Such a law illustrates the beauty of federalism. Texas and other states can have them if they want them! Maine has not nearly as much space and much more natural beauty to protect [per square mile], so it can and maybe should have a different set of rules. That's cool.
This is a recipe for creating dead retiree states. Just NIMBY everything, NIMBY the power sources[1] [2], then complain about a lack of power so NIMBY any type of new industrial <anything>.
Now do this for housing, new sources of water anything a person younger than 40 would need and you basically get a state full of retirees..and oh would you look at that! [3].
Now the question is, why wouldn't all states eventually do this with the way our population pyramid is looking? It's basically rabid conservation and tragedy of the commons writ large.
I'm from Nevada, another state that people presume is all desert. (Really, it's all mountains.)
The only part of Texas I've driven is between Austin and S Antonio. It was perhaps the least-beautiful wilderness I've driven through. It really did just feel like desert and billboards - like if Walmart was a highway.
But I also presume Texas marketing itself as a less-regulated alternative (e.g. to California) is why it's easy to imagine Texas wanting infrastructure that Maine might not.
Folks have been conditioned to consider the deserts of West Texas, especially the Permian Basin, to be wastelands with no redeeming value.
Personally, while it isn't my favorite landscape or even my favorite desert landscape, I still think it is a landscape with intrinsic value and beauty.
Yeah, sorry that wasn't intended as a slight to Texas. Texas just does have a lot of barren landscape where datacenters wouldn't offend as much. I modified it to make that clear. Also, energy is playing a role here.
I've driven through all of Texas twice, and had to spend time in Austin and Houston for work, but never had to live there, so I'd like to think I'm informed without being biased.
Besides the heavily oak covered hill country west of Austin it's pretty much the ugliest landscape in the country. I will admit the west Texas desert is less ugly than the desert of southern Arizona/eastern California, but north/east Texas is the flattest, least interesting part of the Mississippi basin (Nebraska/Kansas/Oklahoma are similarly meh but you don't have the insane humidity).
I live in Maine. Commercial power is crazy expensive. I don't know why you would build an AI datacenter here in the first place. As an obsessive self-hoster, I've researched building one, and there is no universe in which it makes sense. New Hampshire and Massachusetts are so nearby latency-wise.
Even in inefficient data centers, cooling is a minority of the power expense. Chasing a few percent of better cooling efficiency at the expense of a few percent more expensive power is a net negative.
Cheap power is much more cost effective than the smaller efficiency bump you get from cold weather -- and you can also get both by locating in the midwest or northwest. Hyperscalers build here for these reasons.
Power is not the most expensive part of data center lifetime cost; especially these days when you're filling them with several billion dollars of nvidia chips. It's still an important consideration of course, but not the only one.
I don't know if that's really true. Given realistic life cycles of equipment (~10 years, not 3 as commonly believed) the operating power is going to be 75-80% of the TCO, or more.
I don't know about this particular situation (NH and MA seem to have expensive power as well), but you can have significantly different costs on one side of the line or the other for regulatory reasons. State regulations can affect the cost of business significantly, and electricity is no exception.
They are very dependent on natural gas and they also heavy environmental protections/pollution regulation that makes it hard to build stuff like pipelines and, hence, makes electricity more expensive compared to states with less environmental protections.
As has been repeatedly demonstrated[1], it is the presence of new, large consumers that drives down the cost of bulk power by amortizing the infrastructure investments.
Maine voters are, of course, notorious bozos in this field, having voted in a plebiscite in 2021 to cancel the link to Quebec Hydro, which was already substantially completed.
This is so ignorant it hurts. The same exact proposition was voted down in New Hampshire years earlier, because the transmission line goes straight through natural forests, to Massachusetts, and has little to do with the state other than chopping down a bunch of trees. Neither Maine nor New Hampshire have an extra $1 billion to waste on enhancing the grid mainly for the benefit of southern New England states.
Neither Maine nor New Hampshire voters are "bozos" for voting it down. The whole ordeal even prompted Maine voters to establish a new law to stop foreign investors from influencing local referendums because Hydro Quebec spent so much money trying to sway the vote.
Do you have any links to support this? Because the commonality of all arguments _against_ has been that they make water and power crazy expensive for everyone that has to live close to the newly opened datacenters, while the DC operator enjoys subsidized land use tax, water and power.
This is a natural response to the excessive pushiness and underhandedness that's been used to build many of these new datacenters, often in direct conflict with the wishes of the locals. Maybe the firms paying to get them built should take a more diplomatic approach instead of trying to railroad projects through.
It explains the intent (to protect consumers/grid from price changes and fluctuation), and bans 20MW+ loads. They forgot to define load, so a behind-the-meter datacenter (zero net load on the grid) still would likely not get permitted even though it does not violate the intent of the law, which is a bit odd.
From the bill text establishing a council to figure it out:
> The council shall evaluate issues related to data centers located or proposed to be located in the State, with the goals of protecting ratepayers, maintaining electric grid reliability, minimizing environmental impacts and enabling responsible and appropriately sited economic development.
For people who support this kind of ban, I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts.
Like data centers, factories use a lot of power -- which drives up electricity bills -- and their construction can have local environmental impacts. Data centers have a reputation for not providing too many local jobs, but modern factories are often highly automated and also don't provide too many local jobs.
If, given all that, you'd support factory construction but not data center construction, I'd be curious as to why.
Was just about to say the same, but without the numbers. Thanks for providing. People aren't stupid and they find (AI) datacenters to be a net minus to their local communities.
"We are for the jobs the comet provides" - Don't Look up.
I'm not trying to be facile here but let's be honest the environmental concerns are silly. I don't want to hear about electricity shortages from a state hellbent on NIMBY-ing itself out of power[1],[2].
I understand people are threatened by this technology, the tech CEOs' loud pronouncements can cause that and that these arguments are basically threat responses. I buy that.
But to hear otherwise smart people say non-chemical industrial factories are a serious environmental threat but if they provided more jobs it would be fine while everyone nods along, feels like I'm living in an Adam McKay satire.
Bingo. Data centers are a net negative wherever they are. Giant, employ far fewer people than a grocery store after they’re built, crank up electricity costs, use tons of water, air pollution if it’s self-powered, noise pollution (it’s really worth watching Benn Jordan’s video on infrasound,) ugly… the only local entities that win are the landowner and the municipality that collects taxes on them. Though I’ve seen some astonishingly misinformed politicians offering big tax incentives for data centers not realizing that they employ so few people. From what I hear, even much of the construction is done by flown-in contractors with experience doing it elsewhere.
The people that own these data centers have only themselves to blame. They’ve been obnoxious, at scale, for so long that damn near everybody knows how much they suck, and they’re losing their ability to railroad locals into eating their turd sandwiches.
Edit: I know it’s gauche to talk about votes here, but this comment trended upward consistently for 45 minutes. In much less than 10 minutes, it collected more than half that amount in downvotes. I’d eat my hat if there wasn’t some kind of organized/automated brigading happening here.
Edit again: Now close to 70% gone. Not exactly surprising given the forum, but pretty depressing nonetheless.
The major data centers being built for AI are much more energy-hungry than car manufacturing, and they're being built at a pace that the US energy grid simply cannot accommodate in the short term... or quite possibly even the long term, considering the US's extreme aversion to expanding nuclear power.
Also, you can call it Luddism if you want, but a car factory is going to bring a lot more net benefit to the average person than an AI data center. Motorized transportation is essential to modern civilization, fancy chat-bots are not.
I wonder why this doesn’t get us frustrated with the grid, not data centers. Delays on interconnects for renewables and offshore wind both seem pretty self inflicted.
> AI are much more energy-hungry than car manufacturing
This is not even remotely true[1]. Large auto plants use on the order of 200–250 megawatts of power, which is either on par with a data center or slightly more than a data center depending on the size and how cooling is handled.
And a data centre brings absolutely no economic benefit whatsoever to its local community, unlike something like an auto plant that creates entirely new supporting industries to support it and its employees.
I would argue that with the rise of coding and debugging agents, the AI data centers provide (or will in the near future) even more benefit than a car factory, in terms of digital infrastructure. These technologies are just a lot more invisible so we don't realize how important they are.
It's a temporary ban (until 2027) and I think it totally makes sense to do so during a boom that has no strong evidence of long-term sustainability. I would absolutely support temporary bans for industries at the peaks of their hype cycles
Bad dichotomy they aren't saying no to data centers to spite them. They are saying no because that data centers are a major public drain and net negative on public resources.
Often they don't pay high taxes nor do they employ large numbers of people. Most of the money made by leeching of public power infrastructure and cheap electricity and export the profits to somewhere else. They are building and selling a non tangible good i.e where do you tax it?
