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.
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.
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.
Of course you already know this but for everyone else it is called the Basin and Range province. You have desert areas and then a mountain range with much higher elevation with cooler temperatures and more precipitation which means trees and forests and green in color
Between Austin and San Antonio is so developed that it's considered by many to be a single "metro" area, DFW-style. There's very little not developed directly between the two.
I drove that way in 2024 for the solar eclipse. Some parts of that route struck me as a bit exurb-ish and spread-out, I wouldn't call it a single metro area, but there were definitely people living there. And it was way too green to be called a desert; I've driven through actual deserts in southern CA and nowhere that I saw in that part of Texas was anywhere near that dry (I guess you have to go further west to get to actual Texas desert, which we didn't do on that trip).
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 been watching a series on YT that is specifically about rural towns in Texas that are being abandoned or on the brink of total collapse. Much of it has to do with highways and routing around these communities decades ago. I don't know if a datacenter is the answer, but it has to be better then what looks like a post apocalyptic America.
Reviving Radiator Springs with a datacenter! The plot of Cars 4.
Those small towns are often positioned such that even if you plopped a billion dollar datacenter on top of them, it wouldn't change much, as even with second and third order effects it's adding 100-200 total population.
Is that really the primary concern about datacenters? Their aesthetics? I thought the major problem with them was that they muscle in on valuable resources like water and electricity, consuming what would otherwise be used by people, and driving the prices up.
Taking up land is one of the resources they use - consider cutting down trees to clear space for a large one, or the habitats that might have been in that space. That's not really an aesthetic thing.
It's emblematic of Maine's wider anti-business and anti-growth climate which may explain why the state now has the highest median age in the US and one of the lowest fertility rates of any state.
I can't tell if this is sarcasm? On the chance that it isn't, how would that make them rich? The profit from the data centers goes to the owner not to the people in the community or rest of the state.
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.
I'm from Nevada. Very aware that California has more regulation (and hence more cost than us), but know little about the regional cost differences between Maine and Massachusetts.
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.
Indeed, considering the much of the cost in the end consists of carrying costs, litigation, and year-of-expenditure overruns that were caused by the delay.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
> Data centers are a net negative wherever they are.
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.
Obviously the solution is to tax them instead of ban them so they end up dispersing income to the surrounding areas. The entire point though is that they won't get built where they are taxed, and eventually, through regulatory capture or governance capture, they'll get built without having to compensate for their exteralities.
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.
>The entire point though is that they won't get built where they are taxed
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.
He's not saying it's economically unfeasible to build where taxed. He's saying they'll simply build elsewhere where they won't be 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.
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.
Unfortunately it’s a race to the bottom in most of America: If you pass such regulations locally or in your state, the data centers will simply choose to not build in your area of authority (county/state). Unless we were to pass sweeping, nation-wide regulations (which this administration is aggressively against because they believe we are in an AI arms race with China), those regulations/bans just drive the data centers elsewhere.
Maine obviously wouldn't have a problem with that, this law indicates they want them somewhere other than Maine. Environmental regulations that are as good as a ban seem far preferable to an outright ban, IMO. There's a large segment of the population that see outright bans as oppressive but support environmental regulations.
>Environmental regulations that are as good as a ban seem far preferable to an outright ban, IMO. There's a large segment of the population that see outright bans as oppressive but support environmental regulations.
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.
But people probably wouldn’t have a problem with them building a data center in central Aroostook. Nobody making these regulations wants to simply stop data centers from being built anywhere— they’re trying to stop people from building them where it will really suck to have them, like densely populated Lewiston. I actually left tech to work in manufacturing. I know the value it provides and how much it can negatively impact others. Big companies want to build this shit near population centers because it’s more convenient, profitable, easier to hire people, etc. Tough cookies, I say.
> There is a need for them and they aren't inherently damaging.
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.
Perhaps they are simply not taxed enough to benefit the community. If the local municipality is bearing a lot of these hidden costs, then perhaps the taxes need to be higher and directed at efforts that mitigate the worst of the problems. Water management solutions, air pollution management. Are there ways to mitigate the noise pollution? It seems like they should be taxed /more/ to help offset the negatives. There is surely a way to mitigate the problems. For example, can the noise pollution be addressed by forcing more green spaces around them, etc?
Almost anything can be mitigated at some cost - but it has to be determined what those mitigations are, and then demand them.
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).
True. There likely needs to be some sort of templating handled by states. Each data center and location will be different and require assessment. This does drive costs up for the data center, but I don't see another fair way to handle it really.
