Yes, Big Tech should pay its own way on powering data centers

While other states scramble to protect families from the cost of the data center boom, Minnesota saw it coming and set the standard first. 

In 2025, the Legislature passed one of the strongest data center laws in the country, and Gov. Tim Walz signed it. The law puts the largest electricity users in a class of their own and makes them pay the full cost of the power and infrastructure built to serve them. If one of these companies shrinks or walks away, the bill for that stranded equipment stays off your monthly statement.

Every kilowatt these facilities draw has to meet the state’s carbon-free standard, and each large campus pays millions a year into weatherization for families who need the help. Minnesota built a fence around the ratepayer before a single server arrived.

I lead the building trades across Minnesota, and the men and women I represent have watched this debate up close. 

We live in these communities and raise our families here, drinking the same water and paying the same power bills as our neighbors. Labor settled its position on data centers at the AFL-CIO convention in Minneapolis, where delegates for more than 15 million workers backed these projects as critical infrastructure and demanded strong labor and environmental standards, with real accountability to the towns that host them. 

Minnesota already wrote that deal into law, and business and labor alike want to keep it.

That is why the Pine Island proposal deserves a fair hearing rather than a slow death by delay. Google would anchor a data center campus in Goodhue County, tied to an Xcel Energy plan to add 1,900 megawatts of new generation. Under the rules Minnesota wrote, Google pays for the power and the infrastructure its campus needs, and the families nearby pay nothing for the privilege of hosting it. This is the law working as designed, on the first real test of its kind.

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Google has met the environmental bar, too. The company has committed to replenish more water than it consumes across its data centers by 2030, and it publishes its water use for anyone to check. In Minnesota, that promise funds the restoration of 84 acres of floodplain forest along the Zumbro River. Google turns to air cooling where a local watershed runs low, sparing the supply nearby communities depend on. A host town should demand these commitments, and Minnesota is right to nail them down in writing before anyone breaks ground.

The reward for Goodhue County lands close to home. The campus would draw billions in private investment, and because state law requires prevailing wage on the build, it would put union tradespeople to work where they live. These are the family-sustaining careers that have carried earlier generations from a registered apprenticeship into the middle class, and we should be widening that path for the workers coming up behind us. 

The campus would also hand the county property tax revenue for classrooms and the services rural Minnesota scrapes to fund year after year. In Iowa, Google has spent the better part of two decades and billions of dollars building data centers, and Minnesota can win that same investment without lowering the standards it already set.

A real review belongs in this process, and so do firm conditions, but it cannot run on with no end in sight. 

On May 22, a Goodhue County district judge halted the planned July groundbreaking after the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy challenged the city’s environmental review. The Court of Appeals reached a similar result weeks later in a Faribault case, and the same group has filed challenges in a string of other Minnesota towns. The questions about water and power are fair, and they deserve real answers. A review that stretches on with no deadline makes the same families the law set out to protect pay for the delay.

Illinois shows the cost of hesitation. For years, the state drew data centers with tax incentives, and those deals came with labor agreements that put union crews on the job. This summer, the governor paused new incentives after lawmakers deadlocked over the terms, and Illinois labor leaders warned the freeze would ship billions in investment and thousands of union jobs to Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio — states on the same grid that will land those projects anyway, just without Illinois workers on them. Companies build in the next state over, and no one can blame them. Investment follows a clear answer, and it leaves when the answer never comes.

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Minnesota does not have to repeat that blunder. The state already did the hard part when it wrote rules that guard ratepayers and demand responsible water use. 

If these projects are coming, and they are, we should want Minnesota workers building them here, under the standards this state already set on some of the cleanest and most reliable power in the country. Minnesota should press Google with every tough question and put each condition on paper before it makes the call. 

Goodhue County has waited long enough to learn whether the jobs and the tax dollars are coming. The families there earned a straight answer, and Minnesota wrote the law that lets their leaders give one. 

Dan McConnell is the president of the Minnesota State Building and Construction Trades Council.

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