Their is also noise pollution concerns which can destroy communities near by and water usage concerns. These plants drain aquaifers.
I just think you haven't substantially thought about the effect these have on the actual people living nearby. AI being .000001cent cheaper just doesnt help people that much
> Often they don't pay high taxes nor do they employ large numbers of people... They are building and selling a non tangible good i.e where do you tax it?
You could easily charge a property tax (could even have a higher rate for data centers, specifically), or an excise tax on number of servers, or a tax on excess energy/water consumption. There's lots of options here, if that's what you're worried about.
> Their is also noise pollution concerns which can destroy communities near by and water usage concerns. These plants drain aquaifers.
Factories also do both of these things. They're noisy, often have emissions much worse than anything coming from a datacenter, and most factories use large quantities of water as well.
They had that opportunity, to build up the infrastructure necessary to operate, to build in places where they wouldn't reduce people's quality of life. They chose to do everything they could to squeeze out some extra profit. Requiring good behavior in one specific way wouldn't be sufficient when dealing with such obviously bad actors. They can try again to get the right to build once they've won back the trust of Mainers.
You can call it childish if you want, but a lot of people are unhappy with the economy in general and rising costs in particular. Energy costs are a big part of those rising costs and, like it or not, the AI vendors and their data center projects are an easy target.
I don't think it's necessarily a "backlash" to all the hype but the hype certainly made them a target
Mainers hate seeing wind and solar plants- they consider them to be a massive eyesore.
The people of Maine won't consider "We'll build something you don't like but we'll offset it by building something else you don't like" as a compromise.
Maybe I misunderstood, but isn't that what they did? Here is the max. power you can draw from the grid, feel free to be more efficient or to produce your own electricity.
Imagine the additional space needed to power a scaled DC with solar. I think the number of people opposing the construction would increase when they release its half the county.
1. That renewable energy development is supposed to allow a _reduction_ in fossil fuel consumption, not an increase in wattage used.
2. That investment should already be happening, not subject to some future plans of some holding company or billionaire investor. Keeping global warming at bay is no longer some kind of future concern; and we've begun to see some initial effects of it in recent years - drouts, fires, various kinds of biosphere degradation etc.
I imagine Maine would support bans on both, yes. Most of their economy is tourism and being known for their coasts and forests, I don't think anything that could possibly have environmental impacts to support industries/businesses that are primarily not housed in Maine would be seen as a good thing.
The more interesting question to me is do you support full bans on these things in states that could easily allow them with strict regulations, knowing that they will instead likely be built in places with no regulations?
I'm not sure how I'd feel about a ban on factories, but I think cars, as bad as they are in terms of environmental effects, are far less harmful to our society than "AI" companies and the big-tech companies that are intertwined with them (e.g., Google and Facebook).
On the flip side, I'd ask the question: if someone supports banning these data centers, why not support just banning the AI companies entirely?
> I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts.
Those factories employ people.
> Like data centers, factories use a lot of power -- which drives up electricity bills
No. They have nowhere near the power consumption density unless it's a metallurgical facility doing aluminum smelting or scrap recycling in arc furnaces.
Slot machines are (ab)used by relatively few people.
OTOH the proportion of Mainers who already use or (say by 2030) will be using AI routinely in their daily lives is likely around 50 per cent. Which makes the initiative a bit of an exercise in political posturing and hypocrisy.
Reminds me a bit of all the anti-nuclear countries of Europe which nevertheless do not mind importing nuclear-generated power from their neighbours if needed.
I would definitely support tech companies charging residents and especially government offices and legislatures of such states an extra fee. As Nicholas Nassim Taleb says, having skin in the game is important, and that would at least be a form of skin in the game.
I see no need for a false dichotomy of "require" vs "ban". There aren't laws requiring a state to have lumber mills, or outright banning them. There are many alternatives with a wide spectrum of attributes:
- Limiting the rates of builds allowed (e.g. total area per year, density per area per year).
- Requiring that the companies involved offset their resource usage in any number of ways (could expand this to three paragraphs on its own).
- Placing restrictions on proximity to $THINGS, whether that's residential areas, parks, you name it.
These are just the first three examples that come to mind, and I am confident that people smarter than me could come up with more.
In free societies, bans should be the last weapon of choice. By default, any activity should be allowed, many of the allowed activies should be regulated and/or taxed, but outright bans should be very well justified.
Otherwise you will end up with a chaotic-authoritarian system banning whatever the current Zeitgeist feels icky about, which in the era of social networks means twenty different things each year.
People are worried about their power and water costs rising.
I think this is a legit worry. The fact of the matter is that local governments often don't care about their constituencies and sell them out in order to boost tax revenue of new business moving in, and this creates a race to the bottom.
I would love a situation in which datacenters also paid for their own power upgrades and infrastructure so that locals did not experience high bills. That would be the best case scenario.
But barring that, banning the data center seems like a legit second base case scenario.
I heard one rationale that has nothing to do with factories > AI data centers. It is the only lever that legislators currently have. They want some bargaining chip to get more control over AI firms.
It's not an environmental issue, data centers are overleveraged in the US due to a belief that they need to win the "AI race". The government is putting their hand into the market to try and shift this balance, when they should be creating basic infrastructure and services.
Your profile indicates you're head of engineering at an AI startup. Can you provide a reason why someone who isn't financially motivated by their stake in an AI company should support new data center development for AI? Especially someone who lives in the area and will be disproportionately negatively affected by the construction and operation?
>For people who support this kind of ban, I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts.
If car parts factories produced nothing, employed no one and were made with equipment that will get outdated in a couple of years... Oh, gee, I dunno, it's a tough one.
Why not cut straight to the jugular and ask them how they feel about raising local taxes to fund stadiums? Then ask them how they feel about beef and almond farming if they pivot to water as the next complaint. FWIW stadiums create about twice as many jobs as the current crop of datacenters so there's that I guess but the bang per tax dollar is still godawful.
I think a temporary ban makes sense when there are market bubbles driving investment that has a high likelihood of being abandoned shortly thereafter... and I think that could apply to any industry.
A lot of what is going on right now is debt-financed speculation, and the losers will leave behind empty industrial buildings on deforested land in their wake.
there's a lot of work already done on understanding what makes factories safe or not.
whats the infrasound danger of a factory? how long can a new factory use emergency nat gas generators because they ignored the environmental regulations?
data center owners are much much more powerful than factory owners having the ear of the president, supreme court, and congress. if you tried to regulate one after it gets opened, youre screwed, and theyre gonna ignore your regulations
This is one heck of a straw man argument: “if you wanna ban datacenters but not factories they’re basically the same thing”.
The current datacenter boom isn’t general compute, but AI compute - a highly specialized form that’s not adaptive or recycled into other, demonstrably useful forms of compute should this end up being a highly speculative bubble or dead-end technology. The demonstrated environmental impacts are very real, and the reason they’re shoved through has everything to do with secrecy around their known impacts in an effort to get cheap land and government buy-in before locals protest the harms of the buildout.
As for a modern, highly automated factory like what China builds? At least then we get cheaper goods and services to buy while still creating jobs (repairfolk, technicians, roboticists, etc) as opposed to AI datacenters, which just slurp up resources while delivering chatbots that kill society’s best-paying jobs and careers and centralizing power under fewer hands.
So yeah, I’d be totally in favor of factories that build things and employ people, versus AI data centers that just hoover up resources and shunt costs to locals without consent.
> This is one heck of a straw man argument: “if you wanna ban datacenters but not factories they’re basically the same thing”.
The irony in this comment is that you are the one arguing against a strawman, much more so than GP. They never said they were basically the same thing. There's certainly some level of comparison though as GP laid out in their comment.
It's also basically impossible to extract taxes on the products of data centers. It seems like a way to drain a locality of value while providing nothing in return but slightly lower latencies for corporations.
As someone who lives in Maine (inland, mountains), I have two reasons why this make sense: 1) this state has a lot of natural wilderness that should stay untouched, the gulf of maine is the fastest warming body of water in the world. we feel global warming more than anyone, we dont need more of it. 2) electricity is extremely expensive here. also, the majority shareholder of the spanish company that owns the electric grid is the qatar government, so our electric grid is pretty much owned by qatar.
(For anyone not familiar with Bitcoin source, I can report that the green energy preference/requirement in the hash code is hidden very well. And that the non-benefits of holding Bitcoin in a third parties repository, or the micro-benefits of making a few transactions a year, are unusually minimal relative to the enormous global resource consumption. Not because crypto has to be so wasteful, but because the Bitcoin blockchain implementation has been an "entire-population-of-all-dinosaurs-that-ever-lived" efficiency lemon for most of its existence.)