They get their own unique third category as unlike industrial sites there's no hazardous chemicals and even the noise pollution is substantially different in nature.
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 likely many times that).
The city making money off of it doesn’t make the impact smaller. You can’t tax away the air pollution coming from a gas turbine running in a populated area.
The fact that they need to use gas turbines at all is a tragic condemnation of how the US can’t build shit at all. We should be consuming more (green) energy to make our lives better, and rushing toward diminishing returns on energy consumption. Instead, we have this unholy alliance of (usually right wing) NIMBYs and (usually left wing) degrowthers that make it much more convenient to use a gas turbine than build renewable energy somewhere windy/sunny and plumb it in with some transmission lines. Renewable energy is way past the tipping point of being cheaper, the gas turbines are just there due to regulatory burden at all levels.
Yeah, but unfortunately, here we are, and there are the companies that want to build these things in completely inappropriate areas because it’s more convenient.
That was my point. It doesn't all have to be taxes. It can also be agreed upon mitigation maintenance. Better filtration on gas turbines, etc. Green spaces to mitigate sound impact. I don't know, I am just wondering if there is a model that can be designed that makes a data center "balance" within its local environment instead of getting the opposite, tax incentives. Right now I agree, they get to socialize the costs and reap the benefits of building data centers to a large extent.
That all sounds nice in theory, but does the Lewiston municipal government have the resources and expertise to determine what countermeasures would be effective? Would it be left up to the company paying for the mitigations to decide what’s reasonable? I think we know how that would turn out. Even in heavily regulated states, industrial pollution still heavily impacts people in the vicinity. They usually accept it because so many of them work there. This place was estimated to employ 30 people. We don’t even know if problems like infrasound are reasonably avoidable or mitigated, and it’s not like they can make more water. Additionally, the way the industry has conducted itself over the past decade has been abhorrent. There’s no reason to believe they wouldn’t try to circumvent every last shred of mitigation knowing the city has comparatively minuscule resources to fight it.
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.
youre starting a good conversation but as per typical internet fashion you are being critiqued as though your direction of thought is being presented as some sort of final solution.
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 pollution (it’s really worth watching Benn Jordan’s video on infrasound,)
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 was a bit misleading in terms of the audibility of infrasonic noise, but I think he did a good job of highlighting some of the effects of infrasonic noise on QoL/health with the study towards the end. IIRC, he also recorded some regular human-range noise that I would personally find disruptive to have to live with (though this was a fair bit closer to the data center than the claimed range of infrasonic noise's effects)
Doesn't this also apply to new housing? Strain on services per job created is probably even higher. The benefits are for someone currently not living here, just like data centers used for remote users. And if cheaper housing is available obnoxious poor people might move in. I think there should be a moratorium. Not in my backyard!
I’m not sure who you’d expect to sway equating data centers to east coast urban housing during a giant, sustained housing crisis, but your obviously disingenuous argument is completely ridiculous.
> Though I’ve seen some astonishingly misinformed politicians offering big tax incentives for data centers
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"...
So maybe someone can open a new sandwich shop and accomplish the same thing without screwing everybody else in the process. Not only that, Lewiston probably doesn’t have a glut of data center talent seeking employment —I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that not a single person living in Lewiston when a project like that was approved would be employed there.
Not if it drives up energy prices and makes other businesses that employ more people less competitive. Not saying that is the case but it’s certainly not a given
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.
The number the developer gave in a press release was "20-30." I find that reasonable as a very large Facebook data center near me has a permanent staff of around 50. Keep in mind that these large DCs use contractors for the majority of the work, which unfortunately doesn't really help with employment because the contractors mostly come in from out of state (there is a HUGE temp labor market for traveling IT technicians and skilled crafts get hired mostly from big national outfits that just send whatever crew is available next). It is good for the hotel business though.
Yep, and anything outside of that is contracted groups that come in from outside. Maybe a hotel in the area would get a little more business, but it won't be much.
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.
I keep wondering this too. It feels like such a self fulfilling prophecy: don’t build new power plants. Don’t build nuclear. Get mad when the grid can’t keep up…it’s defeatist and anti-growth-of-any-sort through a different lens.
To be fair, for decades, electricity consumption has been mostly flat. There has not been a need to massively ramp up new generation or distribution. It is only in the last few years that such mega consumers have come online that is requiring new development at a frantic pace.
Not true. Electric vehicles have been threatening to collapse residential grids for quite a few years now. The US hasn't been making the necessary infrastructure investments for a long time. See PG&E for example.
