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This particular site is being built basically in the parking lot/backyard of a steel mill, so it sort of is brownfield. I have a hunch that “empty cornfield” is just the author using some artistic freedom instead of saying “an empty field in the Midwest”.

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It was definitely farm fields growing crops, you can look in Google Earth and see for yourself.

Edit: Anywhere in the Midwest where there is a large expanse of flat ground will almost always be growing crops or have a town built on it. Undeveloped land is almost all hilly and forested or floodplain, nowhere where you could put a data center.

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