Cardi B praised Minneapolis for standing up to ICE.
During her Thursday show at Minneapolis, Minnesota’s Target Center venue, the Bronx hitmaker levitated above the crowd on a swing as she applauded them.
“Minneapolis, you are such a strong city. I’ve been seeing what’s going on in the news, and we wanna say thank you for your for your resilience, for your resistance,” she said to the sold-out crowd.
“I don’t know why those motherfuckers came to this state. Y’all n***as is not pussy. I don’t know why they came over here. They must not know how y’all give it up.”
Bardi has been openly critical of ICE’s immigration tactics, most recently slamming the federal agency around the start of her Little Miss Drama Tour. On the opening night of her trek in Palm Desert, she shouted out her Mexican fans and issued a warning to ICE.
“Mexicans in the building?” she said as her audience roared. “Bitch, if ICE come in here we gonna jump they asses. Bitch, I got some bear mace in the back. They ain’t taking my fans, bitch.”
When Homeland Security caught wind of her comments, the agency clapped back at her, dragging her for her past as an exotic dancer. “As long as she doesn’t drug and rob our agents, we’ll consider that an improvement over her past behavior,” the organization tweeted.
Minneapolis became a fierce adversary of ICE as more and more agents popped up in the city to deport whomever they deemed to be “illegal” immigrants. In late January, during subzero temperatures and following the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, thousands took to the streets to protest ICE’s presence in the city.
Frey, Klobuchar condemn ICE presence in Minnesota after shooting
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar called for ICE to leave Minneapolis after another fatal shooting.
After eight years as the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey has a well-tested recipe for his State of the City speech.
Start with a healthy base of events that tested the city in the past year, but also drew out its strengths. Next, mix in updates about pet projects – Stable Homes Stable Schools, efforts to end exclusionary zoning, an uptick in police recruitment numbers – before sprinkling with some shout-outs to local businesses. Finally, add in the secret ingredient: the applause line about the Timberwolves.
Tuesday morning’s State of the City speech – the first of Frey’s third term – had all of that. But there was a little more bite than usual to the optimism that often shines through the annual address.
The mayor, who has taken some heat locally for his national notoriety, said that local government leaders needed to refocus on their core responsibilities before the city’s strong standing takes a downward trajectory, referencing discord between his administration and the Minneapolis City Council, though never saying exactly where he’d assign the blame.
“We tried to do everything – things that aren’t always a local government’s job – and in the process we didn’t always do the most important things well enough,” Frey said. “We’ve spent time debating things that are not the most critical parts of our job.”
Those critical parts, Frey said, start with public safety. He cited the police response to the Annunciation shooting and 911 operators’ work during Operation Metro Surge as core reasons to invest in public safety before proudly sharing that in 2025, 2,328 people had applied to become officers with the Minneapolis Police Department.
He also focused on some ground-level efforts, including the now-completed backlog of streetlight replacements and the upcoming implementation of the Community Safety Ambassador program in Uptown.
Not directly mentioned was his controversial veto of a Council ordinance that would have decriminalized the possession of drug paraphernalia. Supporters say the ordinance would’ve aligned the city with Minnesota state law and the principles of harm reduction – the idea that reducing the negative consequences of illegal drug use is an effective way to get users on a path to recovery.
“Continued open (drug) use on our streets is devastating: for residents, for families, and for businesses, large and small,” Frey said in his speech. “Compassion matters but it doesn’t mean anything goes.”
Switching to affordable housing, the mayor praised the transformation of commercial spaces into housing, citing examples like Opportunity Crossing and Groove Lofts. He also pushed for the city to cut the red tape keeping more properties from being built, including controversial accessory dwelling units.
The speech also marked a change in his rhetoric on one specific topic: Minneapolis’ return to office work, especially downtown.
In his 2023 speech, he said he didn’t really “get” remote or hybrid work, though he understood the appeal of “sweatpants on Mondays” and encouraged a commitment to in-person work in downtown Tuesday through Thursday.
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” he said, “to have everyone back downtown for three whole days each week?”