If the factories only employed 50 people, polluted the earth at a much higher scale, and were mainly used to product fake cat videos and scam dating profiles, then yes I would support banning them too.
I support the ability of local jurisdictions to create laws that are intended to benefit it's citizens. If that means banning a particular new and pernicious development in their borders, then yes, of course I support that.
> would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts.
Has anyone actually done that?
Do you support a ban on tobacco? If yes, then what's different about your desire for this type of ban?
yeah, another way to put it: if you don't want factories, that's fine; just don't buy manufactured stuff .. the same with data centers, if you don't want data centers then don't go on the Internet because by doing so you're becoming part of the problem.
> If, given all that, you'd support factory construction but not data center construction, I'd be curious as to why.
Personally I'd support either/both, but I could easily see someone's else perspective being that you support the usage and selling/purchasing of whatever the factories make, but you don't feel the same about what the data centers provide. So regardless of impacts, in one case the tradeoffs feel OK, and in the other it doesn't, all because your personal preferences and opinions.
To be honest, it's a bit surprising this is even a question? Did you really not understand that people have different preferences in what exists and is available in a society, and especially near them?
No because the people who make car parts aren't promising to kill my livelihood and everyone else's.
The people who make car parts aren't telling me that the cars they build are likely to murder everyone I love.
The people who make car parts aren't writing long screeds about how if our dysfunctional government doesn't step up to implement a solution to the problems created by all the car parts, we're going to to see mass poverty and social chaos.
(To be fair, I don't believe all these forecasts by AI companies, but when they're making them, why on earth would I support letting them go about their business?)
If they produce large negative externalities like data centers do, then yes absolutely.
In a normal market, tech cos would have to pay for the messes they make (the negative externalities). With so much speculative financing available today, these costs are not being born by the companies creating them. Rather, random people (external parties) are forced to suck up higher electricity costs, noise, environmental degradation, new competition for water, non-employment of local people, oh yeah, and not much more to show for it than a proliferation of new forms of slop.
Tech guys: can’t you think of more economically useful products to launch?
Factories for car parts employ about 1000X more people per square foot than a data center and aren't actively contributing to decreasing the amount of jobs for people in a state.
So it's hard to get numbers here so I went looking for electricity usage figures for an automobile plant. This obviously depends on the size but the estimates I could find for a theoretical plant that produces 1000 vehicles a day are:
- 300-400GWh/year of electricity usage. It's significantly more for EVs, as an aside;
- Such a plant employes 2000 to 5000+ people.
Data centers also vary in size but I've seen estimates of 20-100MW being a typical range. 20MW run continuously is 175GWh/year.
So it seems like one large AI data center employs probably fewer than 50 people and uses as much electricity as a plant producing upwards of half a million cars per year. Those cars have a lot of utility, obviously, and employ a lot of people.
Let's be fair: AI data centers currently produce almost nothing of value and contribute almost nothing to the local or state economy. They're being built speculatively on the basis of a potential future value add that has yet to materialize.
My view is that the "value" AI data centers will add is for employers, by allowing them to fire people and suppress wages. That's the true use case. So, in other words, AI data centers represent negative jobs.
Five years from now we'll see studies and media reports on the relationship between how many jobs you can eliminate per MW of electricity. The added bonus is all the residents will be paying higher amounts for their electricity for that "privilege".
>For people who support this kind of ban, I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts.
They de-facto banned these things over the past decades by saddling them with requirements that make them non-competitive locally and/or globally while simultaneously opening up international trade. But they're in denial about this so they'll whine about how it's "not technically a ban" because hoops that are a non-starter to 99% can be jumped through at great cost when the 1% profitable enough to justify it example comes along.
AI (in its current form) just needs to get its act together and find efficient alternatives just like cryptocurrencies did.
Bitcoin mining farms were taking lots of electricity and were the ones getting shut down and there was little opposition to that and it didn't matter anyway since there were efficient alternative cryptocurrencies available right away that did not need more data centers and energy requirements.
Now AI just isn't efficient enough to refrain from building more data centers. This is clearly a software problem which is getting to the point that the energy requirements going to surpass Bitcoin alone. [0]
When a tech company builds an AI training datacenter in Alabama, does the model they train there get counted as a created capital asset that they then pay taxes on in that state.
They'll owe some tax from apportionment formula that doesn't really cover the datacenter's contribution to the value of the created model I think, but maybe that's wrong.
A factory that produces physical goods gets more straightforwardly taxed, though they often pit states against each other to reduce it to near zero or negative for bringing jobs.
I’m not particularly excited about construction on either of those but I will not pretend to have a fully formed opinion on “factory construction,” however one would define it. And either way it’s kind of immaterial to me, because 1) we are talking about data centers not factories and 2) what I’m seeing happen with the data centers being built has made me pretty against them so far: https://lailluminator.com/2025/11/22/meta-data-center-crashe...
Jurisdictions decline all sorts of developments when the proponent cannot demonstrate a sufficient public good.
Generation capacity is scarce at the moment, and governments have to decide if they would rather have affordable residential electricity or be home to the Grok anime slop generator.
AI seems like it would advance the power of the capitalist class over labor more than new factories.
AI is allied with the tech oligarch faction which has allied itself with the fascists.
Datacenter manufacturers seem to have, at least lately, been particularly underhanded in their attempts to force themselves upon communities that don't want them.
If they fail (e.g. due to the AI bubble bursting or a recession), a factory seems like it would be more likely to survive or at least leave a facility and equipment that is useful.
I feel like this is always the case with new technology. People had the same reaction to the invention of the printing press. New is scary. It doesn't mean there aren't valid concerns, but unfortunately this feels a bit like an inevitability. The focus shouldn't be on stopping it, but how to maximize the gains and minimize the losses to the local communities where these are being built.
You're not doing your side any favors by using the printing press of all things as your comparison. People very legitimately don't want things like fracking in their area even IF it brings a boatload of jobs due to the costs on communities.
Datacenters might not be as potentially destructive, but they're also a massive net negative for the community in many real world ways. If you want them to "maximize gains", then the answer is "tax them more" which, shockingly, turns into a functional ban because somewhere else is taxing them less.
I think legislation like this is much more about making sure that they're never even considered by the big AI companies. OpenAI and Anthropic, when looking to build a new center, will see that there would be headaches trying to get a datacenter built, so they instead just focus on one of the other 49 states.
I think they're playing it safe. Data centers are at their peak of their hype cycle and it totally makes sense for Maine to place a temporary moratorium (it expires Nov. 2027) on new centers until the industry is a bit more stable
It's far from a blanket ban. Nobody here reads passed the (admittedly, misleading) title
It's a temporary moratorium (on data centers requiring over 20 megawatts) until 2027 to give them time to research and plan for how to do data centers in an environmentally responsible way
> The bill also creates the Maine Data Center Coordination Council, and instructs the council to provide strategic input, facilitate planning considerations and evaluate policy tools to address data center opportunities.
This seems like smart and thoughtful policy and exactly the kind of stuff we should hope for from our elected officials.
How long until the AI companies start charging more to people who use AI services, but live in areas that do things like this?
NIMBY causes energy prices to go up in areas that won't allow drilling, refining, nuclear or nat gas development, or power lines. When will the same happen for things like AI services?
AI results are generally easy to transport - just a few bytes over some fibre. Electric is harder to ship, there is only so much you can put in a wire (even high voltage DC). Widgets (car parts...) are even harder to ship and take longer which is why big things often get final assembly locally.
Honestly would be kind of cool if a locality actually had that much power. It could lead to an enclave of people who still value thinking for themselves. In practice I doubt bigcorps would turn down the customers.
Lol the corpos having too much power over consumers is because the local residents wont submit?
You assume the company cant charge higher anyway out of the goodness of their hearts?
This is what unregulated capitalism looks like with no govt oversight.
It's not a ban. It's a temporary moratorium (on data centers requiring over 20 megawatts) until 2027 to give them time to research and plan for how to do data centers in an environmentally responsible way
> The bill also creates the Maine Data Center Coordination Council, and instructs the council to provide strategic input, facilitate planning considerations and evaluate policy tools to address data center opportunities.
data centers drive up the cost of power. basic supply and demand.
instead of blocking data centers, we need to scale up energy production. the solution is to get rid of all the red tape that makes it so impossible to build in America.
quality of life metrics are highly correlated to the availability of energy.
Why? Why are progressive being regressive about this? What exactly is so wrong with data centers? They use electricity? Then just demand more power plants not some NIMBY bullshit that will just result in data centers being made in other countries. It’s not like they’re polluting anything. What exactly is so terrible about servers running quietly in a building.
> The bill gained traction after residents in Wiscasset and Lewiston successfully opposed data center proposals over water usage and safety concerns.
