2015
Buffalo Trail Wind begins
Invenergy begins developing the Buffalo Trail Wind Project, requests interconnection at the Broadview Substation, and starts assembling land interests and leases around Broadview.
InvenergyNorthWestern Energy
The record · Senate District 22
Eleven years. One substation. A wind project that quietly became one of the largest data centers in the country. And at nearly every turn — on the committee, at the company, back on the committee — the same senator.
What follows is a timeline, not an accusation. Every dated entry is drawn from public records, filings, and published reporting, and every source is listed at the bottom of this page. Where something is unproven, we say so plainly and put it in the open questions.
1,000 MW
Power NorthWestern signed a letter of intent to deliver to a single Yellowstone County customer
759 MW
NorthWestern's entire average daily retail load, for every other customer in Montana
5,100
Acres assembled south of Broadview before the project was announced publicly
0.9
Montana's Class 17 tax rate on qualifying data center property — below commercial land
Start here
The short version, in six steps
The full record is below, with every date and source. But the whole thing fits in six steps. Read these and the rest will make sense.
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1
A wind farm got permission to plug into the power grid. It never got built.
You cannot build anything big without permission to connect to the grid, and that permission takes years to get. A wind company north of Billings got it in 2015. The wind farm was never finished — but the permission stayed with the land. That is the most valuable thing in this whole story.
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2
The lawmaker in charge of energy went to work for the company that owned it.
Daniel Zolnikov chaired the Montana House energy committee. In 2020 he quit the Legislature mid‑term and took a job at Broad Reach Power — the company holding that grid connection. He wrote the state's energy rules, then went on the payroll of a company those rules applied to.
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3
While he was there, the land around it was quietly bought up.
About 5,100 acres south of Broadview changed hands before the county, the neighbors, or the public knew a data center was coming. That is nearly eight square miles — close to a fifth the size of the entire city of Billings. Buying quietly keeps the price low. It also means nobody can object yet.
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4
He came back to the Legislature and got the energy gavel again.
He returned in 2023, this time in the state Senate, as Majority Whip and chair of the Senate Energy Committee. Same subject, more power. His wife, Katie Zolnikov, chairs the interim committee that covers the same ground.
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5
Then the laws changed to fit a project exactly like this one.
The 2025 session cut the tax rate on data center property below what a Billings storefront pays, passed a "Right to Compute" law limiting how governments can restrict computing, and moved the deadline for citizen petitions. He sponsored the shield law. He voted for the rest.
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6
Neighbors gathered nearly 15,000 signatures. The new deadline threw them out.
Yellowstone County residents did exactly what the law allows: they circulated a petition asking for a public vote on water and power bills. Nearly 15,000 people signed. The petitions were rejected on the filing deadline the Legislature had just moved. Nobody has claimed the signatures were fake.
What it adds up to
One man held the committee, then the company, then the committee again. The rules that made this project cheap and hard to stop were written while he sat in those chairs. And the neighbors who asked for a vote were shut out on a technicality his own Legislature had just created.
Every step above is documented with dates and sources in the record that follows. If a term below is unfamiliar, there is a plain‑English glossary at the bottom of this page.
I
The asset nobody was watching
2015 – 2020
Before there was a data center, there was a wire. Everything that follows happens because one substation north of Billings had room on it, and because the people who knew that were not always sitting on the same side of the table.
In plain English
A power line with room to spare is worth a fortune, because you cannot build a big project without one. This chapter is about who knew that first.
2015 – 2020
Broadview becomes the prize
Development continues and the Broadview substation quietly becomes one of the key interconnection assets in the region — the scarce thing any future large load would need.
September 2020
The chairman walks out the door and into the industry
Daniel Zolnikov resigns from the Montana House after serving as Chair of the House Energy Committee and joins Broad Reach Power as a Montana developer.
Daniel ZolnikovBroad Reach Power
December 2020
Three months later, his new employer buys Buffalo Trail
With Zolnikov in the developer role, Broad Reach purchases Buffalo Trail Wind and Buffalo Trail Solar from Invenergy — the Broadview position, now in the hands of the former energy chairman's employer.
