North Dakota county cuts power to construction on crypto mining datacenter

WILLISTON, NED (AP) – Construction of a crypto mining data center in northwest North Dakota will be delayed, after a county commission voted Tuesday to ask a utility company to cut power to the project because of repeated construction delays.

FX Solutions Inc. is building the $1.9 billion center near Williston in Williams County. It will be owned and operated by Atlas Power.

The county commission voted Tuesday to ask the Mountrail-Williams Electric Co-Operative to cut power to phase two the project, KFGO reported.

Commission chairman Cory Hanson said construction leaders missed a June 16 deadline to meet several county stipulations for the project and had not offered any explanation for the delays.

“There are seven stipulations that need to be taken care of and until those are done, I don’t really know what else we can do but leave the power off,” Hanson said.

The project had received previous extensions to complete road work, security, noise mitigation and other basic construction it had promised to complete months ago.

The commission has heard several complaints about noise and documented many zoning violations during the construction, and at previous meetings, county employees reported the crypto mining servers in one section were running without a certificate of occupancy, KFGO reported.

In early June, Rick Tabish, president of FX Solutions, said the companies were ahead of schedule to complete the required work within the 45 days set by the commission on May 2.

The commission also voted to place a six-month moratorium on any new crypto datacenters, to give the county planning and zoning department time to update ordinances in response to delays with the project.

When Gov. Doug Burgum announced the project in January 2022, he said it would be one of the largest data centers in the world as North Dakota tries to become a hub for high-performance computing, including cryptocurrency mining.

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