Could Ellendale, North Dakota become the next Silicon Valley?
There’s a new and interesting development happening there that could completely transform the entire community and all of Dickey County.

A Dallas company called Applied Digital is in the process of building a data center just south of Ellendale, near the South Dakota state line that is expected to bring as many as 85 new jobs to this community of 1,000 and use a whopping 100 megawatts of electricity to power the facility.

There are two issues with this, housing and power, and apparently both are being addressed.
Recent reports on Fargo TV have indicated that 20 new, pre-fab homes are coming to the area known as Ellendale Acres, because, as you might imagine, there isn’t a lot of available housing in a community of 1,000, with 227 students attending Trinity Bible College with some renting in city limits.

The city of Ellendale built the infrastructure at Ellendale Acres about 15 years ago, thinking it would become a “suburb” of Aberdeen, given its proximity to South Dakota’s third largest city. That didn’t happen, but when Applied Digital made its pitch, one major hurdle was already crossed.

The other issue is power, lots of electrical power. MDU supplies electricity to Ellendale, but it’s unclear at this time if MDU will service Applied Digital.

To give you an idea of the scope of 100 megawatts, that amount of power can generate electricity for 60,000 homes in one day. That’s the equivalent of power for every home in the city of Fargo for one day.
Part of Applied Digital’s business plan is to use renewable energy. There are several wind farms near Ellendale that are expected to produce a lot of the energy needed for this project.

According to the North Dakota Public Service Commission, there are six wind farms close enough with a capacity of 651 megawatts. They include ND Wind I and II near Edgeley, Tatonka in both Dickey and McIntosh counties, Foxtail Wind Energy in Dickey County, Emmons/Logan Wind Energy and Merricourt Wind Power Project in Dickey and McIntosh counties.
Two pending wind farms include Just Wind in Logan County and Dickey County Wind Farm near Ellendale. If and when they come to fruition, that would be an additional 418 megawatts of electricity.

So what is Applied Digital? According to a company press release from October 2023 announcing the groundbreaking, it’s a designer, builder and operator of next-generation digital infrastructure designed for high-performance computing applications.

The Ellendale facility is designed and purpose-built for artificial intelligence workloads such as generative AI, natural language processing and machine learning. The facility is a gargantuan 342,000-square-foot building.
The Ellendale facility is said to be the first of its kind to meet the demand of evolving AI and high performance computing.
Fully operational, the employees who work in this facility will completely transform the state of the economy of downtown Ellendale. After years of businesses slowly closing their doors and the school getting smaller because of shrinking population, it is expected to be a major shot in the arm.

But as anyone in a small, North Dakota community knows, it’s hard to find enough employees locally to fill jobs, so it’s anticipated that some of the employees will come from nearby Oakes, Fullerton, Edgeley, Ashley, Aberdeen and even Jamestown.

Applied Digital hasn’t specified what kind of payroll it will have, but did indicate some of the positions will be high-level information technology professionals most likely from Dallas and elsewhere.

The housing project, meanwhile, is the first to use North Dakota’s R-WISH program (Rural Workforce Initiative to Support Housing), a program designed for rapidly growing communities and is a partnership between the Bank of North Dakota through Starion Bank and Applied Digital.

There’s already talk on Ellendale’s Main Street about new businesses coming to town and the school making room for additional students because of Applied Digital’s intent. However, many other local residents are approaching this with cautious optimism.