LISTEN: Mayors of Fargo, Harwood spar over $3B AI data center project

August 29, 2025

KVRR Staff,

Mahoney Hankey — (L) Fargo Mayor Tim Mahoney, (R) Harwood Mayor Blake Hankey

FARGO (KVRR-KFGO) – Mahoney says Applied Digital Corporation first approached Fargo about its plan to build a multi-billion dollar artificial intelligence data center and the city was working behind the scenes to accommodate the company’s needs. At some point, Mahoney says that all changed.

“We had a great discussion,” Mahoney said. “‘(Applied Digital said) we’re going to come in. Here’s what we’re going to do…’ Everything was good. Next meeting we have, they switched and they were going to go into Harwood’s jurisdiction. What they said to us is, ‘hey, we don’t like the building fees, and we don’t like your franchise fee. But Harwood doesn’t have a franchise fee, so we can go in there and then we don’t have to use their building inspectors or anything else.’ So, it’s kind of like – wait, wait, wait, wait. We had a good discussion about what we were going to do, and we were working with Harwood on the project.”

Fargo is now attempting to annex land near Harwood for the plant. The Dallas-based company says it will fight that.

Mahoney says Fargo met with Harwood mayor Blake Hankey, hoping to work something out. Hankey, on KFGO News and Views with Mahoney, said Fargo should stay out of it.

“Why does Fargo care,” Hankey asked. “It’s up to us to figure out. We’ve been working with Applied Digital. It’s been fairly short. We have a great engineer in Moore Engineering. We have good legal council. It’s our problem to figure out and deal with.”

Hankey says Fargo withdrew an offer to give the tax benefits to his city and the company objects to paying Fargo’s franchise fee on utilities.

Mahoney argues that Harwood doesn’t have the services Fargo could provide to the AI factory, including fire and police protection.

Harwood is preparing to change the zoning for land that Applied Digital plans to acquire for the plant.

Applied Digital says “Polaris Forge 2” would bring 200 jobs to Harwood in addition to 700 construction jobs. The company intends to begin work this fall.