‘Like being hit between the eyes with a sledgehammer’: Meet the one town in America that defied election trends and voted in favor of data centers

Residents of Harwood, North Dakota voted down a measure that would have slowed industrial development, including AI data centers, bucking a national trend of local opposition. The vote clears a path for projects in the small town near Fargo as data center demand surges. The result matters because local permitting has become a major hurdle for developers racing to build computing capacity.