Polaris Forge 1 AI Data Center Campus, Ellendale, North Dakota

Polaris Forge 1 is a hyperscale AI campus in a town of about 1,100 people. Applied Digital is building the 400-megawatt, three-building data center campus outside Ellendale, N.D., for CoreWeave, and on Nov. 9, 2026, ENR named it the Best Project for safety in its 2026 Midwest Best Projects awards. Gensler is the lead design firm and McGough Construction is the general contractor.

The numbers behind the safety award are big. Crews logged more than 2.6 million work hours while structural, mechanical, electrical and utility work ran at the same time across an active 100 MW campus, and they kept going through North Dakota winters.

Project Scope

Applied Digital broke ground on the first building in late 2023, before it had a tenant. CoreWeave then signed two leases of roughly 15 years each, one for 250 MW in May 2025 and another for 150 MW that August, bringing the campus to the full 400 MW. Building 1 reached its 100 MW ready-for-service mark in November 2025. Applied Digital has since announced delivery of a second building, and the third is targeted for the first half of 2027.

The cooling plant is air-cooled chillers on the roof, not evaporative towers, a choice that makes sense on the northern plains. What stands out on the construction side is how much of the mechanical work never happened in the field. Major systems were fabricated, assembled, inspected and tested in an offsite manufacturing facility, then shipped as installation-ready modules containing piping, pumps, heat exchangers, ductwork and controls. That pulled a lot of the riskiest work, including overhead piping and heavy rigging, off the site.

Why It Matters

Rural AI campuses are now a template. Cheap land, available power and cold air are the draw. A thin local labor pool, long hauls and weather are the price. Polaris Forge 1 shows the answer is mostly logistics: build the complicated stuff in a factory where it’s warm and the lighting’s good, then truck it in.

It’s also a useful counterweight to the idea that speed and safety pull against each other. The team ran an accelerated schedule on an energized campus with tenants moving in, and still won a safety award judged by peers. Other developers chasing 2027 power dates will copy the modular playbook, and they’d be smart to copy the safety planning that came with it.

Project Team & Details