COUNCIL BLUFFS, IA — A 1.2-million-square-foot hyperscale data center on the western edge of Iowa reported zero service interruptions during this week’s winter storm, an achievement its operator called “a testament to grid resilience” and the 41,000 customers without power for fourteen hours in the surrounding county called “noticed.”
The facility, which trains generative AI models on behalf of three Fortune 50 clients, drew its standard load throughout the storm — roughly the same draw as the Pottawattamie County residential grid that failed Tuesday at 3:18 a.m., according to filings with the Iowa Utilities Commission. Crews restored residential power Wednesday afternoon. The data center never required restoration.
“Mission-critical infrastructure is engineered to ride through events of this magnitude,” said Greta Hollins, a senior fellow at the Beacon Grid Policy Center, clarifying that “mission-critical” in this context means “training a chatbot to write more confident-sounding LinkedIn posts.”
A regional spokesperson confirmed that during the peak outage window, the facility’s primary workloads included generating holiday marketing emails for a Midwestern grocery chain, drafting autocomplete suggestions for developers in three time zones, and processing an estimated 4.3 million user queries about whether poinsettias are poisonous to cats. None of these workloads were paused, deferred, or load-shed at any point during the storm.
Backup diesel generators activated twice during the outage, burning enough fuel in roughly four hours to heat a midsize elementary school for the remainder of winter. The campus’s evaporative cooling system, which draws from the Missouri River under a 2021 allocation agreement local residents were told would be “revisited soon,” continued to operate at full capacity.
“We were boiling snow on a Coleman stove,” said Linda Petersen, 64, who lives in a subdivision two miles from the campus. “My husband kept turning to me and saying, well, at least the AI is doing okay over there. He meant it as a joke the first time.”
The operator’s regional sustainability officer issued a statement Friday noting the company has pledged to be water-positive by 2030, carbon-negative by 2030, and “a good neighbor to the communities that host us” by no specified date. The statement did not address the outage directly, but did include a link to a 78-page ESG report and a stock photograph of a wind turbine in a field that does not appear to be in Iowa.
State regulators told reporters Thursday that the facility’s grid-priority designation is “under review,” a phrase the agency has now used in connection with the same campus in 2022, 2023, and 2024. The data center is currently undergoing a 40% expansion, with completion projected for late 2026.