Keep Its Data-Center Bet Alive
Harwood Rejected a Bigger Say to Keep Its Data-Center Bet Alive
The conflict began in 2025, when Applied Digital moved quickly on a 160-acre AI data-center campus in Harwood, with Oracle identified as the end user. The $3 billion project, due to be operational next year and potentially expand dramatically, landed in a town of fewer than 1,000 people. Residents say they learned of it only weeks before construction began; Mayor Blake Hankey and then-Fargo Mayor Tim Mahoney had signed nondisclosure agreements with the developer months earlier.
For Mike Swartz and the grassroots group Voices of Harwood, that speed became the case for a Home Rule Charter amendment. The proposal would have required independent reviews and public hearings for future large industrial developments. Swartz, worried about issues including noise near an elementary school, said residents had been “blindsided” by the current project’s approval: “We are the people that have to live with this type of industry as a neighbor.”
The push gained signatures quickly, but its opponents framed it as a costly, sweeping constraint rather than a narrowly tailored data-center safeguard. The Fargo Moorhead West Fargo Chamber of Commerce circulated material warning of substantial added costs and lost projects. Applied Digital, meanwhile, said its choice of Harwood reflected its climate, energy access and a pro-business setting, and insisted it had offered engagement “well above and beyond” formal meeting requirements.
Hankey opposed the amendment on a different but overlapping calculation: Harwood could not afford rules that made big investment harder. He said the language was imprecise and potentially “financially burdensome to a city our size,” stressing that it covered future businesses generally, not just data centers. He also defended the NDA as necessary to keep the project—and its tax base—from going to Fargo.
On election day, that argument won decisively. Voters rejected the measure 325 to 105, even as 44 of 45 data-center-related ballot measures nationally went the other way. Harwood chose the prospect of $1.65 million in taxes by 2028 over a stronger public brake on the next major build.
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