Daniel ZolnikovSteve Vavrik, CEOMark Klein, COO
2020 – 2021
The seat stays in the family
Katie Zolnikov is appointed to Daniel Zolnikov's vacated House seat and begins serving in the Montana House.
2022 – 2023
The wind project stalls — the interconnection doesn't
Broad Reach delays Buffalo Trail. The renewable build never arrives, but the Broadview transmission position remains available for whatever comes next.
2023
Back through the door — this time with the gavel
Daniel Zolnikov returns to the Legislature, now in the Montana Senate, and rises to:
- Senate Majority Whip
- Chair of the Senate Energy & Telecommunications Committee
- Katie Zolnikov chairs the interim committee covering the same subject matter
August 2023
ENGIE buys Broad Reach — but not Montana
ENGIE acquires Broad Reach Power. Public reporting indicates the Montana Buffalo Trail assets stay behind with EnCap Investments.
Chart 01 · The revolving door
Who held which chair, and who held the land
Read down the columns instead of across the rows. The gaps in one lane are filled by the other two.
Daniel ZolnikovR · Billings
Katie ZolnikovR · Billings
The Broadview siteInterconnection & land
How to read this
Follow the top row left to right. Daniel Zolnikov chaired the House energy committee, left for a job at the energy company, then came back as chair of the Senate energy committee. Now look at the bottom row: that same company held the Broadview grid connection the entire time. Red blocks are private paychecks. Gray blocks are public offices. He was never out of the picture — he just changed which side of the table he sat on.
Public office
Private energy interest
Third-party owner
Employment and office dates per the timeline sources below, including Montana Free Press, Aug. 27, 2026.
II
Bought quietly, on purpose
Late 2023 – 2024
A dead wind farm becomes an AI campus. Roughly 5,100 acres change hands before a single neighbor is told, and the men doing the buying have worked together before.
In plain English
The wind farm died, but the valuable part — the grid connection — lived on. Investors bought the land around it before telling anyone what they meant to put there.
Late 2023 – early 2024
The concept changes
According to public reporting, John Chesser begins discussions with EnCap and the dormant renewable project starts transitioning toward an AI hyperscale data center.
May 2024
Montana Property LLC assembles the site
Roughly 20 parcels totaling about 5,100 acres south of Broadview are acquired. Yellowstone County records identify Montana Property LLC as the purchaser, with a mailing address associated with Damon Obie. This happens before Quantica is announced, before the NorthWestern letter of intent, and before any public debate.
“We acquired that land last year very quietly because we didn't want to alarm the community before we announced anything.”
John Chesser, Quantica Infrastructure
Quantica's executives — Chesser, Obie and Charlie Baker — previously worked together at Talen Energy through that company's Chapter 11 restructuring.
2023 – 2024
The think tank turns on the message
Daniel Zolnikov serves on the Frontier Institute's board of directors. Over the same period the organization increasingly publishes in favor of AI, data centers, energy abundance, and regulatory and permitting reform.
2024
A conflict disclosed to a committee his wife was chairing
On the Energy & Telecommunications Interim Committee — the panel overseeing Montana energy policy and the Public Service Commission — Sen. Daniel Zolnikov publicly disclosed a potential conflict of interest before an energy agenda item. The meeting was chaired by Rep. Katie Zolnikov. At the same meeting, former Broad Reach Power COO Mark Klein appeared before the committee on an energy developers panel.
November 12, 2024
The first paper trail between Quantica and the utility
A mutual non-disclosure agreement is executed between Quantica and NorthWestern Energy — the earliest publicly documented agreement between them. The NDA itself has not been released.
Chart 02 · The quiet assembly
About 20 parcels, bought before anyone was told
What 5,100 acres looks like
Eight square miles. The city of Billings covers about 45 square miles (U.S. Census), so this is roughly a fifth of the whole city, assembled out in the county before a single public hearing. Land is normally bought in the open. Buying it quietly does two things: it keeps neighbors from raising the price, and it keeps them from organizing until the deal is already done.
Yellowstone County records as described in Montana Free Press; campus acreage confirmed at 5,000–5,100 acres in NBC Montana coverage.
