Maine Said No to New Data Centers. Other States Are Racing to Follow

Put a different way, some companies have made a lot of money with business models that hinge on victims never being able to reach a human.

Those same companies want to set up phone centers in the neighborhoods of the people they’ve neglected that also will not take their calls.

Town hall it is.

These projects can be developed and located responsibly, and every project is different. I don't think a blanket ban is good policy.

The reason the DC want to be placed in proximity to people is to get access to the infrastructure, electricity grid and roads. I think the next natural step is to just put the DC further away from existing infrastructure and pay for the connect, not move to space.

Why would anyone want them?

The only thing that'd change my mind would be full communal ownership in addition to everything you've said.

Amazon and other companies already have job training programs because they cannot find enough skilled labor to build and operate their data centers. The number of jobs commonly cited are comically lower than what is common to operate a modern hyperscaler. In my experience, hyperscalers often have at least 100-200 people on site to operate the data center and I've seen more than 1000 people on a site when the data center is under construction.

The real issue, as always, are the local governments and utilities that sellout out the citizens and fail to create and enforce building codes. The governments should be using the demand for data centers to partner with the companies and have them pay to modernize and fix the power grid. They should be using them to help subsidize green energy initiatives among other things and fund other projects to benefit the community.

The inconvenient truth is that the problem with data centers lies with the people in the communities who continue to elect politicians who, time and time again, make decisions counter to the best interests of their community. Data centers just happen to be the latest scapegoat to distract people from corrupt politicians and an community that is not civically engaged enough to hold their politicians accountable.

We've been slowly boiling alive in the reality that the tech industry has long been evolving to hurt us more and help us less each year. We'd be neutral or welcoming to data centers if we didn't know that storing and processing all that data was going to be used against us.

This empowers people making them feel less beholden to rising energy prices, and gives the data center more energy for its needs as the grid is freed up.

It's not enough to offer incentives. You have to explain why you even need to do it in the first place, and the answer better not be "we want money."

Honestly, I think it's possible that there isn't really organic opposition to data centers from people living in communities near them at all - but instead, there is opposition to them from people like Mother Jones magazine journalist Sophie Hurwitz, who is therefore motivated to write an article reporting on Maine banning data centers while framing it as a reasonable policy, and implying that this is a reasonable thing for other local governments considering data center bans to enact.

I note that every person cited in this article is some kind of national-level ideological actor - a member of a pro-data-center lobbying group; a researcher affiliated with the Federation of American Scientists which is a NGO headquartered in Washington D.C.; the head of Good Jobs First, which is another Washington D.C.-headquartered nonprofit; and several well-known national politicians who are already known for being suspicious of the tech industry.

There's no quote from any ordinary person in Maine who talks about some concrete negative impact of a data center near them - the closest thing is a link to an article with a quote from the Maine state representative who sponsored the bill, which states: "“It’s not that there’s no place for data centers in Maine,” said Democratic Rep. Melanie Sachs, who sponsored the measure. “Frankly, the tradeoffs have not been shown to be of benefit to our ratepayers, water usage or community benefit in terms of economic activity.”. The idea that data centers use a particularly large amount of water is basically complete bullshit promulgated by national-level prestige journalists (https://www.andymasley.com/writing/the-ai-water-issue-is-fak...), which makes me skeptical that this is an issue brought to Sachs' attention from her local constituents.

Data centers really do use a lot of electrical power, but the article has the quote "n Maine, electricity bills have already increased by 58 percent on average over the last 5 years. Much of that price jump is likely due to the state’s reliance on natural gas—but some Mainers fear that data center buildout will only increase their expenses.", which is the sort of thing you'd write if you were trying to associate a rise in electricity costs with data centers without being able to demonstrate that data centers are actually causing electric power costs to increase for ordinary people.

I think the purpose is important. People understand the need for power stations or garbage dumps or waste treatment plants. However:

- Those are clearly understood to be a negative for the immediate environment. No one wants to live next to a garbage dump.

- They are just as clearly understood to be a benefit or even necessity for overall society, including the people having to live close by: Everyone wants pickup and processing of their garbage working smoothly.

With AI datacenters, the situation is weirdly turned on its head:

- The overall necessity of AI is still deeply questionable. Businesses and governments are pushing it and yes, there are a lot of users, but overall sentiment of the population seems to be ambivalent to strongly negative. There is everything from warnings of addiction and AI psychosis to AI simply destroying most peoples' livelihood. So there is no "greater cause" for which someone should tolerate an AI datacenter in their neighborhood, the way they might tolerate a wind turbine.

- To make up for this, AI proponents seem to try and conjure up some ostensible direct benefits the data center (and not the AI wave in general) would have for the neighborhood, like jobs or followup businesses. It increasingly gets clear that this is just a ruse, maybe an exploitation of people who confuse a data center with a research campus.

It's like trying to sell a fentanyl factory by saying its exhausts contain CO2 and so might stimulate local plant life.

So my feel is, data centers will always have some negative effects on the neighborhood. But how far the neighborhood is willing to tolerate those effects is directly dependant on its view of AI in general.