Maine is about to become the first state to ban major new data centers
gadgetreview.com
gadgetreview.com
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...
Alongside it is a temporary (until Nov 2027) moratorium on data centers over 20 megawatts. This seems to be in place so they could establish a proper legal and environmental framework for building out data centers in the future.
This is exactly the kind of approach to legislation we should all hope our local representatives are competent enough to do.
California on the other hand… but they are clearly far from becoming a “dead state”
This too is the beauty of federalism. You want to live in a dead retiree state? You can. You want to live in a bustling industrial district? You can too. As long as you do things through proper democratic channels.
> Now do this for housing
But this bill is not about housing. This response makes as much sense as responding to a new law legalizing marijuana and saying "now do this for heroin, rape and murder."
All you get is ugly industrial sprawl.
Meanwhile CMP slow rolls connections to all the new Solar farms starting up trying to help our expensive power situation.
How is this like "tragedy of the commons"?
Good news: lots of choice.
Sorry people aren't bending over backwards to help your AI start-up get VC funding, but maybe if y'all were a bit more honest, people wouldn't hate the infrastructure you're desperately trying to install in their backyard. Because it sure as shit isn't going in yours, is it?
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.
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.
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).
or…have you never been?
Why would anyone want to go to Texas to build a datacenter and worry about the cooling, when they could pick any other state?
https://cdn.xcancel.com/pic/orig/638FA4CD35438/media%2FF5jNt...
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...
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.
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.
Up north comes with it's own issues for Datacenters. Winter low humidity (kills cable/wire insulation), chiller freeze protection can get pretty complex to set up properly (with failures causing complete destruction of some components that will need multi-ton cranes to replace), and multi-year construction projects are harder with real winters. Sure it's all perfectly manageable engineering wise, but why bother.
There's probably easier green energy credits down south, given the current viability of solar.
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.
No they aren't. Datacenters are air conditioned buildings that consume a moderate amount of power and generate a moderate amount of tax revenue through a small number of middle class jobs. They use a negligible amount of water compared to golf and farming and produce a negligible amount of heat compared to cars.
<<If I just paint everyone who doesn't want to support my shitty AI start-up as a stupid Luddite, I can ignore everything they're actually saying and just demand I be allowed to do the thing I want the way I want, where I want! The people living in these communities I have never and will never go to are just too stupid to know what's good for them.>>
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They really shouldn't be.
There is a need for them and they aren't inherently damaging. There's no reason they can't be placed under some environmental regulations that cancel all their negatives, at least on some places. And they would still pay taxes.
But no, datacenter owners are using their connections to remove any regulation instead.
The cynicism of residents is reasonable. They've have to be highly educated to actually understand the implications of what they're doing and how that revenue can be distributed. America's decline lends itself toward small-town corruption, where patronage is more important than communitarianism, due to large and accelerating net worth inequality, and an economy where outcomes are based on inheritance over labor.
This explains the logic behind an outright ban. You don't have to be vigilant about corruption and the principle-agent problem if the thing is just banned.
I dont think this is entirely true. Maybe not the first wave of data centers, but there are a lot of factors that go into the cost calc and its possible that it would still be worth it to build them even if taxed.
About a decade ago, a bunch of data center companies got fantastic deals with my city (low/no tax). People are pretty upset about it. A few years in there was a report on how many people they employeed. I think combined it was under 10 who lived in the area.
there are real competitive differences to locations and the best locations will likely be able to afford to tax. lets say they all go solar power, then places that are good for solar and it doesnt snow or have as many cloudy days relative to other places will be able to tax more than other places and possibly still have it be the most economical choice.
They also cant build them all in the same spot or move them that easily after they are built. It might be smarter to agree to be taxed and have an amicable relationship with the community you build the data center in rather than risk them changing the law after its already built because youre screwing them over.
The community is a heck of a lot poorer now because they were convinced to offer incentives for a factory that never came. Once these firms can dangle hope in return for tax treatment or infrastructure, then you have a zero-sum game between townships where the winner — if there is a winner — ends up being the firm first, and the loser — if there is a loser, will be the township first.
So basically steal legitimacy from real environmentalists by applying their label to something that's not really motivated by environmentalism but can be construed that way?
"They don't actually want what I'm selling so I'm gonna dress it up as something else, they'll never know"
AreWeTheBaddies.jpg
The other problem you're gonna have is that this isn't an original thought. You're at least 20yr late to the party. So, so, so much absolute garbage has sailed under the flag of environmentalism that the public is starting to be more critical (see for example the kerfuffle over wind turbines off Rhode Island) and it's not unforeseeable that eventually the environmentalists are gonna have some sort of purge or reformation or reversion to more traditional environmentalism and serving corporate interests in order to reclaim some lost respect/legitimacy. Trying to sail "obviously not primarily about the environment" stuff under the flag of environmentalism is only gonna hasten that.