I mean one has to also consider the current political _and_ geopolitical landscape now when it comes to energy needs. And given the current outlook and environments even states are now operating in with federal overreach shutting down offshore wind farm efforts and more, it's not hard to do the calculus that lands you squarely in this reality:
- most grids can't sustain the AI energy demands at the moment
- literally no one could tell you if scaling up with clean/renewable energy sources to meet demand is even going to get greenlit right now. it is straight up gambling to try and give a black and white answer to it.
so to a lot of degrees i absolutely understand why a state might pump the brakes. this is increased pressure on a limited resource that is squeezing _the peoples_ economic circumstances. pump the brakes because no one is talking about how to greenlight it and scale up the right way so it doesn't result in even more financial uncertainty for people that are already financially uncertain. its absolutely not something i would want to give the go ahead on without guarantees that renewable energy is going to be the backbone of the increased energy demand.
Also power is not at all a limited resource as many top voted post on HN thinks it to be. Increased demand decreases the price of power not increases it in the long term.
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.
> 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.
Where are you getting the 200 megawatt number from?
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.
I suspect uou've misread that document. It is a good document though. It's saying a large parts plant uses ~188,000 MWh, I think per year.
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.
> A modern AI data center uses 20-100MW+ of electricity.
I understand the high end builds to have exceeded 100 kW per rack at this point, with the largest sites exceeding 1 GW (ie 10x your upper bound). So the smallest datacenters use as much as the largest auto plants, and the largest datacenters use 100x that.
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.
Local municipalities collect this and often get tricked into not collecting it via agreements to host it in or near their town for multiple year agreements. Also the assessed value of the property may not come anywhere near the costs of increased electricity demand, water usage and noise pollution problems. For locals
Their is typically high paying jobs in factories but these places dont employ a large staff beyond construction. It a tough spaces.
Loudoun County in Virginia generates $1 billion in property tax revenues from data centers.
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.
They’re an anomaly that benefits from a number of factors like being close to the government for contracting, early data centers built there and they tended to congregate and dumb luck.
They’re an outlier and don’t really prove much of anything.
Oregon has lots and lots of data centers and not much to show for it on any front, other than higher electric prices for consumers
Hopefully they don't end up with a "Digital Detroit" when datacenters start closing.
Though even if the AI market collapses, the capital spent means they'd probably keep operating; paying for 30 employees is much different than paying for 3,000 at a factory. But the datacenter might be owned by the creditors at that time.
> that they consume a lot of water based on a discredited book with elementary math errors.
How exactly do you think they dissipate the heat of a continuous 100 MW or 1 GW power draw? I have no idea what book you're referring to but you can do the math yourself it's quite straightforward.
Basically, the author (of the book) compares a data center outside Santiago to usage of water by humans, erroneously imputing that the average human uses only 200 cc of water per day.
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.
Can you explain how important they are? So far the benefits seem to be limited to faster code generation, which doesn't solve any actual problem people were facing, and is greatly outweighed by the negatives.
Yet we read everyday that Agents generating astronomous amounts of slop and pointless projects are also straining global digital infrastructure.
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.
Don’t forget the portion that’s used for mass surveillance, scams, and other blackhat shenanigans. Or supercharged personalized advertising with dynamic pricing. And you can’t miss propaganda and dark money influence campaigns.
LLMs are and will be used as malware, propaganda, and slop generation agents more than they will be used as debugging agents. The amount of energy that we'll need to consume going forward just to defend against malicious users and to filter down the flood of slop is absolutely eye watering and will continue to grow as far as we can tell.
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.
We need to go full Oracle and charge an excise tax per logical CPU core. For GPUs we can count SIMT lanes.
More seriously they should be taxed per watt, likely in an asymptotic manner because most of the externalities don't scale linearly. Any additional infrastructure requirements should be directly rolled into their electric and water bills, which is to say that they should receive a very unfavorable rate.
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
If you or Google have a plan to make the federal government stop shutting down renewable projects, we can re-examine the data center question after you carry it out.
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.
Utility solar is VERY different from small-scale solar panels on houses.
And, yes, there are already utility solar and wind plants around. There are also chemical plants, prisons, and garbage dumps. That doesn't mean the people of Maine want to see more of those things.
This. Utility solar in Maine in 2020-whatever is a lot like the crown's wood lots in Scotland in 1520-whatever. The locals lives aren't made any better by it and some people down south who hate them make bank.
Say what you want about resource extraction, it necessarily leeched far more wealth into local economies.
I personally think it's short sighted but I see why they're not a fan.