He was a little more blunt in 2024, expressing growing concern from “residents having to pick up the tab because less taxes are generated from downtown buildings.”
Last year, he noted that “nearly 70% of downtown workers are back at least once a week – by the way, please keep it coming.”
In Tuesday’s speech, though? A note that COVID-19 had “expedited a necessary transition away from full-time, in-person work” and a push for businesses to consider changes to how they use their buildings.
“If you’re willing to invest in a big vision for a building where the basis has been lowered, come talk to us,” said Frey, calling out the use of tax increment financing to support redevelopment. “If you’ve got one gigantic retail space on Nicollet Mall, and you want to change it to a bunch of smaller ones, come talk to us.”
As he closed, he made another call for city leaders to get serious about results, foreshadowing a challenging budget process ahead and “hard conversations” about programs and investments that weren’t delivering for residents.
Council president Elliott Payne (Ward 1), vice-president Jamal Osman (Ward 6) and member Robin Wonsley (Ward 2) spoke briefly with press after the speech, expressing a general appreciation for Frey’s remarks and a hope that they could collaborate.
“Governance is not an individual sport,” Payne said. “We govern collectively and we move our city forward together. And so we’re looking forward to a four year term where we have deeper collaboration with the mayor and can actually advance a working class agenda that really puts the people first.”
Wonsley called for additional revenue options to reduce the burden of property taxes on residents, saying that things like income taxes or taxes on empty homes could raise millions “so that we can make sure we’re preserving the programs that actually help our residents have a good quality of life.”
And asked about the recent vetoes, Payne said he was open to discussions about solutions that could make it past the mayor’s desk.
“We would like the mayor to set his veto pen down and meet me at the whiteboard so that we can actually come up with the solutions to a lot of those intractable problems,” he said.
Core42, the cloud subsidiary of Abu Dhabi’s G42 Group, has leased 20 megawatts in a converted office building in downtown Minneapolis. The company building the Stargate UAE campus is now filling American offices-turned-data-centres, part of a broader pattern in which the same AI systems emptying offices are generating the demand to fill them with servers.
TL;DR
The building at 1001 Third Avenue South in downtown Minneapolis used to be an office. Now it is a data centre, and its anchor tenant is not a Silicon Valley hyperscaler but Core42, the cloud and AI infrastructure subsidiary of Abu Dhabi’s G42 Group. The lease, reported by Bloomberg on Wednesday, covers 20 megawatts of capacity in a facility converted from commercial office space by Legacy Investing, a Virginia-based developer that has spent more than 70 million dollars transforming the property. The deal is a small piece of a much larger pattern: the UAE’s most ambitious AI company is building a network of American data centres while simultaneously constructing the largest AI compute facility outside the United States, and the buildings it is filling were, until recently, home to the kind of white-collar workers whose jobs AI is designed to replace.
G42, led by CEO Peng Xiao and backed by Abu Dhabi’s national security adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, has become the UAE’s principal vehicle for AI infrastructure investment. The company is building the Stargate UAE campus, the international flagship of the 500 billion dollar Stargate joint venture between OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and Abu Dhabi sovereign investment vehicle MGX, across approximately 19 square kilometres of desert south of Abu Dhabi. The first phase, a 200 megawatt compute cluster powered by Nvidia Grace Blackwell GB300 systems, is scheduled to come online by the end of 2026, with full build-out designed to reach one gigawatt of capacity at a projected cost exceeding 30 billion dollars. The project has already attracted geopolitical threats, with Iran warning of retaliatory strikes against Gulf infrastructure including commercial data centres.
Core42’s US expansion extends well beyond Minneapolis. The company signed a ten-year lease with TeraWulf for more than 70 megawatts of data centre infrastructure at the Lake Mariner facility in upstate New York, with an option for an additional 135 megawatts. G42 has also announced a one billion dollar data centre investment in Vietnam and established Core42’s European headquarters in Dublin. The Minneapolis lease adds a relatively modest 20 megawatts to a portfolio that is scaling globally, but its significance lies less in the capacity than in the location: a converted office building in the centre of an American city whose downtown vacancy rate, like those of most mid-sized US cities, has climbed steadily since the pandemic.
