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.

The tenant

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.

The conversion

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.

The pattern

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 context

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.

MINNEAPOLIS — On February 12, Trump-appointed “border czar” Tom Homan announced the “end” of Operation Metro Surge, during which more than 4,000 federal agents aggressively targeted immigrant communities in the Twin Cities, causing massive chaos throughout the area and killing Renee Good and Alex Pretti. It seemed meaningful that the same day as Homan’s announcement, Minnesota-based interdisciplinary artist Rosy Simas opened A:gajë:gwah dësa’nigöëwë:nye:’ (i hope it will stir your mind) at the Walker Art Center. The contemplative installation slows the viewer down, inviting a soft sense of communion with objects such as salt bottles made from woven corn husks, each hung from a grid on the ceiling in honor of one of Simas’s relatives, and offering a site of peace amid fear and confusion.

The exhibition is inspired by her fifth great-grandfather’s half-brother Handsome Lake (Ganyodaiyo’), who experienced a vision after years of war and began teaching his people about working from the Seneca notion of a “good mind” in the early 1800s. The aforementioned sensory work, on view through July 5, is part of a two-part project, which also includes performances on May 13–16. Simas is most known for her choreography, but she has long explored visual art in tandem with dance, at times mounting installation exhibitions and performances concurrently, as she does with this project. She’s also been gaining national recognition as a visual artist, recently earning a Creative Capital Award for that side of her practice. Here, she discusses her latest endeavor.

Hyperallergic: How has the work changed since January?

Rosy Simas: The installation became more subtle. It was always intended to be a space that didn’t provoke, but maybe evoked. It is a space for people to rest their nervous systems, but also to inhabit a space made by a Haudenosaunee artist reflecting on what it means to try to create from a place of generating peace. I am interested in response, as opposed to reaction.

H: What is your experience of opening an exhibition in the midst of a federal occupation?

RS: When we knew that it was becoming more difficult for people to just exist around here, asking people to gather, that was sort of a no-brainer — that is not something that we can do. This isn’t a “just push through” moment. At the same time, I think having these kinds of spaces is really important during what feels like an oppressive occupation. It’s not even about a safe space. It’s a space where people can be with themselves.

Making work for a museum gallery is really difficult for me, because I like to think of the work as iterative, even within the time that it’s being shared. So for me, it’s difficult to put something up and let it be there until July, because things change.

H: You tend to want to go in there and shift things around?

RS: Yeah, the static nature of exhibitions is really challenging for me. That is part of why we’re doing so many community engagement activities around it, and also why there are two shows. The performance has more of a presentational aspect to it, where there is something being shared that has more dynamic ebb and flow, and it is also intended to draw an audience’s focus into what’s happening with the performers themselves — what they are expressing and what they are sharing.

That’s different from creating an environment for people to be inside of, where they can be with their own individual experience. There’s still something relational being asked of the people who go into the gallery. They’re asked to contemplate what I’ve put forward in terms of materials and what those materials mean. But it’s a little different than performance, where they’re being asked to exist in relationship to the performers.

H: One of the things that I experienced with the exhibition was the different spaces that you move through. You’re being invited to sit or to visit each station in an active way. It seemed almost like it’s choreography for the participant who’s viewing the work.

RS: In Haudenosaunee world, we do everything counterclockwise. There is an invitation to come in, turn to your right, and see the embroidery and the first set of treaty cloth panels. And then to see the salt bottles, the deerskin lace, the treaty panels with the corn husk, and end up back where the language pillar is, where you can feel the vibration of the language — how it feels through a sense of touch, and not just a sense of hearing. Nobody’s telling people to come in and move counterclockwise, but people are invited in that way.  

My work as a body-based moving artist here is an important reference. The corn husk panels are hanging from a grid, and that’s intentional. The grid is made to reflect the way that I think as someone who primarily makes work in a theater setting: The way that the panels hang references how I think about stage design and how we experience performance in space. 

H: On social media, you commented about the need for visibility for Native, BIPOC, and queer voices. Why is creating a space for that presence so important right now? 

RS: Those voices are the ones that are being suppressed in all of this. We have to keep making work. There are people who haven’t been leaving their houses. There were people who became paralyzed and were unable to do their work. I have had serious moments of paralysis, for six to eight hours at a time, and that has been going on since January. And it’s not just because of this recent occupation, but it’s cumulative in many ways. 

H: The space feels sacred. Was that something that you were going for? 

RS: I don’t know that I would use that term, but what your experience of the space and how it feels to you is probably the most important thing to me. 

It’s the same as making the dance work. From the first residency until now, the ideas around the dance work — not the meaning behind it, but the way that it’s presented and the space around it — shift depending on what environment we’re currently living in. And in Minneapolis since January, we’ve been experiencing a very particular environment, and my work happened to be made in that timeframe. I’ve put a lot of thought into creating a space that I think people need right now, in this very time.