III
Building the framework, one bill at a time
2025
In a single session, Montana wrote the tax treatment, the legal shield, and the utility mechanics that a project like this one needs. Two of those pieces carried the same last name.
In plain English
Four things had to be true for a project like this to pencil out: low taxes, legal protection, cooperative utility rules, and few ways for locals to say no. In one 2025 session, Montana delivered all four.
HB 424 · Signed May 2025
The tax rate
Sponsored by Rep. Katie Zolnikov. Extends Montana's Class 17 treatment for qualifying data centers — and clarifies its reach to qualifying new electrical generation associated with them — while stretching the construction window to 2037 and applying retroactively to tax years beginning after December 31, 2024. It is, in effect, the same economic architecture now proposed at Broadview.
LegiScan, HB 424 (2025) · Montana data center policy tracker
SB 212 · Signed April 16, 2025
The legal shield
Sponsored by Sen. Daniel Zolnikov. The “Right to Compute Act” makes Montana the first state to establish a right to privately own and use computational resources, requiring government restrictions to be demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to a compelling interest. It frames AI as economic development, and it hands investors exactly what a billion-dollar build wants most: legal predictability.
MTFP Capitol Tracker, SB 212 · MultiState: first-in-nation right to compute
Chart 03 · Who pays what
A qualifying data center is taxed below a Billings storefront
Montana tax rates as a share of market value. Class 17 covers qualified data center property; Class 4 covers the commercial and residential property everyone else owns.
What this means for your bill
Montana does not tax the full value of a property. It taxes a slice of it, and the Legislature decides how big that slice is for each type of property (Montana Free Press walks through the math here). For a Billings commercial building, that slice is 1.4–1.9% of what the building is worth. For a qualifying data center, lawmakers set it at 0.9%. The tax rate applied afterward is the same for everybody — so a smaller slice going in means a smaller bill coming out. On two properties worth the same money, the data center pays roughly half to two‑thirds of what the storefront pays. That difference does not disappear. It shifts onto everyone else in the county.
Montana Department of Revenue, 2025 property tax information · Class 17 rate per MCA 15-6-162 as summarized by the state policy tracker.
The rest of the scaffolding
Two more pieces, less noticed
- § 69-3-224 — creates a framework for data-center-owned electric generation and sales to utilities.
- PSC large-load proceedings — set how very large electric loads are served and, critically, how their costs are allocated to everyone else.
IV
One customer, more power than the whole state
July – December 2025
Then came the number. A single letter of intent for more electricity than NorthWestern Energy delivers to all of its Montana retail customers on an average day — and a protective order keeping the paperwork out of public view.
In plain English
A megawatt measures how much electricity something draws. This one campus asked for more of it than NorthWestern Energy delivers to every home, farm and business it serves in Montana on an average day. Then a judge sealed the contract so you cannot read it.
Chart 04 · Scale
1,000 megawatts for one campus
How much power is 1,000 megawatts
Run flat out for a year, a 1,000‑megawatt campus would burn through roughly 8.8 million megawatt‑hours of electricity. Every electric customer in the entire state of Montana — every house, school, hospital, mine and refinery — bought 15.5 million megawatt‑hours in a year (U.S. Energy Information Administration). One customer is asking for more than half of what the whole state uses. For scale, NorthWestern serves about 440,700 electric customers in Montana (2025 annual report); this campus would be one of them. When demand jumps that fast, someone has to pay to build the plants and wires to meet it — and that cost lands on everyone’s monthly bill.
Montana Free Press, July 31, 2025 · load comparison and 1,400 MW total per NBC Montana.
July 1 – July 30, 2025
The letter of intent
NorthWestern and Quantica execute an LOI contemplating:
- A 1,000 MW campus at the Broadview Substation
- New generation resources and behind-the-meter generation
- Potential utility ownership of that generation
- Definitive agreements by December 31, 2025
John Chesser, CEODamon Obie, PresidentCharlie Baker, CFOBrian Bird, NorthWestern CEO
September – December 2025
Sealed
NorthWestern requests confidentiality and the Montana Public Service Commission grants a protective order covering the Quantica, Atlas and Sabey letters of intent. Ratepayers are asked to trust a deal they are not allowed to read.