"Water usage" and especially "safety" are bullshit arguments against building new data centers - in particular the idea that data centers use a lot of water was popularized by the freelance prestige journalist Karen Hao, who got a lot of her facts egregiouly, sloppily wrong in her reporting about AI data centers. This is either retarded environmentalism unconcerned with facts; or the actual motivation to prevent data center construction is some kind of more nebulous distrust of big tech or AI companies or concern that AI will take people's jobs.
Maybe they will. They are not banning them permanently. They are placing a moratorium until 2027 so they can research and plan for how to do data centers responsibly
> The bill also creates the Maine Data Center Coordination Council, and instructs the council to provide strategic input, facilitate planning considerations and evaluate policy tools to address data center opportunities.
Hate to sound all California, but some restrictions on datacenters and similar power/water users seem reasonable. Datacenters in particular vs. factories because of the nature of datacenter inputs and outputs.
---
Will the DC cover the costs of its own expanded power generation needs? Are residential and small business users protected?
Can the water system handle the increased usage in a given area?
What physical discharges are created? Waste heat air, waste heat water, etc?
What kind of noise will be generated? Are there limits on use of onsite fossil fuel power generation?
This has gotta be the dumbest issue in politics today. By far, the biggest use of data centers right now is on streaming Netflix and YouTube and stuff, but you don't see any protests about that.
In terms of square footage there are few "businesses" which consume more resources (water, power, tax credits) and produce less onging local employment. More states and municipalities are going to do this, and rightly so.
It's not plain banning. It's a moratorium until 2027. I think it's sensible policy given this craze is at the peak of a hype cycle and there's been a lot of investigative reporting on shady deals around hyperscaler infrastructure
The people (through their elected representatives) have a right to do this. It is stupid, in my opinion, but they have every right to do so. If this is what they want, they should have it.
Personally, I see little reason to ban new taxpayers with few-to-none negative externalities from moving into your state, but what do i know?
>Maine will go bankrupt?
No it’s a bunch of poor old stock Yankees. They have no money but they are still fiscally solvent.
>Maine will turn into a barren backwater?
It’s already a backwater. The goal is to keep it that way.
>There will be no jobs?
Unless working as a fisherman for half the year or a bartender for 3 months in the summer is counted as a job then nothing changes.
Maine has always been out of the way and poor. I doubt this bill will change much one way or the other. As per the local idiom: you can’t get there from here.
There are already no jobs, it is already a barren backwater as compared to most other states. Other than the tourism options, Maine doesn't have a lot going.
If Maine passes this moratorium, and then starts accusing developers of malicious compliance for cancelling their projects instead of redesigning against the 20 megawatt limit, I'll definitely line up to make fun of them. My sense is that this isn't what's happening, and the Maine legislators understand and intend for this policy to discourage datacenter investment altogether.
That seems fair. When these data centers are built elsewhere, people in Maine should be charged higher prices for the services delivered by these data centers.
This shouldn't be read as a carefully considered policy with upsides and downsides. It's obviously silly to just ban datacenters from a policy perspective.
Read this instead as, people hate this shit. They don't want datacenters, they don't want AI, they don't feel like those things are doing anything for them.
You will win the policy debate by saying:
"a datacenter uses just as much electricity and provides just as many jobs as a car parts factory, so it's silly to ban the one and not the other when you can just as easily examine the externalities of the datacenter and blah blah blah"
But you will be missing the point, which is that people see building car parts as a solid, upstanding thing which has tangible and direct benefits to people; whereas building an AI datacenter means allowing some rich California surveillance czar to suck the water and power from your local community so that they can steal your job, fracture your community, and impoverish your family. One is good and one is bad and the voter's choice is to do the good thing and not the bad thing.
Even if car parts factories pollute more than datacenters do.
FFS did anybody in this thread read passed the title?
It's not just a plain ban. It's a moratorium until 2027 for data centers requiring over 20 megawatts. The temporary moratorium gives it time to build the infrastructure necessary to roll out data centers in an environmentally responsible way:
> The bill also creates the Maine Data Center Coordination Council, and instructs the council to provide strategic input, facilitate planning considerations and evaluate policy tools to address data center opportunities.
If they think this is progress, I call that a catastrophic failure. The other party has nearly started WW3, but let’s make sure that a state no one wanted a data center in can’t have one. Great strides for the progressive community. A single non-win.
Such a law illustrates the beauty of federalism. Texas and other states can have them if they want them! Maine has not nearly as much space and much more natural beauty to protect [per square mile], so it can and maybe should have a different set of rules. That's cool.
This is a recipe for creating dead retiree states. Just NIMBY everything, NIMBY the power sources[1] [2], then complain about a lack of power so NIMBY any type of new industrial <anything>.
Now do this for housing, new sources of water anything a person younger than 40 would need and you basically get a state full of retirees..and oh would you look at that! [3].
Now the question is, why wouldn't all states eventually do this with the way our population pyramid is looking? It's basically rabid conservation and tragedy of the commons writ large.
[1]: https://www.mainepublic.org/politics/2025-04-08/bill-removin...
[2]: https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/maine-voters-reject-q...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
Don't know why people think Texas doesn't have natural beauty. It's a huge state.
I'm from Nevada, another state that people presume is all desert. (Really, it's all mountains.)
The only part of Texas I've driven is between Austin and S Antonio. It was perhaps the least-beautiful wilderness I've driven through. It really did just feel like desert and billboards - like if Walmart was a highway.
But I also presume Texas marketing itself as a less-regulated alternative (e.g. to California) is why it's easy to imagine Texas wanting infrastructure that Maine might not.
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Folks have been conditioned to consider the deserts of West Texas, especially the Permian Basin, to be wastelands with no redeeming value.
Personally, while it isn't my favorite landscape or even my favorite desert landscape, I still think it is a landscape with intrinsic value and beauty.
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Yeah, sorry that wasn't intended as a slight to Texas. Texas just does have a lot of barren landscape where datacenters wouldn't offend as much. I modified it to make that clear. Also, energy is playing a role here.
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I've driven through all of Texas twice, and had to spend time in Austin and Houston for work, but never had to live there, so I'd like to think I'm informed without being biased.
Besides the heavily oak covered hill country west of Austin it's pretty much the ugliest landscape in the country. I will admit the west Texas desert is less ugly than the desert of southern Arizona/eastern California, but north/east Texas is the flattest, least interesting part of the Mississippi basin (Nebraska/Kansas/Oklahoma are similarly meh but you don't have the insane humidity).
Because it's Republican, obviously.
yes but they likely won't build datacenters by destroying national parks would they?
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And abolishing ICE! Why should states be forced to host armies they don't agree with?
Strange that suddenly they don’t seem to like this concept so much anymore :)
“I support the right of $state to ban $thing”
Wait, not like that!
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They sure have a right to enact policies that keep them economically & demographically irrelevant.
https://cdn.xcancel.com/pic/orig/638FA4CD35438/media%2FF5jNt...
Data Centers would have made them sooooooo rich, very silly policies indeed, they’d be swimming in money
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I live in Maine. Commercial power is crazy expensive. I don't know why you would build an AI datacenter here in the first place. As an obsessive self-hoster, I've researched building one, and there is no universe in which it makes sense. New Hampshire and Massachusetts are so nearby latency-wise.
Abundant access to a source of cooling can help offset high grid prices. Well places centres can a ton of money that way.
Even in inefficient data centers, cooling is a minority of the power expense. Chasing a few percent of better cooling efficiency at the expense of a few percent more expensive power is a net negative.
Cheap power is much more cost effective than the smaller efficiency bump you get from cold weather -- and you can also get both by locating in the midwest or northwest. Hyperscalers build here for these reasons.
Power is not the most expensive part of data center lifetime cost; especially these days when you're filling them with several billion dollars of nvidia chips. It's still an important consideration of course, but not the only one.
I don't know if that's really true. Given realistic life cycles of equipment (~10 years, not 3 as commonly believed) the operating power is going to be 75-80% of the TCO, or more.
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I know little about this region. Why would it be unreasonably more expensive to build on one side of the state line than another?
I don't know about this particular situation (NH and MA seem to have expensive power as well), but you can have significantly different costs on one side of the line or the other for regulatory reasons. State regulations can affect the cost of business significantly, and electricity is no exception.
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They are very dependent on natural gas and they also heavy environmental protections/pollution regulation that makes it hard to build stuff like pipelines and, hence, makes electricity more expensive compared to states with less environmental protections.
As has been repeatedly demonstrated[1], it is the presence of new, large consumers that drives down the cost of bulk power by amortizing the infrastructure investments.
Maine voters are, of course, notorious bozos in this field, having voted in a plebiscite in 2021 to cancel the link to Quebec Hydro, which was already substantially completed.
