Project Fighting Pike data center, Williston, North Dakota

Project Fighting Pike, the proposed data center campus of 455 megawatts that Critical Data House plans at the northern entrance to Williston, North Dakota, is not expected to open until late 2028 or early 2029, because the company still does not hold clear title to the land, the Williston Herald reported on September 17, 2026. The Williston project in Williams County was filed as seven 65MW buildings on a 300-acre site at the corner of 56th Street NW and US Highway 2.

City documents describe buildings of 275,000 to 500,000 square feet, cooled by a closed-loop system with direct-to-chip liquid cooling, built in three phases over ten years with two buildings in the first. Critical Data House could invest as much as $5 billion in the buildings, with another $5 billion possible on computer hardware. The Williston City Commission approved the plans in March 2025, requiring noise mitigation to be in place before operation and maintained for a year after, with a third-party consultant working on it. "Hopefully we spent the time on it and got it right," Mayor Howard Klug said then.

The land is the problem. Over 1,100 people, mainly from Malaysia and Singapore, invested $18 million in a 322-acre planned community on the lot southwest of U.S. Highway 2 and the U.S. 85 Bypass, then abandoned it when demand for oil workers fell and Williston's population declined. After the city approved the subdivision plat on March 25, 2025, the company learned it had to serve each of those investors under the Hague Conventions, an international legal process that is still going on. CEO Chris Hardin told the Herald that if a pending decision allows notice to be served through newspapers in Malaysia and Singapore and the title arrives around January 2027, the campus could run between October 2028 and January 2029, on a 20 to 24 month build; the company had once said it would be operating by January 2027. He said five to seven companies were in talks to use the facility but that nondisclosure agreements kept him from naming them. Dale Haugen, the former Mountrail-Williams Electric Cooperative general manager who represents Williston on the project, said he wanted the abandoned lot cleaned up: "This is the entrance to our community that I worked with and love."

The worry in Williston is noise, because the city has lived with it. Residents near the Atlas Power data center sued in 2023, saying its noise hurt their property values and quality of life, and settlements, whose terms are confidential, were going out to them in March 2026 while the facility kept running. Atlas's power use also strained the grid and contributed to higher energy costs, the North Dakota Monitor reported. Protesters gathered near Harmon Park in May 2026 over what they saw as a lack of transparency about the project's environmental and economic safeguards and its delays. Haugen said the planning documents gave thorough assurances and that there had been no way to tell the public about the delays before the Herald interview; the company says it will start a website for updates and hold more public meetings. Hardin said Fighting Pike would not mine cryptocurrency: "The Atlas situation is truly a Bitcoin facility. It's not a data center."

Williams County has more tracked data center facilities than any other county in the state, ten, nine of them not yet running, Valley News Live reported in August 2026. Atlas Power's facility near Williston is one that is already operating. Nixxy has also announced the Nakota campus of up to 1GW in what it calls North Dakota's energy corridor. At least four western North Dakota counties have put temporary bans on data center projects, though some have since lifted them, and the only permit a developer needs in the state is from local government.

The next step is a legal one, not at City Hall: the Williston City Commission has already approved the plat, and construction waits on the title. Hardin said every month of delay in serving the investors pushes the opening back by the same amount. The noise conditions the Williston City Commission attached in 2025 apply once the campus operates.