Data centers don't really help the material conditions of Mainers though. Here's the net effects of new data centers they'll really see, in material terms:
- A brief boost in construction jobs
- ~0 new jobs in the long term
- Increased electricity prices
- A slight chance of very slightly lower taxes, as data center taxes partially replace taxes on other stuff
It's not like the average Mainer is losing a lot from this decision. There's actually a good chance a data center ban is a net gain for the average Mainer materially, because the change in electricity demand (and thus prices) will outweigh all other effects.
Carbon offsets are a sham, but you could just require them to directly pay for the actual energy infrastructure required. If you need 1GW of electricity, develop 1GW of solar.
Sorry, I'm not picking up on the connection - could you expand? Do you think they should also pay for offsets alongside developing energy infrastructure?
I guess what I'm asking is how long it takes, soup-to-nuts, for the 1GW installation to be carbon neutral or better? I've read anywhere from 7 months to 25 years. Maybe its dependent on location?
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.
It still makes more sense to directly regulate the thing that actually matters. People don't really care about the presence of a DC in their state. They care about the effect it might have on energy prices and potentially the effect it might have on public land use. You can always regulate the electricity market and public land use directly, instead of regulating the construction of data centers which is more of a second-order effect.
These approaches might very well result in the same outcome: fewer DCs, but it leaves the details up to dynamic market forces.
A Technology Connections video recently changed my opinion on this. The land required to power the entire U.S. would be less than the farmland we currently use for ethanol production.
Alec presented it well- but we don't even need to take his word for it.
The Department of Energy has all the data available, so do a dozen different other private and public institutions. It didn't click for me till I ran some napkin math.
> I think the number of people opposing the construction would increase when they release its half the county.
What's the math on that?
It's interesting to see the US mandate ethanol production the way they do, which could be argued to be a farm subsidy, and then balk at the land needed for solar installations.
For arguments made in good faith- I think it's humanity's inability to comprehend scale. We can't get the volume of a glass of water right if we change it from tall to wide. Why would we think that terrawatts worth of PV would be a square shorter on a side than most people's daily commute?
Horrifically pessimistic numbers for PV (winter in maine with conversion efficencies half what they are now)... comes out to about a 50x50 mile square of panels to generate the entire USA's power demand from the most recent DOE numbers. Ignore that we can have wind, solar, and crops* in the same area. Turns out, btw, crops don't like high noon beating down on them. As a result we can reduce water usage and get nearly the same crop yield if part of the field is covered with panels- at least according to some studies.
That isn't the whole story. At least some of these new datacenters are gigawatt class. That's multiple sq km of solar.
Water usage is also an issue. A continuous 1 gigawatt is enough to boil off 1.3 million liters per hour which over 24 hours equates to very roughly 90k residential users. If it isn't boiled but is instead returned lukewarm it will require many times that amount due to how large the heat of vaporization is. Compare to the entire state of Florida at "only" 23.5 million people.
did you move the goal post, or erect a new one? either way- residential use is penny ante in terms of water usage. So much so that comparing data center use to residential use without including industrial, commercial, and irrigation can only be in bad faith.
Particularly since usage reports typically present all the numbers in the same chart or grid.
The concern is resource usage. Water had been left out, so including it isn't shifting the goalposts given the context.
The comparison was intended for illustrative purposes. Residential usage provides something relatable and is the general standard for these sorts of discussions.
Even comparing to industrial most operations don't use anywhere near as much electricity or water. The new gigawatt class datacenters are in the same ballpark as aluminum smelters, but rather than melting metal they sink all that energy into water.
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'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?
>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.
> 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.
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?
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.
Luckily it's only a memorandum and not a ban then.
>do not mind importing nuclear-generated power from their neighbours if needed.
Which does put some distance between you and whatever disaster occurs because someone thought pocketing $5 was more important than safety.
You're also assuming there won't be a massive crash in the next year or two would leave a lot of stranded assets around. If there's not, then they'll build DC's then.
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.
The consequence of saying they cannot choice to not have them. Is saying your requiring them to have them whether or not the people their want them. Its also a temporary moratorium. Maybe the industry should have been more responsible and not pasted so many externalities on to the public sector if they didnt want to face regulations.
I think the highest parent comment basically hasn't engaged in any of the cost benefit analysis just strawman the subject to banning all industry. They are not doing that and allow other manufacturing to exist maybe the data center business should learn from those industries how to conduct themselves
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.
It's a free state. Like the Swiss banned minarets in Geneva the Mainers should be allowed to vote to ban datacenters. AI bros can always opt to build their stuff elsewhere, like Texas or Abu Dhabi.