November 10, 2025
Then someone starts buying the minerals
Yellowstone County records deed 4119298, executed a month earlier, conveying an out-of-state landowner's oil, gas and other mineral interests in 160.14 acres to Montana Property LLC, with records to be returned to Lonewolf Energy Inc. Other recordings in the county appear similar. Someone ran a mineral-title chain far enough back to find scattered fractional heirs living in California, Washington, Illinois and elsewhere.
That acquisition ran from October 2025 through May 2026 — the month Quantica said it was considering natural-gas generation. Ask yourself why a data center needs the gas under its own field.
V
And then the neighbors found out
2026
Water. Rates. Land. Local control. When Yellowstone County residents did the one thing citizens are supposed to do — circulate a petition and ask for a vote — they ran into a deadline the Legislature had already moved.
In plain English
When Montanans want a say in a local decision, they gather signatures and force a vote. That is the one tool they have. The Legislature shortened the window to use it, and the petitions landed on the wrong side of the new date.
January – February 2026
The announcement
Quantica goes public with the Big Sky Campus: roughly 5,100 acres, AI infrastructure, up to 1,000 MW of electrical demand. First building expected to be operating around 2029.
Spring – summer 2026
Citizens respond
Concerns build around water, electric rates, transparency, infrastructure, local control, and land use.
June – July 2026
The petition, then the lawsuit
Kassi Solberg files a petition seeking voter approval for future data center construction, and the County Attorney approves it for circulation. After signature gathering begins, the Yellowstone County Commissioners file suit challenging the initiative — represented by that same County Attorney in his official capacity as the county's counsel.
The central legal question becomes whether signatures collected after the SB 11 statutory deadline may be counted at all. SB 11 — a 2025 bill to “standardize” how citizens petition their government — came out of the Veterans Affairs Committee. An easy one to miss.
July 31, 2026
The letters come out — once the companies stop objecting
NorthWestern files revised public versions of the letters of intent after Quantica and Atlas say they no longer consider them confidential. The public gets the documents after the framework is already law.
Chart 05 · The signatures
Thousands of names, one moved deadline
Nearly 15,000
Montanans reported to have signed
~19,000
valid signatures the county requires
2/3
voter approval the measure would require
0
of those names counted so far
Why the signatures did not count
To force a public vote in Montana, you collect signatures and file them by a deadline. Nearly 15,000 people signed. Nobody has argued those names are fake, forged, or ineligible. The petitions were thrown out over when they were filed — against a deadline the 2025 Legislature had already moved up. The rule changed, and then the people who followed the old rule lost. That is the whole dispute.
The dispute is not whether people signed. It is whether the signatures gathered after a deadline the 2025 Legislature moved are allowed to count.
Signature requirement and deadline per Yellowstone County Voices; signature total as reported by Montana Free Press, Aug. 28, 2026. The exact certified count is still being litigated.
VI
Open questions we are still working
Unverified · help wanted
These are not findings. They are threads that citizens are pulling on, listed here so you can judge the evidence yourself — and so nobody can say we blurred the line between what is documented and what is not.
Unverified
Who else knew, and when?
Residents investigating the project have raised questions about long-standing personal relationships among county officials and project attorneys. We have not been able to confirm those claims, and we are not asserting them.
Still sealed
What is in the 2024 NDA?
The November 12, 2024 mutual non-disclosure agreement between Quantica and NorthWestern is the earliest known agreement between them. It has never been released.
In progress
Did Cumulus deliver the jobs?
Quantica's executives previously built the Cumulus campus in Pennsylvania, reportedly sold to Amazon for roughly $650 million. The marketing points look familiar. We are checking whether the promised local hiring survived the handoff to the buyer's own contractors.
Working on this with us? We are organizing county records, PSC filings and legislative history into one public file, and Yellowstone County could use a standing citizen watchdog group. If you have documents, dates or firsthand knowledge, send them — corrections included. We would rather fix a date than defend a bad one.
None of this required a single illegal act.