1: For example LBNL's latest banger: Factors influencing recent trends in retail electricity prices in the United States, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104061902...
This is so ignorant it hurts. The same exact proposition was voted down in New Hampshire years earlier, because the transmission line goes straight through natural forests, to Massachusetts, and has little to do with the state other than chopping down a bunch of trees. Neither Maine nor New Hampshire have an extra $1 billion to waste on enhancing the grid mainly for the benefit of southern New England states.
Neither Maine nor New Hampshire voters are "bozos" for voting it down. The whole ordeal even prompted Maine voters to establish a new law to stop foreign investors from influencing local referendums because Hydro Quebec spent so much money trying to sway the vote.
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Do you have any links to support this? Because the commonality of all arguments _against_ has been that they make water and power crazy expensive for everyone that has to live close to the newly opened datacenters, while the DC operator enjoys subsidized land use tax, water and power.
"already substantially completed" isn't accurate. $450m of the eventual $1.65b cost had been spent at that point - so less than half.
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Why on earth did they do that? Linking to a power station you didn't have to build seems like a no brainer. Was the deal that bad?
This is a natural response to the excessive pushiness and underhandedness that's been used to build many of these new datacenters, often in direct conflict with the wishes of the locals. Maybe the firms paying to get them built should take a more diplomatic approach instead of trying to railroad projects through.
Ironically railroads almost always got their way in the past.
Railroads were incredibly useful for the entire population.
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The actual language (I think): https://legislature.maine.gov/legis/bills/getPDF.asp?paper=H...
It explains the intent (to protect consumers/grid from price changes and fluctuation), and bans 20MW+ loads. They forgot to define load, so a behind-the-meter datacenter (zero net load on the grid) still would likely not get permitted even though it does not violate the intent of the law, which is a bit odd.
The moratorium is also only until Nov 2027.
I think the moratorium is a small part of this bill. I think the most important part is the creation of the Maine Data Center Coordination Council.
The title on this very partisan site is quite misleading.
From the bill text establishing a council to figure it out:
> The council shall evaluate issues related to data centers located or proposed to be located in the State, with the goals of protecting ratepayers, maintaining electric grid reliability, minimizing environmental impacts and enabling responsible and appropriately sited economic development.
https://legislature.maine.gov/legis/bills/getPDF.asp?paper=H...
For people who support this kind of ban, I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts.
Like data centers, factories use a lot of power -- which drives up electricity bills -- and their construction can have local environmental impacts. Data centers have a reputation for not providing too many local jobs, but modern factories are often highly automated and also don't provide too many local jobs.
If, given all that, you'd support factory construction but not data center construction, I'd be curious as to why.
> modern factories are often highly automated and also don't provide too many local jobs.
The factories in Maine employ thousands of people. Bath Iron Works alone has over 7k employees.
The Lewiston datacenter that was planned to be built was expected to employ less than 30.
Was just about to say the same, but without the numbers. Thanks for providing. People aren't stupid and they find (AI) datacenters to be a net minus to their local communities.
"We are for the jobs the comet provides" - Don't Look up.
I'm not trying to be facile here but let's be honest the environmental concerns are silly. I don't want to hear about electricity shortages from a state hellbent on NIMBY-ing itself out of power[1],[2].
I understand people are threatened by this technology, the tech CEOs' loud pronouncements can cause that and that these arguments are basically threat responses. I buy that. But to hear otherwise smart people say non-chemical industrial factories are a serious environmental threat but if they provided more jobs it would be fine while everyone nods along, feels like I'm living in an Adam McKay satire.
[1]: https://www.mainepublic.org/politics/2025-04-08/bill-removin...
[2]: https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/maine-voters-reject-q...
My favorite class of HN comment: bringing concreteness to a vibes fight.
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Bingo. Data centers are a net negative wherever they are. Giant, employ far fewer people than a grocery store after they’re built, crank up electricity costs, use tons of water, air pollution if it’s self-powered, noise pollution (it’s really worth watching Benn Jordan’s video on infrasound,) ugly… the only local entities that win are the landowner and the municipality that collects taxes on them. Though I’ve seen some astonishingly misinformed politicians offering big tax incentives for data centers not realizing that they employ so few people. From what I hear, even much of the construction is done by flown-in contractors with experience doing it elsewhere.
The people that own these data centers have only themselves to blame. They’ve been obnoxious, at scale, for so long that damn near everybody knows how much they suck, and they’re losing their ability to railroad locals into eating their turd sandwiches.
Edit: I know it’s gauche to talk about votes here, but this comment trended upward consistently for 45 minutes. In much less than 10 minutes, it collected more than half that amount in downvotes. I’d eat my hat if there wasn’t some kind of organized/automated brigading happening here.
Edit again: Now close to 70% gone. Not exactly surprising given the forum, but pretty depressing nonetheless.
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I'm guessing the population of Lewiston would welcome an employer of 30 jobs
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Less than 30 makes no sense. It's easily in the hundred if you account for shifts and the specialized jobs required.
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The major data centers being built for AI are much more energy-hungry than car manufacturing, and they're being built at a pace that the US energy grid simply cannot accommodate in the short term... or quite possibly even the long term, considering the US's extreme aversion to expanding nuclear power.
Also, you can call it Luddism if you want, but a car factory is going to bring a lot more net benefit to the average person than an AI data center. Motorized transportation is essential to modern civilization, fancy chat-bots are not.
I wonder why this doesn’t get us frustrated with the grid, not data centers. Delays on interconnects for renewables and offshore wind both seem pretty self inflicted.
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> AI are much more energy-hungry than car manufacturing
This is not even remotely true[1]. Large auto plants use on the order of 200–250 megawatts of power, which is either on par with a data center or slightly more than a data center depending on the size and how cooling is handled.
[1] https://www.energystar.gov/sites/default/files/tools/Industr...
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And a data centre brings absolutely no economic benefit whatsoever to its local community, unlike something like an auto plant that creates entirely new supporting industries to support it and its employees.
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I would argue that with the rise of coding and debugging agents, the AI data centers provide (or will in the near future) even more benefit than a car factory, in terms of digital infrastructure. These technologies are just a lot more invisible so we don't realize how important they are.
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It's a temporary ban (until 2027) and I think it totally makes sense to do so during a boom that has no strong evidence of long-term sustainability. I would absolutely support temporary bans for industries at the peaks of their hype cycles
Bad dichotomy they aren't saying no to data centers to spite them. They are saying no because that data centers are a major public drain and net negative on public resources.
Often they don't pay high taxes nor do they employ large numbers of people. Most of the money made by leeching of public power infrastructure and cheap electricity and export the profits to somewhere else. They are building and selling a non tangible good i.e where do you tax it?
Their is also noise pollution concerns which can destroy communities near by and water usage concerns. These plants drain aquaifers.
I just think you haven't substantially thought about the effect these have on the actual people living nearby. AI being .000001cent cheaper just doesnt help people that much
> Often they don't pay high taxes nor do they employ large numbers of people... They are building and selling a non tangible good i.e where do you tax it?
You could easily charge a property tax (could even have a higher rate for data centers, specifically), or an excise tax on number of servers, or a tax on excess energy/water consumption. There's lots of options here, if that's what you're worried about.
> Their is also noise pollution concerns which can destroy communities near by and water usage concerns. These plants drain aquaifers.
Factories also do both of these things. They're noisy, often have emissions much worse than anything coming from a datacenter, and most factories use large quantities of water as well.
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Why not just require factories /data centers invest in solar/wind/renewables to cover their power usage.
Banning is so childish when there is easy solutions.
They had that opportunity, to build up the infrastructure necessary to operate, to build in places where they wouldn't reduce people's quality of life. They chose to do everything they could to squeeze out some extra profit. Requiring good behavior in one specific way wouldn't be sufficient when dealing with such obviously bad actors. They can try again to get the right to build once they've won back the trust of Mainers.
You can call it childish if you want, but a lot of people are unhappy with the economy in general and rising costs in particular. Energy costs are a big part of those rising costs and, like it or not, the AI vendors and their data center projects are an easy target.
I don't think it's necessarily a "backlash" to all the hype but the hype certainly made them a target
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Mainers hate seeing wind and solar plants- they consider them to be a massive eyesore.
The people of Maine won't consider "We'll build something you don't like but we'll offset it by building something else you don't like" as a compromise.
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Because we already do. Its why electricity costs money. In my area big consumers and producers already pay through the nose to tie into the grid.
What we _should_ be asking is where all the money we paid for infrastructure and upkeep went for the last two decades of decreasing power usage.
The title is misleading. It's not a "ban", just a "moratorium" until November 2027
And your "easy solution" has had a lot of research debunking its efficacy and a lot of holes in it.
https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/news/carbon-offsets-have-fa...