That’s like saying “Mainers should be allowed to ban speech they don’t like, and private sex acts they find offensive”. Your view of what constitutes freedom is nonsensical.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
I don't know if I get you're points because lobster farms are tied to certain external factors in a way things like data centers aren’t.
but either way, the argument feels very NIMBY: it’s not ‘no housing,’ it’s ‘just not here.’
so when someone say ‘let someone else host them,’ it really comes across as: I want the internet, just let other communities pay the environmental cost.
The cost of running a datacenter and the impact it has is also tied to external factors. The environmental cost is not the same in all locations. There are differences in land use, environmental requirements, power generation methods, and the downstream impact of all of those.
> 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...
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
All the concerns around data centers have technological solutions.
A key characteristic of a society in decay is banning productive assets because there is no will to build the infrastructure anymore. Hopefully this changes
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.
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.
Don't know why people think Texas doesn't have natural beauty. It's a huge state.
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.
Same with swamps and wetlands.
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.
Most people never bother to look at a map.
It takes 2 seconds to look at google satellite view of the area and see lots of desert with strips of green
https://maps.app.goo.gl/R8HuWBi66548Jq5BA
Of course you already know this but for everyone else it is called the Basin and Range province. You have desert areas and then a mountain range with much higher elevation with cooler temperatures and more precipitation which means trees and forests and green in color
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basin_and_Range_Province
Between Austin and San Antonio is so developed that it's considered by many to be a single "metro" area, DFW-style. There's very little not developed directly between the two.
I drove that way in 2024 for the solar eclipse. Some parts of that route struck me as a bit exurb-ish and spread-out, I wouldn't call it a single metro area, but there were definitely people living there. And it was way too green to be called a desert; I've driven through actual deserts in southern CA and nowhere that I saw in that part of Texas was anywhere near that dry (I guess you have to go further west to get to actual Texas desert, which we didn't do on that trip).
Ah yes, the vast, undeveloped wilderness of I-35 between Austin and San Antonio. Totally just unoccupied desert.
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 been watching a series on YT that is specifically about rural towns in Texas that are being abandoned or on the brink of total collapse. Much of it has to do with highways and routing around these communities decades ago. I don't know if a datacenter is the answer, but it has to be better then what looks like a post apocalyptic America.
Reviving Radiator Springs with a datacenter! The plot of Cars 4.
Those small towns are often positioned such that even if you plopped a billion dollar datacenter on top of them, it wouldn't change much, as even with second and third order effects it's adding 100-200 total population.
Is that really the primary concern about datacenters? Their aesthetics? I thought the major problem with them was that they muscle in on valuable resources like water and electricity, consuming what would otherwise be used by people, and driving the prices up.
Data centers use a lot of electricity but negligible water.
Taking up land is one of the resources they use - consider cutting down trees to clear space for a large one, or the habitats that might have been in that space. That's not really an aesthetic thing.
Because it's Republican, obviously.
yes but they likely won't build datacenters by destroying national parks would they?
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
It's emblematic of Maine's wider anti-business and anti-growth climate which may explain why the state now has the highest median age in the US and one of the lowest fertility rates of any state.
I can't tell if this is sarcasm? On the chance that it isn't, how would that make them rich? The profit from the data centers goes to the owner not to the people in the community or rest of the state.
There's this thing called taxes...
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.
I don't see how that number could possibly be realistic.
A H100 cost 30k when new, and uses 500W of power.
500W for a year is about 4500kWh, which at $0.10/kWh is $450/year if run at full utilization (unrealistic).
TCO of an AI data center should be entirely dominated by capex depreciation.
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.
I'm from Nevada. Very aware that California has more regulation (and hence more cost than us), but know little about the regional cost differences between Maine and Massachusetts.
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.
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.
I'd call that substantial
Indeed, considering the much of the cost in the end consists of carrying costs, litigation, and year-of-expenditure overruns that were caused by the delay.
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.
AI is incredibly useful for the entire population
Is that why the US's GDP is currently booming into infinity? Or is it only responsible for their unprecedented median standard of living?
You don’t understand it hasn’t trickled down yet
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.
"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...
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.
My favorite class of HN comment: bringing concreteness to a vibes fight.
Perhaps unfortunately, vibes are part of being human. Ignore them at your peril.
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.
> Data centers are a net negative wherever they are.
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.
Obviously the solution is to tax them instead of ban them so they end up dispersing income to the surrounding areas. The entire point though is that they won't get built where they are taxed, and eventually, through regulatory capture or governance capture, they'll get built without having to compensate for their exteralities.
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.
>The entire point though is that they won't get built where they are taxed
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.
He's not saying it's economically unfeasible to build where taxed. He's saying they'll simply build elsewhere where they won't be 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.