In a particular state in the midwest. The regulator has adopted the policy of "no new septics". You have to do a mound system at great cost. No rule, no code, no performance standard, just an unofficial policy of "we don't approve those". I know someone who's got a textbook perfect property for a traditional septic. They don't care. The shit pump people are laughing all the way to the bank.
It's all so tiresome.
One solution: local taxes on the economic value generated by the data center. MNCs love to play accounting games, so a simple formula based on metered GWh multiplied by reported worldwide revenue with a scaling factor a fraction of a percentage. This fund should be ring-fenced be address whatever externalities are introduced by the data center, including electric bill subsidies, infra maintenance, and funding independent oversight.
Many municipalities are unequipped to deal with a "datacenter" because on paper it is the same as an office building (that draws a lot of power), where it should be treated like an industrial site (rail yard, factory).
The old datacenters are analogous to office buildings that emit some unusual noise and consume large amounts of electricity.
The new ones (ie gigawatt class) consume enough electricity for ~1 million households and at minimum enough water for 100k households (but possibly many times that).
It's the sort of externality that could be solved with a well placed megaproject. A related question to my mind is why we're building such expensive strategic assets in the open rather than under a mountain.
Delved too greedily and too deep learning!
Unlock the FUN
Can datacenters load shed when requested? If not, they should be paying a premium/spot market prices for power if they arent participating in load management.
Local utility would ask them to shunt to the generators now and then during potential rolling blackout situations.
If we put them anywhere — and I’m not convinced we really need all of the data centers we have, let alone all the ones we’re building — they should not be in the middle of densely populated areas like Lewiston.
i completely agree that we should be looking into modelling this in terms of what is possible to mitigate its impact and what does that look like with current technology and costs, and where would we need to develop new tech, and what would be the critical values to hit to consider mitigation a success
Noise from data centers is a real issue, but Benn's measurements and analysis are not great (speeding up the sample rate to demonstrate frequency effects is just wrong, among other issues).
- It's not really fair to blame datacenters for using the municipality's electricity and then blame them again for being loud and generating electricity instead of using the municipality's electricity. Any given datacenter is only doing one of these.
- Presumably, the municipality's tax dollars benefit the people who live in the municipality in the form of better services
First, the gp comment says the data center is not good for existing residents - obviously true for housing too, which you didn't refute.
Then it assumes statewide ban should be based on personal preference of local residents. That is just a definition of nimbyism. While in reality I am a YIMBY and the end was part sarcasm, I would genuinely prefer living next to a data center, rather than next to non immigrant poor in the US. I grew up lower middle class or poor by US standards, and also live in Seattle, lots of experience. So I say along with data centers we have a statewide ban on anyone who is lifetime net consumer of tax money anywhere near my backyard.
My national government is currently giving massive tax breaks for one of these. It's going to be, after all, "the biggest foreign investment in the country ever"...
And presumably everybody in Lewiston already has lunch somewhere, so a new sandwich shop that was successful would put another lunch spot out of business, for a net zero jobs.
Edit: the larger point here is that jobs, particularly skilled jobs, don't grow on trees (much like money). New technologies and new jobs replace old technologies and old jobs. If you put a ban on new technologies and new jobs, you'll just have more unemployed people.
Tack a new building that size onto Bath Ironworks? That’s a huge boon. Heck even an Amazon warehouse would be an improvement. But a data center? For the people in Lewiston, it would be far more of a negative than a positive — and that’s the way it works in this country. We value money over people. If private equity, venture capitalists or huge corporations want something that you don’t want, you lose. Getting a policy win is a rarity and I’d be surprised if it didn’t get successfully challenged in court.
If so, thirty jobs are on the plus side. What's on the minus side?
* further down east than Lewiston but, there was a time I was the damm foreigner from the big city.
a mcdonalds is probably 1% of the land and employs more than 30 people.
(the # of jobs angle is not the right approach if you are a proponent of new datacenters. there are much stronger arguments to be made)
Fast food chains are damaging to human health.
replace "mcdonalds" with "specialty health foods" or "flower shop" or "independent book store" or whatever and my points remains unchanged: job numbers arent an argument in favor of datacenters, they are an argument against them.
You have a guard, some remote hands, maintenance, maybe additional security or two, times 4 for the various shifts. 30 sounds about right.
Even 20 years ago the datacenters I worked with often had fewer employees onsite than "visitors" - because they rented out racks.
Count the cars here: 36.242186561973, -95.32619746715035
[…]the data center would have employed only about 30 workers, the city estimated.
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...
You're right that there's tension between 'not enough power' and 'no new heavy loads' but it's not hypocritical to argue that megawatts of power should be allocated towards 7k jobs rather than a few dozen if possible. That's exactly the kind of tradeoff a power-constrained state should be explicitly making. The logic behind it is not satirical, it's just triage.
On top of that, this is not a blanket ban of AI datacenters. It's a temporary blocking of any new datacenters that require more than 20 megawatts until late 2027 pending a PUC study on how these datacenters will affect their existing grid. It also creates a new council for researching and coordinating the creation of new datacenters, so this really doesn't seem like any sort of NIMBY action here.
