Applied Digital is developing Polaris Forge 3, a high-performance computing data center campus in Oliver County, North Dakota, sited west of the town of Center. As of September 9, 2026, site clearing and land grading are underway, placing this at early construction rather than the planning stage. The project was first reported by the Commercial Appeal, with additional context from News From The States and a LinkedIn summary of Applied Digital's Polaris Forge pipeline.

Site work has begun on a campus described as approximately 300MW in capacity. No verified square footage, building count, acreage, formal power-on timeline, or named tenant has been publicly disclosed for this specific site.

Applied Digital is a developer and operator of large-scale HPC and AI-oriented data center campuses across the United States. Its North Dakota presence already includes operating and under-construction facilities in Ellendale and Harwood, meaning Polaris Forge 3 is not an isolated bet on the state but the third named campus in a growing in-state portfolio. The company has positioned itself specifically around AI infrastructure demand, building at scales that serve cloud and HPC customers requiring dedicated, high-density power environments.

Oliver County presents a staffing picture that is both promising and genuinely difficult. The local industrial base, centered on the Young Station and lignite mining operations, has produced a regional workforce with real depth in heavy construction, high-voltage electrical work, and industrial maintenance. Those are directly transferable skills for data center construction. The complication is retention: utility and mining employers in Oliver County tend to hold their workers. Polaris Forge 3 is less likely to pull experienced plant hands directly off those payrolls and more likely to succeed by tapping those employers' contractor ecosystems and apprenticeship pipelines as indirect feeders of skilled trades into the campus build.

The nearest deep construction-trades pool is Bismarck-Mandan, roughly 40 to 60 miles from Center depending on the route. Contractors based there already service regional energy and infrastructure projects, and the Polaris Forge 3 build will likely depend heavily on commuting labor from that corridor supplemented by traveling national data center contractors. Competition for that labor is real: Applied Digital's own Ellendale and Harwood campuses, plus a broader statewide tally of tracked data center projects clustered around Fargo and Jamestown, are already drawing electricians, low-voltage specialists, and heavy civil contractors into the same pipeline.

For operations and commissioning roles once the campus is energized, Oliver County has almost no local bench. Those hires will need to be recruited from other Applied Digital sites, from the broader data center talent market, or developed through deliberate pre-operational training programs tied to the Bismarck-Mandan workforce. We break down the roles, pay bands, and sourcing strategies specific to this location in our guide to hiring data center talent in Oliver County, North Dakota. Sources: the Commercial Appeal, which first reported the Polaris Forge 3 construction activity; News From The States for statewide context; and a LinkedIn summary of Applied Digital's Polaris Forge campuses.