Dickey County, North Dakota

County ranked by announced AI data-center load

400 MW Announced AI load

Campuses

Lead operator

Applied Digital

Resi rate Δ (Otter Tail Power)

+9.3%

Home price Δ (3y)

n/a

Property tax Δ (3y)

-1.3%

Population (2024 ACS)

4,935

Median HH income (2024 ACS)

$68,654

Key takeaways

Dickey County has 4,959 residents and a $63,125 median household income. Applied Digital's 400 MW Ellendale Polaris Forge 1 campus translates to roughly 81 kW of AI compute per resident, the highest per-capita ratio of any county in this batch.Source: Census ACS 2023 B01003, B19013 (FIPS 38021) + data/sites/data_centers.csv (Ellendale Polaris Forge 1)
Ellendale itself is 1,125 residents and was platted in 1882 as a stop on the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad. CoreWeave's 250 MW lease at Polaris Forge 1 is now the anchor tenant on the only US AI campus built primarily for HPC training in a town this small.Source: sources[0] (Wikipedia: Ellendale, ND) + data/sites/data_centers.csv (Ellendale Polaris Forge 1)
Property tax assessments fell 1.3% over three years, the only county in this batch where assessments actually dropped. Otter Tail Power's North Dakota residential rate is up 9.3% on the same baseline.Source: data/cache/property_tax_yoy.csv (FIPS 38021) + data/cache/utility_rate_yoy.csv (Otter Tail Power Co, ND)
Median home value is $167,100, the lowest of any AI county in this batch, and 27.1% of adults 25 and older hold a bachelor's degree. Zillow has no 3-year typical-home-value series here, so any home-price spillover from the AI build will not surface in the standard data feed.Source: Census ACS 2023 B25077, B15003 + data/cache/realestate_yoy.csv (no FIPS 38021 row)

Dickey County has 4,959 residents but only 1,953 housing units. The CoreWeave-anchored Ellendale Polaris Forge 1 campus will draw construction and operations workers into a county with roughly 2,000 doors total, including the rental stock.Source: Census ACS 2023 B25003 (FIPS 38021)
92.7% of Dickey residents are white, 3.9% Hispanic, 1.1% Asian, and 0.3% Black, with just 14 Black residents in the 2023 ACS sample. Applied Digital is opening the most racially homogeneous AI host county in the entire dataset.Source: Census ACS 2023 B02001, B03003 (FIPS 38021)
Unemployment is 2.9% and 13.4% of Dickey workers are in manufacturing. Cavalier Specialty Vehicles in Ellendale and the regional grain processors already absorb the working-age labor pool, so Polaris Forge 1 will largely run on commute-in or housed-in workers.Source: Census ACS 2023 B23025, C24050 (FIPS 38021)
Only 81.7% of Dickey households have a wired broadband subscription. The 400 MW CoreWeave HPC cluster will train frontier models on a fiber spine that 18% of its host county's residents do not yet plug into at home.Source: Census ACS 2023 B28002 (FIPS 38021)

Ellendale Polaris Forge 1 — Applied Digital/CoreWeave · Ellendale, ND · 400 MW