August 31, 2025 | Mark Luis Foster

We’ve all been hearing about the rapid expansion of new data centers across the country, including those being proposed right here in Minnesota. As our data, A.I. and storage demands increase, companies like Meta and Amazon need to build giant behemoths to house all of it, and it’s coming at a price. We recently blogged about one such data center issue that affected an HOA here.  There are other examples of HOAs being in the shadow of these centers as well.

Some of these builds are ending up in court due to environmental concerns. Over the holiday weekend we learned that the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy (MCEA), which describes itself as a “nonprofit environmental law organization,” has now filed lawsuits against two Minnesota cities, which recently approved new data center proposals without adequately studying the potential impacts the facilities could have on Minnesota’s water and energy resources, according to the MCEA press release.

The lawsuits are the first in Minnesota to challenge the environmental review of data centers. They seek to halt both cities’ data center proposals until they complete legally required, full environmental review. The suits were filed in Minnesota’s 1st and 5th district courts challenging approvals by Lakeville and North Mankato as well as the two development companies seeking to build data centers in the cities.

Data centers use a tremendous amount of water, minerals and energy, not to mention the land use via the giant footprint necessary to house all the equipment that stores our photos and generates A.I. Apparently the project descriptions themselves are left quite vague and don’t mention data center in the text. That’s a concerning twist.

The lack of specificity makes it difficult for residents to figure out what is proposed to be built, let alone what its potential risks and benefits might be for their communities. The cities’ environmental review processes also neglected to examine some of the most common and significant environmental impacts associated with the burgeoning data center industry, including large electricity demand that may put Minnesota’s clean energy goals at risk, and high usage of already-stressed groundwater resources.

At issue is something known as an AUAR, an Alternative Urban Areawide Review, which is supposed to require a study of direct and indirect environmental impacts related to construction and operation of data centers. But in Lakeville and North Mankato, the AUAR did not appropriately address the issues.

In both Lakeville and North Mankato, an environmental review process called an Alternative Urban Areawide Review (AUAR) was used to skirt adequate environmental review and advance each city’s respective data center proposal. Public records show that North Mankato, for example, described the project to residents engaged in the environmental review process as vague and speculative — even while actively planning for a data center.

Vagueness seems to be the central theme here.

AUARs for “large specific projects” are required by law to include “clear, complete and detailed project descriptions.” They are also required to study any direct, indirect and cumulative environmental impacts that are anticipated in an AUAR study area from the proposed project. Lakeville and North Mankato violated state law on both accounts through vague project descriptions and failing to study the direct, indirect, and cumulative impacts on water resources and air pollution.

You can read the MCEA news release HERE.