I mean, just look at what happened with Foxconn in Racine, WI: https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/what-happened-to-foxco...
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.
Unfortunately it’s a race to the bottom in most of America: If you pass such regulations locally or in your state, the data centers will simply choose to not build in your area of authority (county/state). Unless we were to pass sweeping, nation-wide regulations (which this administration is aggressively against because they believe we are in an AI arms race with China), those regulations/bans just drive the data centers elsewhere.
Maine obviously wouldn't have a problem with that, this law indicates they want them somewhere other than Maine. Environmental regulations that are as good as a ban seem far preferable to an outright ban, IMO. There's a large segment of the population that see outright bans as oppressive but support environmental regulations.
>Environmental regulations that are as good as a ban seem far preferable to an outright ban, IMO. There's a large segment of the population that see outright bans as oppressive but support environmental regulations.
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.
Environmentalists are going to get blamed for the data center ban in Maine either way.
But people probably wouldn’t have a problem with them building a data center in central Aroostook. Nobody making these regulations wants to simply stop data centers from being built anywhere— they’re trying to stop people from building them where it will really suck to have them, like densely populated Lewiston. I actually left tech to work in manufacturing. I know the value it provides and how much it can negatively impact others. Big companies want to build this shit near population centers because it’s more convenient, profitable, easier to hire people, etc. Tough cookies, I say.
> There is a need for them and they aren't inherently damaging.
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.
Perhaps they are simply not taxed enough to benefit the community. If the local municipality is bearing a lot of these hidden costs, then perhaps the taxes need to be higher and directed at efforts that mitigate the worst of the problems. Water management solutions, air pollution management. Are there ways to mitigate the noise pollution? It seems like they should be taxed /more/ to help offset the negatives. There is surely a way to mitigate the problems. For example, can the noise pollution be addressed by forcing more green spaces around them, etc?
Almost anything can be mitigated at some cost - but it has to be determined what those mitigations are, and then demand them.
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).
True. There likely needs to be some sort of templating handled by states. Each data center and location will be different and require assessment. This does drive costs up for the data center, but I don't see another fair way to handle it really.
They get their own unique third category as unlike industrial sites there's no hazardous chemicals and even the noise pollution is substantially different in nature.
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 likely many times that).
Where does the water go afterwards? Is it evaporated? Sewer?
Evaporated. Given how the water cycle works, it should be expected it will be precipitated back as rain.
The city making money off of it doesn’t make the impact smaller. You can’t tax away the air pollution coming from a gas turbine running in a populated area.
The fact that they need to use gas turbines at all is a tragic condemnation of how the US can’t build shit at all. We should be consuming more (green) energy to make our lives better, and rushing toward diminishing returns on energy consumption. Instead, we have this unholy alliance of (usually right wing) NIMBYs and (usually left wing) degrowthers that make it much more convenient to use a gas turbine than build renewable energy somewhere windy/sunny and plumb it in with some transmission lines. Renewable energy is way past the tipping point of being cheaper, the gas turbines are just there due to regulatory burden at all levels.
Yeah, but unfortunately, here we are, and there are the companies that want to build these things in completely inappropriate areas because it’s more convenient.
That was my point. It doesn't all have to be taxes. It can also be agreed upon mitigation maintenance. Better filtration on gas turbines, etc. Green spaces to mitigate sound impact. I don't know, I am just wondering if there is a model that can be designed that makes a data center "balance" within its local environment instead of getting the opposite, tax incentives. Right now I agree, they get to socialize the costs and reap the benefits of building data centers to a large extent.
That all sounds nice in theory, but does the Lewiston municipal government have the resources and expertise to determine what countermeasures would be effective? Would it be left up to the company paying for the mitigations to decide what’s reasonable? I think we know how that would turn out. Even in heavily regulated states, industrial pollution still heavily impacts people in the vicinity. They usually accept it because so many of them work there. This place was estimated to employ 30 people. We don’t even know if problems like infrasound are reasonably avoidable or mitigated, and it’s not like they can make more water. Additionally, the way the industry has conducted itself over the past decade has been abhorrent. There’s no reason to believe they wouldn’t try to circumvent every last shred of mitigation knowing the city has comparatively minuscule resources to fight it.
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.
youre starting a good conversation but as per typical internet fashion you are being critiqued as though your direction of thought is being presented as some sort of final solution.
