Expert: Montana Is a Great Place for Data Centers

"Montana would be ideal for these facilities due to the state’s weather, power potential, location and available land"

President Donald Trump announced last week that America will invest $500 billion to build the infrastructure needed for artificial intelligence.

Under the Stargate project, 10 data centers will be built in Texas. In the future, it may increase to 20, according to Construction Dive. Each one of these facilities will be 500,000 square feet.

Tanner Avery, director of The Center for New Frontiers at the Frontier Institute, told The Montana Chronicles that when companies build data centers, they look at how they will get their power.

 ”There is this new trend called ‘Bring Your Own Power,’ which means that if these people want to run data centers, they're going to have to invest in infrastructure to generate power. That's a big trend. And so they're going to places in which they can do that.”

Avery said a data center is “a facility packed full of computers that is facilitating certain functions.”

According to Amazon Web Services, data centers contain “the computing infrastructure that IT systems require, such as servers, data storage drives, and network equipment.”

“ It's really the backbone that makes the 21st-century economy possible,” he said.

Before Trump took office, he secured a $20 billion investment from DAMAC Properties to build data centers in Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, Ohio, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan and Indiana.

According to McKinsey & Company, “global demand for data center capacity could rise at an annual rate of between 19 and 22 percent from 2023 to 2030.”

“More and more data centers move onto the periphery of cities and out into places like the Midwest and, hopefully someday, Montana as well,” Avery said.

Due to the future need for data centers, Avery said Montana would be a “great place for data centers.” Currently, the state has nine of them.

Avery said Montana would be ideal for these facilities due to the state’s weather, power potential, location and available land.

He said Montana has “a cool climate with low humidity,  which is great for operating data centers.”

Another thing that makes Montana ideal for data centers is the lack of natural disasters.

“If you're planning a very expensive facility, you're going to go somewhere where there aren't many natural disasters you don't need to worry about. The most we have here is going to be tornadoes,” Avery said.

According to KRTV, Montana gets around 12 tornadoes a year, but they tend to be small and occur in underpopulated areas of the state.

Furthermore, Avery described Montana’s location as “strategic” for data centers.

“ A lot of these data centers have been on the coasts. They're starting to move more inward because of the cost of energy. Montana is on a major thoroughfare for fiber optic, which means that we have some good things that we can tap into to get to both the east coast [and] the west coast,” he added.

Montana has “abundant energy potential,” Avery told The Chronicles, but the state needs to have a demand for that.

He said Montana has “a lot of energy that can be used” for data centers.

“ What we can do is if there is greater demand, whether it's data centers or something else. We have the ability to supply that, but we need to bring that demand here,” he said. “And if we do, we'll be able to export Montana energy through the web across the world, which is a huge deal.”

 ”If we can boost demand for Montana energy, it's a major boom to our economy,” Avery explained. “ We are energy abundant. We just need somewhere to go with it.”

If Montana were to get more data centers, it would allow for a “homegrown supply chain,” according to Avery.

“One of the big reasons why manufacturing, especially for computer chips, moved to China and Taiwan was to be close to the supply chain,” he said. “Montana is lucky enough to have the energy and the critical minerals that make data centers possible. So bringing that here will also bring hopefully manufacturing jobs as well.”

Data centers require a lot of electricity. The Department of Energy estimates that by 2028, they will use between 7 and 12 percent of America’s electrical grid.

According to Avery, Montana has a lot of the minerals that are needed to run data centers.

Copper is one of the main earth minerals used to run these facilities.

Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Montana and Michigan make up 99 percent of America’s domestic copper production, the EPA says.

In addition to energy potential, Montana has a lot of land available for companies to build their data centers on.

“Montana’s large geographic size provides ample opportunity for affordable land within reasonable distances of fiber and abundant power,” Avery’s report on data centers in Montana said.

However, one of the things that may prevent more data centers from coming to Montana is regulations.

Avery said that if the state wants to attract data centers, it must “create a policy framework that gives data centers much-needed regulatory clarity.”

“This ranges from clarifying [Montana Environmental Policy Act] all the way to clarifying how Montana will regulate these cutting edge computational tools made possible by data centers,” he told The Chronicles.

This act, also known as MEPA, is a clause in the Montana Constitution that says the “state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.”

The Montana Supreme Court uses this clause frequently to decide environmental cases.

Last month, the Montana Supreme Court ruled in favor of the 16 youth plaintiffs who had sued Montana in 2020 “over its promotion of fossil fuel extraction and its failure to consider climate change impacts in its decision-making,” according to Our Children’s Trust.

Avery said that any projects going through MEPA will have “a huge hurdle” to get through.

During the Montana Legislative session, numerous bills were introduced to reform MEPA.

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Zachery Schmidt is the founder of The Montana Chronicles. If you have any tips, please send them to montanachronicles@proton.me.