Google is bringing one of its newest data centers to a place most people have probably never heard of: Pine Island, a small city in southern Minnesota that sits off Highway 52 between Rochester and the Twin Cities. For a town better known for cornfields and commuter traffic, suddenly becoming part of the global infrastructure that keeps Search, YouTube, Maps, Workspace and a growing wave of AI services online is a big shift.

The company confirmed that Pine Island will be the future home of a Google data center, built in collaboration with the city and regional utility Xcel Energy. On paper, it sounds like a typical hyperscale build: large campus, high energy load, long planning horizon. In reality, it’s doubling as a test bed for how to power power‑hungry AI infrastructure without blowing up local electricity bills or climate targets.

Xcel Energy will supply electricity to the new facility, but Google is agreeing to pay all of the costs associated with its electric service — from the energy itself to any new grid infrastructure needed to keep the lights on. That structure is meant to reassure existing Xcel customers, whose bills in Minnesota have historically been below the U.S. average, that a giant new data center won’t quietly push their rates higher.

To make that work, Google and Xcel have designed a new tariff model called the Clean Energy Accelerator Charge, or CEAC. If you follow this space, it’s essentially a Minnesota twin of the Clean Transition Tariff Google piloted with NV Energy in Nevada: a dedicated pricing and contract framework that lets a single large customer underwrite a big package of new clean energy without shifting costs to everyone else. In practical terms, the CEAC is the financial plumbing behind a very large clean‑energy build‑out.

Under the agreement, Google and Xcel are tying the Pine Island project to 1,900 megawatts of new carbon‑free capacity for the regional grid. That bundle includes 1,400MW of wind, 200MW of solar, and 300MW of long‑duration storage — specifically, iron‑air batteries from Form Energy that can deliver 300MW of power for roughly 100 hours, or about 30 gigawatt‑hours of stored energy. Xcel says that the combination will push its already roughly 70% carbon‑free electricity mix even further toward its long‑term climate targets while still keeping reliability and affordability front and center.

The storage piece is a big deal in its own right. A 30GWh iron‑air battery installation of this kind would be one of the largest announced long‑duration storage projects in the world, designed to soak up excess wind and solar when demand is low and then feed that power back into the grid across multiple days when demand spikes or the weather doesn’t cooperate. For grid planners staring down a sharp rise in electricity use from data centers, electric vehicles and building electrification, that sort of multi‑day buffer is the difference between a clean‑powered boom and a reliability headache.

Google is also kicking in $50 million to strengthen Xcel’s Capacity*Connect program, which funds a distributed network of smaller batteries spread across the utility’s system. Instead of one massive storage site in a single location, Capacity*Connect aims to scatter capacity around the grid — closer to homes, businesses and substations where it can help manage local peaks, defer expensive upgrades and improve resilience when something goes wrong. The Pine Island deal essentially turbo‑charges that vision, with Google money helping Xcel build out what is expected to be hundreds of megawatts of distributed storage across Minnesota in the coming years.

Economically, Pine Island and the broader region are hoping this isn’t just a server farm behind a fence. The project is expected to generate a burst of construction employment and a smaller but steady set of permanent roles once the center comes online, along with indirect jobs in services, maintenance and local supply chains. Local coverage has framed it as a “significant local investment,” potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars when you tally the facility itself, upgrades to transmission infrastructure and the wave of clean energy projects tied to the CEAC.

At the same time, there’s a healthy dose of skepticism — especially among Minnesotans who’ve watched other data centers appear with more fanfare than long‑term employment. On community forums, residents point out that modern facilities are highly automated and often run with only a few dozen on‑site staff once construction wraps up. Others question how much tax revenue will actually flow into local budgets and whether the community will see broader benefits beyond a few roads, substations and security jobs. It’s the classic data‑center debate: global digital infrastructure meets very local expectations.​

From Google’s perspective, this is about more than one small city. The company is in the middle of a massive build‑out of AI and cloud infrastructure across the U.S. and Europe, from new data centers in places like Texas and South Carolina to multibillion‑euro investments in countries such as Belgium. Each new region that lights up comes with harder questions about energy demand, climate commitments and community impact — especially as AI workloads push power consumption far beyond what traditional search and video streaming required.

That’s why Google and Xcel are so explicit about the “good citizen of the grid” narrative. Executives on both sides describe Pine Island as a model for how utilities and tech giants can handle large new loads: the customer pays the full freight for their service, directly bankrolls new carbon‑free generation and storage, and helps shore up the broader system instead of just drawing from it. If Minnesota regulators sign off — the electric service agreement still needs approval from the state’s Public Utilities Commission — it could become a template for similar deals elsewhere.

For Pine Island, the transformation will be more tangible. A patch of land outside town that once looked like any other Upper Midwest field is now slated to host the racks of servers that keep much of the modern internet humming. Over the next few years, residents will see more trucks, more construction and eventually a new piece of skyline built around cooling towers and electrical infrastructure instead of grain elevators. Whether they ultimately view it as an economic anchor, an energy experiment, or just a quietly humming neighbor may depend on how well the promises made today — on jobs, bills and clean power — hold up once the servers are switched on.