Honestly the only major issue I have with the bill is that it neglects to distinguish self-powered facilities that don't provide much strain on the grid. Though it could be argued that water consumption of these centers might be the reason for it.
Indeed! And we also shouldn't forget the CO2 and NOx emissions from gas-powered turbines (on some)... Also IIRC 9+°C warming in the surrounding areas, loud droning noise, and I seem to recall that there might have also been local water well pollution.
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.
And in any case ban doesn't make any sense. Instead they could charge different for grid electricity usage, and make the datacenter pay for grid expansion when they start building it.
Instead of dealing with that like adults we are throwing a fit instead
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...
A modern AI data center uses 20-100MW+ of electricity. Those two things aren't the same. 20MW of continuous electricity use (which AI data centers do) translates to 175,000 MWh of electricity per year. That's about the same as a minimum and might be 5+ times more.
This document is only about energy usage so we have to guess what "large" means in terms of employment but 3000 to 7000 seems to the range. Compared to 20-30.
But AI data centers are worse because they actually produce what I call negative jobs. Their currently only value proposition is in laying off people and otherwise suppressing labor costs. All while the residents all pay more for their electricity with the money no longer have because they got laid off.
The document you linked says that a large auto assembly plant consumes around 188,000 MWh annually (with regional variation). By my quick math that is less than 22 megawatts baseline load (24/7/365).
There is a mention that natural gas and other fuels being used on-site, are you converting those to MWh equivalent? I'm not as familiar with that conversion, but from a quick online calculator I found it would still be under 75 megawatt for electrical and fuel-equivalent combined.
Following that logic, are you suggesting that data centers should not be built at all?
It funds half of all of their expenditures.
Can you imagine having half of your total municipal government budget being paid for by data centers?
Their citizens pay much lower property tax rates, and get much better schooling and police.
Henrico County (also VA) took $60 million in unexpected new revenues from data centers and created an affordable housing trust that is subsidizing low-cost housing.
Although these counties are figuring it out, it's an incredible failure in imagination for many of these liberals in other states to look at an immense source of new funding that could support schools, housing and health and just spurn it because they heard from a friend of a friend that they consume a lot of water based on a discredited book with elementary math errors.
Which is also “invisible”. Using this technology to make advancements in healthcare is 1% of its usage. While 99% is garbage apps noone needs, memes, deep fake videos and porn.
AI as a whole for now is a net negative for the world.
Banning is so childish when there is easy solutions.
I don't think it's necessarily a "backlash" to all the hype but the hype certainly made them a target
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.
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...
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.
That still doesn't cover making the data centers provide value to the people who live there.
But what's an extra 500 acres between friends.
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.
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
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.
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?
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 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?
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.
- 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.
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.
- 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".
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think they are comparable to car parts, maybe aluminum smelters though?
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
The rest will fallow.
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?
Data centers use minuscule amount of water compared to factories that make physical goods.
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.)
All the output of a datacenter effectively goes offshore immediately.
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?
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?)
Its not being a nimby if no one in the area benefits and all the externalities are being borne by them
Maine doesn't tell Iowa they should grow their own lobsters, they simply trade them.
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.
Most people there seriously don’t give a shit about AI. They care about maintaining the peace, quiet, and purity of their land. Because they enjoy it.
Many of you miss the perspective because you’ve never been there.
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.
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.
Given that, the bill is just for show, and not actually serious.
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.
> 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...
that seems to be the idea!
It seems like that has pretty substantial time lag. Maybe require the ai companies to build power plants before they're allowed to build data centers in a certain region?
> 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.
The council is going to do and accomplish nothing, eventually some company may try to build, but after 2 years another environmental survey will be requested and they'll give up and go somewhere else (likely considered a win by people who support this bill).
These special government councils rarely accomplish anything, they're the exact kind of thing people reference when answering why building in the US is so expensive and why we don't have large infrastructure projects. It's red tape on top of red tape.
The council itself isn't legislating anything. They are simply researching and hiring relevant experts
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.
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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?
...temporarily blocking permits for any new data center requiring more than 20
megawatts. The measure runs until November 2027, buying time for a new Data
Center Coordination Council to study how these facilities strain Maine’s
aging electrical grid.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?
This is what unregulated capitalism looks like with no govt oversight.
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.
Does the move benefit companies with existing DCs whose competition can no longer establish a region there?
Instead of banning, why not put the REAL price tag on it? Require local employment. Stop subsidizing infrastructure. Start taxing them. If a data center came in and provided jobs, paid their own way without handouts, and lowered electricity costs, it might be a different story.
It's not data centers per se. It's the crony capitalism that subsidizes them and lets them extract wealth without oversight. Regulate it properly and the negative characteristics go away. And yes, putting the actual price tag on it might scare away most investors - an effective ban. But that's the market working efficiently on price signals.
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?
> 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.
Maine will go bankrupt? Maine will turn into a barren backwater? There will be no jobs?
>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.
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
"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.
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.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/25/datacenters-...
Nice to see some success for their ideas.