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Can we trust them to actually do it? Not to find some loophole? Or to wait until they are established and then lobby to have the requirement removed?
> Why not just require factories /data centers invest in solar/wind/renewables to cover their power usage.
That still doesn't cover making the data centers provide value to the people who live there.
Maybe I misunderstood, but isn't that what they did? Here is the max. power you can draw from the grid, feel free to be more efficient or to produce your own electricity.
That isn't the factories job - that is your utilities job.
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I would argue it's childish for data centers operators to act so entitled. This is Maine's decision to make.
Imagine the additional space needed to power a scaled DC with solar. I think the number of people opposing the construction would increase when they release its half the county.
But what's an extra 500 acres between friends.
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Why? Because:
1. That renewable energy development is supposed to allow a _reduction_ in fossil fuel consumption, not an increase in wattage used.
2. That investment should already be happening, not subject to some future plans of some holding company or billionaire investor. Keeping global warming at bay is no longer some kind of future concern; and we've begun to see some initial effects of it in recent years - drouts, fires, various kinds of biosphere degradation etc.
I imagine Maine would support bans on both, yes. Most of their economy is tourism and being known for their coasts and forests, I don't think anything that could possibly have environmental impacts to support industries/businesses that are primarily not housed in Maine would be seen as a good thing.
The more interesting question to me is do you support full bans on these things in states that could easily allow them with strict regulations, knowing that they will instead likely be built in places with no regulations?
I'm not sure how I'd feel about a ban on factories, but I think cars, as bad as they are in terms of environmental effects, are far less harmful to our society than "AI" companies and the big-tech companies that are intertwined with them (e.g., Google and Facebook).
On the flip side, I'd ask the question: if someone supports banning these data centers, why not support just banning the AI companies entirely?
> On the flip side, I'd ask the question: if someone supports banning these data centers, why not support just banning the AI companies entirely?
I suspect we'll be seeing more and more of this sentiment in the coming years in one form or another.
> I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts.
Those factories employ people.
> Like data centers, factories use a lot of power -- which drives up electricity bills
No. They have nowhere near the power consumption density unless it's a metallurgical facility doing aluminum smelting or scrap recycling in arc furnaces.
Yes, I would support a ban on new factories for, say, slot machines.
Slot machines are (ab)used by relatively few people.
OTOH the proportion of Mainers who already use or (say by 2030) will be using AI routinely in their daily lives is likely around 50 per cent. Which makes the initiative a bit of an exercise in political posturing and hypocrisy.
Reminds me a bit of all the anti-nuclear countries of Europe which nevertheless do not mind importing nuclear-generated power from their neighbours if needed.
I would definitely support tech companies charging residents and especially government offices and legislatures of such states an extra fee. As Nicholas Nassim Taleb says, having skin in the game is important, and that would at least be a form of skin in the game.
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For people who don't support this kind of ban, I'd ask: What's the alternative? _Requiring_ that states house data centers?
In what universe is requiring them the only alternative to banning them? The actual alternative is obvious: not banning them.
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Taxing them to account for the externalities they bring.
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I see no need for a false dichotomy of "require" vs "ban". There aren't laws requiring a state to have lumber mills, or outright banning them. There are many alternatives with a wide spectrum of attributes:
- Limiting the rates of builds allowed (e.g. total area per year, density per area per year).
- Requiring that the companies involved offset their resource usage in any number of ways (could expand this to three paragraphs on its own).
- Placing restrictions on proximity to $THINGS, whether that's residential areas, parks, you name it.
These are just the first three examples that come to mind, and I am confident that people smarter than me could come up with more.
In free societies, bans should be the last weapon of choice. By default, any activity should be allowed, many of the allowed activies should be regulated and/or taxed, but outright bans should be very well justified.
Otherwise you will end up with a chaotic-authoritarian system banning whatever the current Zeitgeist feels icky about, which in the era of social networks means twenty different things each year.
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People are worried about their power and water costs rising.
I think this is a legit worry. The fact of the matter is that local governments often don't care about their constituencies and sell them out in order to boost tax revenue of new business moving in, and this creates a race to the bottom.
I would love a situation in which datacenters also paid for their own power upgrades and infrastructure so that locals did not experience high bills. That would be the best case scenario.
But barring that, banning the data center seems like a legit second base case scenario.
I heard one rationale that has nothing to do with factories > AI data centers. It is the only lever that legislators currently have. They want some bargaining chip to get more control over AI firms.
It's not an environmental issue, data centers are overleveraged in the US due to a belief that they need to win the "AI race". The government is putting their hand into the market to try and shift this balance, when they should be creating basic infrastructure and services.
Your profile indicates you're head of engineering at an AI startup. Can you provide a reason why someone who isn't financially motivated by their stake in an AI company should support new data center development for AI? Especially someone who lives in the area and will be disproportionately negatively affected by the construction and operation?
>For people who support this kind of ban, I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts.
If car parts factories produced nothing, employed no one and were made with equipment that will get outdated in a couple of years... Oh, gee, I dunno, it's a tough one.
Why not cut straight to the jugular and ask them how they feel about raising local taxes to fund stadiums? Then ask them how they feel about beef and almond farming if they pivot to water as the next complaint. FWIW stadiums create about twice as many jobs as the current crop of datacenters so there's that I guess but the bang per tax dollar is still godawful.
I think a temporary ban makes sense when there are market bubbles driving investment that has a high likelihood of being abandoned shortly thereafter... and I think that could apply to any industry.
A lot of what is going on right now is debt-financed speculation, and the losers will leave behind empty industrial buildings on deforested land in their wake.
there's a lot of work already done on understanding what makes factories safe or not.
whats the infrasound danger of a factory? how long can a new factory use emergency nat gas generators because they ignored the environmental regulations?
data center owners are much much more powerful than factory owners having the ear of the president, supreme court, and congress. if you tried to regulate one after it gets opened, youre screwed, and theyre gonna ignore your regulations
This is one heck of a straw man argument: “if you wanna ban datacenters but not factories they’re basically the same thing”.
The current datacenter boom isn’t general compute, but AI compute - a highly specialized form that’s not adaptive or recycled into other, demonstrably useful forms of compute should this end up being a highly speculative bubble or dead-end technology. The demonstrated environmental impacts are very real, and the reason they’re shoved through has everything to do with secrecy around their known impacts in an effort to get cheap land and government buy-in before locals protest the harms of the buildout.
As for a modern, highly automated factory like what China builds? At least then we get cheaper goods and services to buy while still creating jobs (repairfolk, technicians, roboticists, etc) as opposed to AI datacenters, which just slurp up resources while delivering chatbots that kill society’s best-paying jobs and careers and centralizing power under fewer hands.
So yeah, I’d be totally in favor of factories that build things and employ people, versus AI data centers that just hoover up resources and shunt costs to locals without consent.
> This is one heck of a straw man argument: “if you wanna ban datacenters but not factories they’re basically the same thing”.
The irony in this comment is that you are the one arguing against a strawman, much more so than GP. They never said they were basically the same thing. There's certainly some level of comparison though as GP laid out in their comment.
It's also basically impossible to extract taxes on the products of data centers. It seems like a way to drain a locality of value while providing nothing in return but slightly lower latencies for corporations.
As someone who lives in Maine (inland, mountains), I have two reasons why this make sense: 1) this state has a lot of natural wilderness that should stay untouched, the gulf of maine is the fastest warming body of water in the world. we feel global warming more than anyone, we dont need more of it. 2) electricity is extremely expensive here. also, the majority shareholder of the spanish company that owns the electric grid is the qatar government, so our electric grid is pretty much owned by qatar.
One must also consider the other impacts such as water use and noise pollution.
It's self-selecting. Pro-growth states will flourish, attract intellectual talent. Support auxiliary careers, and grow their educational institutions.
The rest will fallow.
> For people who support this kind of ban, I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts.
Car parts factory?
With the an (energy-use + water-use + land-use)/employee ratio comparable to an AI data center?
I did not know those existed.
But, yes. I think in that case, the right answer is "Yes".
A pro-corporate viewpoint, without calculation of tradeoffs, reminds me of Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk's blatant illogic: Bitcoin means green energy!
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56844813
(For anyone not familiar with Bitcoin source, I can report that the green energy preference/requirement in the hash code is hidden very well. And that the non-benefits of holding Bitcoin in a third parties repository, or the micro-benefits of making a few transactions a year, are unusually minimal relative to the enormous global resource consumption. Not because crypto has to be so wasteful, but because the Bitcoin blockchain implementation has been an "entire-population-of-all-dinosaurs-that-ever-lived" efficiency lemon for most of its existence.)
Think i'd be ok with a year and a half halt for things in general every now and again.
