As the Artificial Intelligence craze grows, experts in the data center field say businesses are looking at South Dakota to build.
At a Downtown Sioux Falls Rotary meeting, the topic was how South Dakota fits into the puzzle.
Ryan Punt is the CEO of SDN Communications. He said no matter how people feel about data centers, they are looking at the state for many reasons.
"Those other site selectors that are looking around our state, the private equity, the venture capitalists that are also looking around our state, it’s all based on where power’s available. Is there stranded power? Stranded power on wind farms. That doesn’t need a long transmission that it can power that data center," Punt said. "And then obviously our climate. Power and climate are by far the ones that are taking everything now. And then I would say, yes, definitely South Dakota’s been very, very good from a business climate perspective. We continue to be good in a business climate perspective and therefore we’re really easy to work with."
Though, a proposed data center in Deuel County said without a sales tax incentive for the projects, South Dakota is behind the 8-ball on attracting the centers. Officials with Applied Digital say without such legislation, it would cost them around $400 million more to build here than in North Dakota.
However, many are concerned with the long-term effects data centers could have on climate change due to their high energy usage.
Scott Sandal is the Vice President of Data Center Infrastructure Management at Sunbird Software. He said as data centers begin to grow…
“We’re getting much more scrutiny as an industry that we have to take these challenges truly into account and say, ‘What is our solution for being maybe bad policy, or bad practices or bad processes in the past? How do we correct those? And what are the metrics we need to measure against?’” Sandal asked. “Again, a very basic example [we look at] is of the servers I buy, how friendly are they to the environment when they’re created? Is it just created from whatever materials are available? Or is there thought put into the creation and the sustainability of those devices in terms of how they got to me, where they came from, what materials go into them. That’s all stuff that needs to be taken into account.”
He added there are more layers the industry is looking into, such as regulating when and how certain types of energy are being utilized to approach more energy efficiency.