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Legacy Investing acquired 1001 Third Avenue South in 2019 and has since invested heavily in converting the six-storey property from office to data centre use. The company spent more than 70 million dollars on improvements in 2025 alone, expanding the building’s capacity from approximately two megawatts to 21 megawatts. In January 2026, Cloud Capital and Bahrain-based asset manager Arcapita acquired the property for 235 million dollars through a joint venture, reflecting the premium that data centre conversions now command over traditional office valuations.
The economics of office-to-data-centre conversion have become compelling enough to reshape urban real estate markets. US utilities plan to spend 1.4 trillion dollars by 2030 to power the AI boom, and the demand for data centre capacity has outstripped the supply of purpose-built facilities. Converting existing office buildings offers developers a faster path to market than ground-up construction, provided the building’s structural load capacity, power infrastructure, and cooling systems can be upgraded to support the density of modern compute hardware. Not every office qualifies. The buildings that do, typically those with reinforced concrete construction, proximity to fibre networks, and access to sufficient electrical capacity, have become some of the most sought-after properties in commercial real estate.
G42’s American data centre strategy reflects a broader shift in how sovereign AI ambitions are materialising in the United States. The company is not simply building compute capacity abroad. It is establishing a physical presence inside the American power grid, the American fibre network, and American commercial real estate markets. The Minneapolis lease, the TeraWulf deal in New York, and facilities in California and Texas create a distributed infrastructure footprint that positions Core42 as a provider of what the company calls sovereign cloud and AI infrastructure: compute capacity that can serve both G42’s own AI workloads and those of its customers, including the US-based companies that require data residency within American borders.
The race to secure data centre capacity has drawn startups, sovereign wealth funds, and hyperscalers into direct competition for the same constrained resources: power, land, cooling, and fibre connectivity. In Minneapolis, Legacy Investing’s conversion of an office building into a 21 megawatt facility illustrates how developers are working around those constraints by repurposing existing urban infrastructure rather than competing for greenfield sites in the exurban corridors where most large-scale data centres are built. The approach has limits. Twenty megawatts is a fraction of the capacity that a purpose-built hyperscale facility delivers, and the structural constraints of an existing building make future expansion difficult. But for a tenant like Core42, which needs distributed US presence rather than concentrated scale, the urban conversion model offers something that a greenfield campus in rural Virginia does not: proximity to enterprise customers and the network interconnection density of a major metropolitan area.
The geopolitics of UAE-linked AI infrastructure in the United States remain sensitive. G42 severed its ties with Chinese technology companies in 2024 under pressure from the US government, a prerequisite for receiving access to advanced American AI chips. Microsoft invested 1.5 billion dollars in G42 as part of that realignment, and the company has since positioned itself as a bridge between American AI technology and Gulf capital. OpenAI’s decision to pause its Stargate UK project over energy costs and regulatory concerns has made the UAE’s willingness to build at scale and speed more strategically valuable, and G42’s ability to secure chip imports for the Stargate UAE campus has been treated by the US government as a test case for whether AI infrastructure can be deployed in allied nations without compromising national security.
The financial dynamics of AI infrastructure investment have produced valuations and capital commitments that would have been inconceivable five years ago. Oracle’s stock fell 50 per cent despite a Wall Street buy consensus as concentration risk from its OpenAI dependency spooked investors. Alphabet raised its full-year 2026 capex estimate to between 180 and 190 billion dollars. The International Energy Agency predicts that energy use from data centres will double by the end of 2026. Into this environment, a 20 megawatt lease in a converted Minneapolis office building registers as a footnote. But the tenant signing the lease is the company building the largest AI compute facility outside the United States, and the building it is moving into is one of hundreds of American offices being repurposed to house the infrastructure that is making the offices themselves obsolete. The conversion is not just architectural. It is economic. The same AI systems that emptied the office are now filling it with servers.
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