If the factories only employed 50 people, polluted the earth at a much higher scale, and were mainly used to product fake cat videos and scam dating profiles, then yes I would support banning them too.
> For people who support this kind of ban
I support the ability of local jurisdictions to create laws that are intended to benefit it's citizens. If that means banning a particular new and pernicious development in their borders, then yes, of course I support that.
> would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts.
Has anyone actually done that?
Do you support a ban on tobacco? If yes, then what's different about your desire for this type of ban?
Car parts are tangible. Even if the product doesn't stay onshore forever, it has to enrich people onshore in order to move.
All the output of a datacenter effectively goes offshore immediately.
It depends what the factory is producing.
yeah, another way to put it: if you don't want factories, that's fine; just don't buy manufactured stuff .. the same with data centers, if you don't want data centers then don't go on the Internet because by doing so you're becoming part of the problem.
It isn't necessary to evenly distribute industry across the entire country out of pettiness.
Maine doesn't tell Iowa they should grow their own lobsters, they simply trade them.
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> If, given all that, you'd support factory construction but not data center construction, I'd be curious as to why.
Personally I'd support either/both, but I could easily see someone's else perspective being that you support the usage and selling/purchasing of whatever the factories make, but you don't feel the same about what the data centers provide. So regardless of impacts, in one case the tradeoffs feel OK, and in the other it doesn't, all because your personal preferences and opinions.
To be honest, it's a bit surprising this is even a question? Did you really not understand that people have different preferences in what exists and is available in a society, and especially near them?
No because the people who make car parts aren't promising to kill my livelihood and everyone else's.
The people who make car parts aren't telling me that the cars they build are likely to murder everyone I love.
The people who make car parts aren't writing long screeds about how if our dysfunctional government doesn't step up to implement a solution to the problems created by all the car parts, we're going to to see mass poverty and social chaos.
(To be fair, I don't believe all these forecasts by AI companies, but when they're making them, why on earth would I support letting them go about their business?)
If they produce large negative externalities like data centers do, then yes absolutely.
In a normal market, tech cos would have to pay for the messes they make (the negative externalities). With so much speculative financing available today, these costs are not being born by the companies creating them. Rather, random people (external parties) are forced to suck up higher electricity costs, noise, environmental degradation, new competition for water, non-employment of local people, oh yeah, and not much more to show for it than a proliferation of new forms of slop.
Tech guys: can’t you think of more economically useful products to launch?
> new competition for water
Data centers use minuscule amount of water compared to factories that make physical goods.
This whole conversation is happening due to data centers existing…
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If theyre a grift that takes from the community and taxpayers like that foxconn "factory" at mt pleasant.
Its not being a nimby if no one in the area benefits and all the externalities are being borne by them
Factories for car parts employ about 1000X more people per square foot than a data center and aren't actively contributing to decreasing the amount of jobs for people in a state.
So it's hard to get numbers here so I went looking for electricity usage figures for an automobile plant. This obviously depends on the size but the estimates I could find for a theoretical plant that produces 1000 vehicles a day are:
- 300-400GWh/year of electricity usage. It's significantly more for EVs, as an aside;
- Such a plant employes 2000 to 5000+ people.
Data centers also vary in size but I've seen estimates of 20-100MW being a typical range. 20MW run continuously is 175GWh/year.
So it seems like one large AI data center employs probably fewer than 50 people and uses as much electricity as a plant producing upwards of half a million cars per year. Those cars have a lot of utility, obviously, and employ a lot of people.
Let's be fair: AI data centers currently produce almost nothing of value and contribute almost nothing to the local or state economy. They're being built speculatively on the basis of a potential future value add that has yet to materialize.
My view is that the "value" AI data centers will add is for employers, by allowing them to fire people and suppress wages. That's the true use case. So, in other words, AI data centers represent negative jobs.
Five years from now we'll see studies and media reports on the relationship between how many jobs you can eliminate per MW of electricity. The added bonus is all the residents will be paying higher amounts for their electricity for that "privilege".
>For people who support this kind of ban, I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts.
They de-facto banned these things over the past decades by saddling them with requirements that make them non-competitive locally and/or globally while simultaneously opening up international trade. But they're in denial about this so they'll whine about how it's "not technically a ban" because hoops that are a non-starter to 99% can be jumped through at great cost when the 1% profitable enough to justify it example comes along.
AI (in its current form) just needs to get its act together and find efficient alternatives just like cryptocurrencies did.
Bitcoin mining farms were taking lots of electricity and were the ones getting shut down and there was little opposition to that and it didn't matter anyway since there were efficient alternative cryptocurrencies available right away that did not need more data centers and energy requirements.
Now AI just isn't efficient enough to refrain from building more data centers. This is clearly a software problem which is getting to the point that the energy requirements going to surpass Bitcoin alone. [0]
[0] https://www.theverge.com/climate-change/676528/ai-data-cente...
When a tech company builds an AI training datacenter in Alabama, does the model they train there get counted as a created capital asset that they then pay taxes on in that state.
They'll owe some tax from apportionment formula that doesn't really cover the datacenter's contribution to the value of the created model I think, but maybe that's wrong.
A factory that produces physical goods gets more straightforwardly taxed, though they often pit states against each other to reduce it to near zero or negative for bringing jobs.
I’m not particularly excited about construction on either of those but I will not pretend to have a fully formed opinion on “factory construction,” however one would define it. And either way it’s kind of immaterial to me, because 1) we are talking about data centers not factories and 2) what I’m seeing happen with the data centers being built has made me pretty against them so far: https://lailluminator.com/2025/11/22/meta-data-center-crashe...
It's a reasonable choice given that DCs use massive amounts of power and provide very few permanent jobs.
I don't think they are comparable to car parts, maybe aluminum smelters though?
Jurisdictions decline all sorts of developments when the proponent cannot demonstrate a sufficient public good.
Generation capacity is scarce at the moment, and governments have to decide if they would rather have affordable residential electricity or be home to the Grok anime slop generator.
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Several reasons:
AI seems like it would advance the power of the capitalist class over labor more than new factories.
AI is allied with the tech oligarch faction which has allied itself with the fascists.
Datacenter manufacturers seem to have, at least lately, been particularly underhanded in their attempts to force themselves upon communities that don't want them.
If they fail (e.g. due to the AI bubble bursting or a recession), a factory seems like it would be more likely to survive or at least leave a facility and equipment that is useful.
I feel like this is always the case with new technology. People had the same reaction to the invention of the printing press. New is scary. It doesn't mean there aren't valid concerns, but unfortunately this feels a bit like an inevitability. The focus shouldn't be on stopping it, but how to maximize the gains and minimize the losses to the local communities where these are being built.
You're not doing your side any favors by using the printing press of all things as your comparison. People very legitimately don't want things like fracking in their area even IF it brings a boatload of jobs due to the costs on communities.
Datacenters might not be as potentially destructive, but they're also a massive net negative for the community in many real world ways. If you want them to "maximize gains", then the answer is "tax them more" which, shockingly, turns into a functional ban because somewhere else is taxing them less.
Yes but totally insane that so many on this site seem to approve such a ban.
If it meant that residents couldn't use AI, then the bill would be certainly dead.
Given that, the bill is just for show, and not actually serious.
What does this have with the use of AI? You can use the services of data centers thousands of miles away.
That's why we ship our "recycling" to the third world. Enjoy the upsides while exporting the downsides to someone else.
My comment is a statement on hypocrisy, and how if people had to bear the full cost of their decisions, they would decide differently.
Maine is codifying this hypocrisy for shallow minded political points.
I shouldn't drive a car if I don't want an oil derrick in my backyard.
Don't worry, atmospheric warming will do you in the same.
Did any major data centers want to locate in Maine, or is this just an empty gesture?
I think legislation like this is much more about making sure that they're never even considered by the big AI companies. OpenAI and Anthropic, when looking to build a new center, will see that there would be headaches trying to get a datacenter built, so they instead just focus on one of the other 49 states.
I think they're playing it safe. Data centers are at their peak of their hype cycle and it totally makes sense for Maine to place a temporary moratorium (it expires Nov. 2027) on new centers until the industry is a bit more stable
Empty ? Why call it that? It's proactive.
Also it's naive to think they announce their intention to move somewhere. They try to cover it and never tell a soul until it's a done deal.
I don't think a blanket (ban or acceptance) anything is a good approach for this issue.
It's far from a blanket ban. Nobody here reads passed the (admittedly, misleading) title
It's a temporary moratorium (on data centers requiring over 20 megawatts) until 2027 to give them time to research and plan for how to do data centers in an environmentally responsible way
> The bill also creates the Maine Data Center Coordination Council, and instructs the council to provide strategic input, facilitate planning considerations and evaluate policy tools to address data center opportunities.