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
They lobbied for tax exemptions for 10 years or longer in most cases. Which probably is the useful lifespan, from most of the stuff in there
noise pollution (it’s really worth watching Benn Jordan’s video on infrasound,)
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 was a bit misleading in terms of the audibility of infrasonic noise, but I think he did a good job of highlighting some of the effects of infrasonic noise on QoL/health with the study towards the end. IIRC, he also recorded some regular human-range noise that I would personally find disruptive to have to live with (though this was a fair bit closer to the data center than the claimed range of infrasonic noise's effects)
Doesn't this also apply to new housing? Strain on services per job created is probably even higher. The benefits are for someone currently not living here, just like data centers used for remote users. And if cheaper housing is available obnoxious poor people might move in. I think there should be a moratorium. Not in my backyard!
I’m not sure who you’d expect to sway equating data centers to east coast urban housing during a giant, sustained housing crisis, but your obviously disingenuous argument is completely ridiculous.
> Though I’ve seen some astonishingly misinformed politicians offering big tax incentives for data centers
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"...
I'm guessing the population of Lewiston would welcome an employer of 30 jobs
So maybe someone can open a new sandwich shop and accomplish the same thing without screwing everybody else in the process. Not only that, Lewiston probably doesn’t have a glut of data center talent seeking employment —I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that not a single person living in Lewiston when a project like that was approved would be employed there.
A sandwich shop would also be infinitely more useful to the population.
Are you saying that those thirty job will go to people currently living in Lewiston?
If so, thirty jobs are on the plus side. What's on the minus side?
Not if it drives up energy prices and makes other businesses that employ more people less competitive. Not saying that is the case but it’s certainly not a given
imagine how many other 30-job employers could fit on the same land that the datacenter would take up.
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)
> a mcdonalds is probably 1% of the land and employs more than 30 people.
Fast food chains are damaging to human health.
neat!
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.
Less than 30 makes no sense. It's easily in the hundred if you account for shifts and the specialized jobs required.
The number the developer gave in a press release was "20-30." I find that reasonable as a very large Facebook data center near me has a permanent staff of around 50. Keep in mind that these large DCs use contractors for the majority of the work, which unfortunately doesn't really help with employment because the contractors mostly come in from out of state (there is a HUGE temp labor market for traveling IT technicians and skilled crafts get hired mostly from big national outfits that just send whatever crew is available next). It is good for the hotel business though.
Once it's built, it basically runs itself.
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.
Yep, and anything outside of that is contracted groups that come in from outside. Maybe a hotel in the area would get a little more business, but it won't be much.
From the Maine Monitor:
[…]the data center would have employed only about 30 workers, the city estimated.
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.
I keep wondering this too. It feels like such a self fulfilling prophecy: don’t build new power plants. Don’t build nuclear. Get mad when the grid can’t keep up…it’s defeatist and anti-growth-of-any-sort through a different lens.
To be fair, for decades, electricity consumption has been mostly flat. There has not been a need to massively ramp up new generation or distribution. It is only in the last few years that such mega consumers have come online that is requiring new development at a frantic pace.
Not true. Electric vehicles have been threatening to collapse residential grids for quite a few years now. The US hasn't been making the necessary infrastructure investments for a long time. See PG&E for example.
I mean one has to also consider the current political _and_ geopolitical landscape now when it comes to energy needs. And given the current outlook and environments even states are now operating in with federal overreach shutting down offshore wind farm efforts and more, it's not hard to do the calculus that lands you squarely in this reality:
- most grids can't sustain the AI energy demands at the moment
- literally no one could tell you if scaling up with clean/renewable energy sources to meet demand is even going to get greenlit right now. it is straight up gambling to try and give a black and white answer to it.
so to a lot of degrees i absolutely understand why a state might pump the brakes. this is increased pressure on a limited resource that is squeezing _the peoples_ economic circumstances. pump the brakes because no one is talking about how to greenlight it and scale up the right way so it doesn't result in even more financial uncertainty for people that are already financially uncertain. its absolutely not something i would want to give the go ahead on without guarantees that renewable energy is going to be the backbone of the increased energy demand.
Also power is not at all a limited resource as many top voted post on HN thinks it to be. Increased demand decreases the price of power not increases it in the long term.
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.
Because we have decided that electrical generation tech ended once China became better at it.
Instead of dealing with that like adults we are throwing a fit instead
> 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...
New AI data center builds are being specified in gigawatts, my friend.
Yup. Here's slides from last year's HotChips on where AI racks are going: https://hc2025.hotchips.org/assets/program/tutorials/HC2025....
The racks rolling out now are in the 100s of KW each, targeting 1 MW per rack as the rough limit for using 400v DC.
The next iteration is go up to 800v DC, riding the coattails of power management components from the EV industry.
