Applied Digital breaks ground on HPC facility at Ellendale, ND

Nov. 3—ELLENDALE, N.D. — Applied Digital Corp. has broken ground on its first 100-megawatt high-performance computing facility that will be located about 1 mile west of Ellendale.

The announcement was made Tuesday, Oct. 31, on Applied Digital's website.

The facility is designed and built for artificial intelligence workloads such as generative AI, natural language processing, machine learning, rendering and traditional high-performance computing applications.

"It's truly like an AI brain data center is what I like to call it," said Wes Cummins, CEO and chairman of Applied Digital, which is headquartered in Dallas. "There'll be 80 megawatts of IT (information technology) load but it's designed so that every rack in the building can be within 30 meters of the network core."

Ellendale Mayor Don Flaherty said projects like Applied Digital's new facility help small communities be more relevant. He said the new facility will bring more higher-paying jobs in technology to the community.

"It's going to help strengthen our community because of the potential growth that it can give us as well as continue to help us as a small community to survive," he said. "It's not every day that these types of things come into your backyard."

Applied Digital designs, develops and operates next-generation data centers across North America to provide digital infrastructure solutions to the rapidly growing high-performance computing industry, according to its website.

Flaherty said the new facility will be located immediately north of the current current data center that went online earlier this year.

Applied Digital currently has three data centers online. They are north of Jamestown, near Ellendale and in Garden City, Texas.

Over the next few weeks, Applied Digital will have a total of 486 megawatts online, Cummins said. He said the data center in Garden City is online now and the amount of megawatts online will increase. Once the data center in Texas is finalized, Applied Digital will have 106 megawatts online in Jamestown, 180 in Ellendale and 200 at Garden City.

"What we've talked about on the high-performance computing data centers is building out 300 megawatts over the next 24 months," Cummins said. " ... Now all the new builds are high-performance compute and that's kind of at this point synonymous with AI workloads for generative AI."

The Jamestown location includes a 9-megawatt facility that hosts high-performance computing applications such as natural language processing, machine learning and other high-performance computing applications developments.

The new facility at Ellendale will be a 342,000-square-foot building that will provide ultra-low cost and highly-efficient liquid-cooled infrastructure for high-performance computing applications, according to a press release on Applied Digital's website. The press release says Applied Digital's data center design allows it to accommodate almost 50,000 of NVIDIA's H100 SXM class graphics processing units in a single parallel compute cluster.

"That's not specifically what we're putting there," Cummins said. "We're just giving an example of how much it can host."

Cummins said the new facility is expected to be completed by late 2024 or early 2025.

Century Builders of Fargo is the general contractor for the project. Cummins said other contractors will help as well.

"I think we've said that at any given time, roughly 50 to 200 construction workers during construction," he said. "Then it's going to be somewhere when as we keep building this out, it probably starts somewhere around another 20-plus full-time jobs and then ramps up to 40 to 50 full-time jobs over time."

Flaherty said the high-paying jobs the facility can offer will make a difference to Ellendale's local economy. He also said individuals who will be in the Ellendale area temporarily with construction will help boost its local economy.

"I see short-term and long-term effects because of this," he said.

Flaherty said it's difficult for smaller towns to survive because younger people aren't moving back.

"I really feel like these things are helping Ellendale be positioned in a place to be here 40, 50, 100 years from now," he said. "Not just a ghost town-type of thing but a real thriving community because we are fortunate enough to be able to benefit from the business decisions that other people are making to invest in our community (and) area."

Cummins said he was in Bismarck last December talking about how North Dakota can play a big role in the high-performance computing AI market and how Applied Digital wants to be a part of making that happen. He said North Dakota has a cooler climate, is energy rich, runs a surplus of energy and is a fiber-rich state.

"So optical fiber, which is really important for the style of data center built so you don't need the ultra-low latency for video streaming and for things like Zoom and Teams and all of the stuff that we typically use, but you still need high bandwidth connectivity," Cummins said. "So you need high bandwidth and redundant fiber connectivity and North Dakota has that and so it's set up to be a great location for some of these types of data centers primarily for training. There's kind of two different pieces of the market here — there's inference and there's training and I think North Dakota is a really good place for the training side of this market."