Minnesota is seeing a wave of large data center proposals tied to cloud and AI growth, and many are being negotiated under NDAs, code names, and front companies.
Meta’s Rosemount facility set a pattern for secrecy that other hyperscale and Fortune 50 buyers now copy, shielding details on end users, workloads, and design until late in the approval process.
This opacity is colliding with local concerns around power use, water consumption, land use changes, and grid impact, triggering lawsuits, protests, and organized citizen opposition in places like Hermantown.
Cities and counties often justify NDAs as necessary to stay competitive for tax base and construction jobs, but it’s also creating mistrust and political blowback that could slow or derail AI data center siting.
Some jurisdictions, like Chaska, are refusing NDAs on transparency grounds yet still advancing massive projects, suggesting secrecy is more about developer leverage than absolute necessity.
A few developers are also moving away from NDAs after seeing the reputational damage, hinting at a split in market practice between hyper-secret hyperscale builds and more open power-and-land developers.
For anyone tracking AI infrastructure build-out, this piece is useful for understanding how NDA-driven siting battles will shape where and how the next wave of GPU-heavy data centers actually get built.
Source: Minnesota Data Center Approvals Happening With Secrecy