This seems like smart and thoughtful policy and exactly the kind of stuff we should hope for from our elected officials.
How long until the AI companies start charging more to people who use AI services, but live in areas that do things like this?
NIMBY causes energy prices to go up in areas that won't allow drilling, refining, nuclear or nat gas development, or power lines. When will the same happen for things like AI services?
The most expensive AI stuff is the least latency sensitive. A coding agent could be on a different continent and you wouldn't really notice.
AI results are generally easy to transport - just a few bytes over some fibre. Electric is harder to ship, there is only so much you can put in a wire (even high voltage DC). Widgets (car parts...) are even harder to ship and take longer which is why big things often get final assembly locally.
Why would anybody outside of tech care if the cost of AI goes up?
Honestly would be kind of cool if a locality actually had that much power. It could lead to an enclave of people who still value thinking for themselves. In practice I doubt bigcorps would turn down the customers.
Lol the corpos having too much power over consumers is because the local residents wont submit? You assume the company cant charge higher anyway out of the goodness of their hearts?
This is what unregulated capitalism looks like with no govt oversight.
The people that ban this are they types that think the internet comes from their phone or electricity comes from the wall outlet.
Was Maine ever at risk of being overrun with data centers? Regardless, if the ban is what Maine voters want then more power to them.
It's not a ban. It's a temporary moratorium (on data centers requiring over 20 megawatts) until 2027 to give them time to research and plan for how to do data centers in an environmentally responsible way
> The bill also creates the Maine Data Center Coordination Council, and instructs the council to provide strategic input, facilitate planning considerations and evaluate policy tools to address data center opportunities.
> more power to them
that seems to be the idea!
Except that's wrong because greater electricity demand stimulates greater investment and leads to lower prices.
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Ban all data centers until they run off SMRs. Then you'll see nuclear take off like a rocket.
data centers drive up the cost of power. basic supply and demand.
instead of blocking data centers, we need to scale up energy production. the solution is to get rid of all the red tape that makes it so impossible to build in America.
quality of life metrics are highly correlated to the availability of energy.
Why? Why are progressive being regressive about this? What exactly is so wrong with data centers? They use electricity? Then just demand more power plants not some NIMBY bullshit that will just result in data centers being made in other countries. It’s not like they’re polluting anything. What exactly is so terrible about servers running quietly in a building.
> The bill gained traction after residents in Wiscasset and Lewiston successfully opposed data center proposals over water usage and safety concerns.
"Water usage" and especially "safety" are bullshit arguments against building new data centers - in particular the idea that data centers use a lot of water was popularized by the freelance prestige journalist Karen Hao, who got a lot of her facts egregiouly, sloppily wrong in her reporting about AI data centers. This is either retarded environmentalism unconcerned with facts; or the actual motivation to prevent data center construction is some kind of more nebulous distrust of big tech or AI companies or concern that AI will take people's jobs.
So what's the current data centers footprint in Maine?
Does the move benefit companies with existing DCs whose competition can no longer establish a region there?
Why not mandate that all data centers must be completely off the grid instead?
Maybe they will. They are not banning them permanently. They are placing a moratorium until 2027 so they can research and plan for how to do data centers responsibly
> The bill also creates the Maine Data Center Coordination Council, and instructs the council to provide strategic input, facilitate planning considerations and evaluate policy tools to address data center opportunities.
So they install noisy, loud fossil fuel generators that pollute the surrounding area.
That certainly is one way to do it, but I'm certain not the only one.
Hate to sound all California, but some restrictions on datacenters and similar power/water users seem reasonable. Datacenters in particular vs. factories because of the nature of datacenter inputs and outputs.
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Will the DC cover the costs of its own expanded power generation needs? Are residential and small business users protected?
Can the water system handle the increased usage in a given area?
What physical discharges are created? Waste heat air, waste heat water, etc?
What kind of noise will be generated? Are there limits on use of onsite fossil fuel power generation?
This has gotta be the dumbest issue in politics today. By far, the biggest use of data centers right now is on streaming Netflix and YouTube and stuff, but you don't see any protests about that.
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In terms of square footage there are few "businesses" which consume more resources (water, power, tax credits) and produce less onging local employment. More states and municipalities are going to do this, and rightly so.
One could absolutely design data centers that were energy positive and ecologically decent (with respects to pollution).
For a known amount of data enter power, dedicate 125% of power in solar and battery.
Need cooling? Use liquid geothermal loops. Or radiate energy back into space. We know frequencies that do not reflect in atmo.
Acoustic pollution is another area. Acoustic tiles, building plans, and natural noise barriers are also of utmost importance too.
We need more compute. Plain banning is not the way. Demanding highly ecological and conserving solutions is.
It's not plain banning. It's a moratorium until 2027. I think it's sensible policy given this craze is at the peak of a hype cycle and there's been a lot of investigative reporting on shady deals around hyperscaler infrastructure
For cooling you can also use a heat exchanger and dump it into a river or an ocean or so.
Closed loop heat exchange costs more electricity. It's not a free lunch that data center designers are overlooking.
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The people (through their elected representatives) have a right to do this. It is stupid, in my opinion, but they have every right to do so. If this is what they want, they should have it.
Personally, I see little reason to ban new taxpayers with few-to-none negative externalities from moving into your state, but what do i know?
Will a US state get the same kind of criticism a European country gets about push-back against big tech?
Maine will go bankrupt? Maine will turn into a barren backwater? There will be no jobs?
If it were a different state maybe but:
>Maine will go bankrupt? No it’s a bunch of poor old stock Yankees. They have no money but they are still fiscally solvent. >Maine will turn into a barren backwater? It’s already a backwater. The goal is to keep it that way. >There will be no jobs? Unless working as a fisherman for half the year or a bartender for 3 months in the summer is counted as a job then nothing changes.
Maine has always been out of the way and poor. I doubt this bill will change much one way or the other. As per the local idiom: you can’t get there from here.
There are already no jobs, it is already a barren backwater as compared to most other states. Other than the tourism options, Maine doesn't have a lot going.
With low fertility and little reason for anyone to move there the northeast will turn into a barren backwater.
If Maine passes this moratorium, and then starts accusing developers of malicious compliance for cancelling their projects instead of redesigning against the 20 megawatt limit, I'll definitely line up to make fun of them. My sense is that this isn't what's happening, and the Maine legislators understand and intend for this policy to discourage datacenter investment altogether.
Good. But will RAM prices go down again? I don't want to pay 2.5x as much as I did ~2 years ago, for the same piece of hardware ...
There are multiple factors at here which have now gone beyond datacenters.
1. Iran war has made the prices of both helium gas and energy to asian countries higher which is making ram production more expensive.
2. Samsung workers are in a protest (15 thousand workers)
3. Jevon's paradox (even after turboquant, we might be just scaling things up in demand perhaps)
4. Some providers have already signed up/locked up more expensive deals so there is a more baseline of higher
Do you have numbers for helium? Sure I've seen it mentioned, but is it even 1% of production cost right now?
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That seems fair. When these data centers are built elsewhere, people in Maine should be charged higher prices for the services delivered by these data centers.
This shouldn't be read as a carefully considered policy with upsides and downsides. It's obviously silly to just ban datacenters from a policy perspective.
Read this instead as, people hate this shit. They don't want datacenters, they don't want AI, they don't feel like those things are doing anything for them.
You will win the policy debate by saying:
"a datacenter uses just as much electricity and provides just as many jobs as a car parts factory, so it's silly to ban the one and not the other when you can just as easily examine the externalities of the datacenter and blah blah blah"
But you will be missing the point, which is that people see building car parts as a solid, upstanding thing which has tangible and direct benefits to people; whereas building an AI datacenter means allowing some rich California surveillance czar to suck the water and power from your local community so that they can steal your job, fracture your community, and impoverish your family. One is good and one is bad and the voter's choice is to do the good thing and not the bad thing.
Even if car parts factories pollute more than datacenters do.
FFS did anybody in this thread read passed the title?
It's not just a plain ban. It's a moratorium until 2027 for data centers requiring over 20 megawatts. The temporary moratorium gives it time to build the infrastructure necessary to roll out data centers in an environmentally responsible way:
> The bill also creates the Maine Data Center Coordination Council, and instructs the council to provide strategic input, facilitate planning considerations and evaluate policy tools to address data center opportunities.
This is a big win for the progressive community.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/25/datacenters-...
Nice to see some success for their ideas.
If they think this is progress, I call that a catastrophic failure. The other party has nearly started WW3, but let’s make sure that a state no one wanted a data center in can’t have one. Great strides for the progressive community. A single non-win.
The progressive community is not about progress, it's about being progressive.