Opinion | Are Minnesota cities secretly building data centers? Residents deserve to know.

By MCEA CEO Kathryn Hoffman, this piece originally appeared in the Minnesota Star Tribune on September 11, 2025

Minnesotans have a right to know what’s proposed in their community and a right to have their say about it. That’s the bedrock that Minnesota’s environmental review law is built on — transparency and public input. It’s been enormously successful and is a vital part of our democracy. When people know what’s coming to their town and have a fair chance to weigh in on it, it improves proposed projects, it increases community acceptance and it flags potential problems early while there’s still time to address them.

But when it comes to mega-sized data center proposals, secrecy has overtaken the transparency that the environmental review process is supposed to provide. That’s why the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy (MCEA) has taken legal action to protect local residents who deserve to know what is proposed in their neighborhood.

In August, MCEA filed appeals of two environmental studies of suspected data centers in Lakeville and North Mankato. MCEA has been tracking environmental studies associated with known or suspected data centers over the past year. What we found shocked us — with few exceptions, the studies don’t even name what developers actually propose to build.

That’s why I used the word “suspected” data centers. Unless you read between the lines, like checking codes used for specific types of facilities, you might not even know if what is proposed in your city is an office, warehouse or a huge data center. All of which carry very different implications for a surrounding community and our state resources as a whole.

In the case of the North Mankato proposal, city officials refused to identify this as a data center proposal at a public meeting. Meanwhile, the same officials were sending internal emails that clearly show it to be just that. North Mankato, like several cities in Minnesota, has a nondisclosure agreement with data center developers. It’s a playbook we’re seeing followed across the country. This is antithetical to the transparency that Minnesota law requires, and the role that cities are supposed to play in ensuring that the law is followed.

While we’ve appealed two specific environmental studies, we’ve observed this pattern across Minnesota. The scale and stakes of these decisions are considerable. The North Mankato proposal would be 4 million square feet in size — more than twice the square footage of the Minnesota Vikings stadium. The amount of electricity that each of these “hyper-scale” data centers consume can be massive. For example, one proposed data center in Farmington would use as much electricity in a year as the Monticello nuclear power plant produces annually.

In addition, depending on the type of system used to cool the electronics, each data center can consume hundreds of millions of gallons of drinking water yearly. Combined with the tons of metals in the electronics inside of these data centers, and the noise and light associated with them, there are many issues that need to be addressed at the planning stage. However, the environmental reviews in Lakeville, North Mankato and elsewhere fail to identify, let alone meaningfully analyze, these issues.

Litigation can be a costly way to resolve these disputes, and MCEA first attempted to address this issue through other avenues. We advocated for legislative action to enact meaningful, transparent and complete environmental reviews of proposed data centers. While the Minnesota Legislature did take steps forward on some aspects of data center regulation in 2025, environmental review changes were left on the cutting room floor. Given the mounting wave of interest in Minnesota for mega-sized data centers (with over a dozen proposals and counting), we simply can’t wait for the Legislature to take action.

Minnesota’s environmental laws were written to allow for clear-eyed planning and good decisions by government officials about proposed development. All proposals have both costs and benefits, and transparency allows residents to learn about the proposal and let elected officials know what they think. Environmental review is a critically important early look at what is being considered in a community, what the impact might be, whether there are better alternatives, and how any impacts can be prevented or mitigated. MCEA is proud of our role as a watchdog and a defender of these laws. When it comes to the challenge that data center development poses, we hope the courts will take action where the Legislature didn’t.

Kathryn Hoffman is the chief executive of the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy (MCEA). MCEA is a public interest law firm and advocacy organization with offices in St. Paul and Duluth.