That is the point. Move a deadline here. Sponsor a rate there. Sit on the committee, then the payroll, then the committee again. Seal the paperwork until the framework is already law. Each step is small, defensible, and nearly invisible on its own — and together they add up to one of the largest data centers in the country landing in our backyard with the neighbors' hands tied behind their backs.
Nothing on this page asks you to take our word for it. Every date, dollar figure, and quotation below is tied to a filing, a public record, or a published report, and the full list is at the bottom. Read it, check it against the primary documents, and draw your own conclusion.
Plain English
The words they use, and what they mean
Complicated language is not an accident. When a process is hard to follow, fewer people follow it. Here is every term on this page in ordinary words.
- Letter of intent
- A signed document saying two companies plan to do a deal. It is not the final contract, but nobody signs one casually — it is how big projects get started.
- Interconnection
- Permission to plug a project into the electric grid. There is a waiting list, it can take years, and there is only so much room on any given power line. This is the bottleneck that makes or breaks a project.
- Substation
- The equipment that steps electricity up or down between big transmission lines and local lines. If a substation has spare capacity, the land near it is far more valuable.
- Megawatt (MW)
- A measure of how much electricity something is drawing at one moment. A megawatt‑hour (MWh) is how much it uses over an hour. Think of megawatts as the size of the pipe and megawatt‑hours as the water that comes out.
- Class rate
- The share of a property’s value that Montana actually taxes. The Legislature sets a different share for each type of property. A lower class rate means a lower tax bill on the same building.
- Class 17
- The property tax category the Legislature created for qualifying data centers, set at 0.9% — below the rate on ordinary commercial property.
- Public Service Commission (PSC)
- The five elected Montanans who approve or reject what utilities like NorthWestern are allowed to charge you. If a deal raises your rates, this is the body that signs off.
- Protective order
- A judge’s ruling that keeps documents in a case out of public view. Here it means the public cannot read the contract behind the power deal.
- Non-disclosure agreement (NDA)
- A private contract in which the parties agree not to talk about something. Legal and common in business — but when a government body signs one, the public loses its window in.
- Ballot initiative / petition
- The process where citizens gather signatures to put a question directly to voters instead of waiting on elected officials. It is the main tool Montanans have to overrule a decision.
- Revolving door
- Moving back and forth between writing the rules for an industry and being paid by that industry. It is legal. It is also why disclosure and recusal rules exist.
- Recusal
- Stepping aside from a vote or decision because you have a personal or financial stake in the outcome.
Sources
- 01Montana Free Press, “How Daniel Zolnikov became Data Center Danny,” Aug. 27, 2026 — montanafreepress.org
- 02Montana Free Press, data center politics in the Billings legislative race, Aug. 28, 2026 — montanafreepress.org
- 03Montana Free Press, NorthWestern Energy inks power agreement with AI data center, July 31, 2025 — montanafreepress.org
- 04NBC Montana, groups file complaint to block NorthWestern plan tied to data centers — nbcmontana.com
- 05Montana Public Radio, NorthWestern plans to power a massive new data center, Aug. 1, 2025 — mtpr.org
- 06MTFP Capitol Tracker, Senate Bill 212 (Right to Compute Act), sponsor Sen. Daniel Zolnikov — projects.montanafreepress.org
- 07Enrolled text of SB 212, 69th Legislature — archive.legmt.gov
- 08LegiScan, HB 424 (2025), revise taxes for class 17 data center property — legiscan.com
- 09Montana Department of Revenue, 2025 property tax information and class rates — revenue.mt.gov
- 10Montana data center policy tracker (Class 17, HB 424 window, PSC dockets) — servercountry.org
- 11Yellowstone County Voices, initiative status and signature requirement — ycv1.org
- 12MultiState, Montana becomes first state to enact a right to compute law — multistate.ai
- 13Enrolled text of SB 11, 69th Legislature (local petition procedure) — archive.legmt.gov
- 14Yellowstone County Clerk & Recorder, recorded deed 4119298 and related mineral conveyances — county records, on file
Dates and figures on this page are drawn from the sources above and from Yellowstone County records we are still organizing. Where a figure is contested — the certified signature count in particular — we label it. Found an error? Tell us and we will correct it in public.