Where are you getting the 200 megawatt number from?
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.
I suspect uou've misread that document. It is a good document though. It's saying a large parts plant uses ~188,000 MWh, I think per year.
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.
> A modern AI data center uses 20-100MW+ of electricity.
I understand the high end builds to have exceeded 100 kW per rack at this point, with the largest sites exceeding 1 GW (ie 10x your upper bound). So the smallest datacenters use as much as the largest auto plants, and the largest datacenters use 100x that.
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.
> data centre brings absolutely no economic benefit whatsoever to its local community
Following that logic, are you suggesting that data centers should not be built at all?
Property taxes come to mind.
Local municipalities collect this and often get tricked into not collecting it via agreements to host it in or near their town for multiple year agreements. Also the assessed value of the property may not come anywhere near the costs of increased electricity demand, water usage and noise pollution problems. For locals
Their is typically high paying jobs in factories but these places dont employ a large staff beyond construction. It a tough spaces.
Loudoun County in Virginia generates $1 billion in property tax revenues from data centers.
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.
They’re an anomaly that benefits from a number of factors like being close to the government for contracting, early data centers built there and they tended to congregate and dumb luck.
They’re an outlier and don’t really prove much of anything.
Oregon has lots and lots of data centers and not much to show for it on any front, other than higher electric prices for consumers
Hopefully they don't end up with a "Digital Detroit" when datacenters start closing.
Though even if the AI market collapses, the capital spent means they'd probably keep operating; paying for 30 employees is much different than paying for 3,000 at a factory. But the datacenter might be owned by the creditors at that time.
> that they consume a lot of water based on a discredited book with elementary math errors.
How exactly do you think they dissipate the heat of a continuous 100 MW or 1 GW power draw? I have no idea what book you're referring to but you can do the math yourself it's quite straightforward.
The book is "Empire of AI". This blog post explains it pretty well: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-mislead...
Basically, the author (of the book) compares a data center outside Santiago to usage of water by humans, erroneously imputing that the average human uses only 200 cc of water per day.
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.
Can you explain how important they are? So far the benefits seem to be limited to faster code generation, which doesn't solve any actual problem people were facing, and is greatly outweighed by the negatives.
Yet we read everyday that Agents generating astronomous amounts of slop and pointless projects are also straining global digital infrastructure.
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.
Don’t forget the portion that’s used for mass surveillance, scams, and other blackhat shenanigans. Or supercharged personalized advertising with dynamic pricing. And you can’t miss propaganda and dark money influence campaigns.
LLMs are and will be used as malware, propaganda, and slop generation agents more than they will be used as debugging agents. The amount of energy that we'll need to consume going forward just to defend against malicious users and to filter down the flood of slop is absolutely eye watering and will continue to grow as far as we can tell.
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.
> an excise tax on number of servers
We need to go full Oracle and charge an excise tax per logical CPU core. For GPUs we can count SIMT lanes.
More seriously they should be taxed per watt, likely in an asymptotic manner because most of the externalities don't scale linearly. Any additional infrastructure requirements should be directly rolled into their electric and water bills, which is to say that they should receive a very unfavorable rate.
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
Mandating renewables for data centers would have left you with checks notes a shitload of renewables after the AI bubble bursts.
Something that should (with good governance) lower energy costs.
If you or Google have a plan to make the federal government stop shutting down renewable projects, we can re-examine the data center question after you carry it out.
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.
Of course Mainers aren't monolithic...
https://www.mainepublic.org/climate/2026-04-07/maine-legisla....
https://www.maine.gov/energy/initiatives/renewable-energy/so...
Utility solar is VERY different from small-scale solar panels on houses.
And, yes, there are already utility solar and wind plants around. There are also chemical plants, prisons, and garbage dumps. That doesn't mean the people of Maine want to see more of those things.
This. Utility solar in Maine in 2020-whatever is a lot like the crown's wood lots in Scotland in 1520-whatever. The locals lives aren't made any better by it and some people down south who hate them make bank.
Say what you want about resource extraction, it necessarily leeched far more wealth into local economies.
I personally think it's short sighted but I see why they're not a fan.
> Mainers hate seeing wind and solar plants- they consider them to be a massive eyesore.
I mean, some do... this implies a terrible politician to not address the material concerns of Mainers though.
Data centers don't really help the material conditions of Mainers though. Here's the net effects of new data centers they'll really see, in material terms:
- A brief boost in construction jobs
- ~0 new jobs in the long term
- Increased electricity prices
- A slight chance of very slightly lower taxes, as data center taxes partially replace taxes on other stuff
It's not like the average Mainer is losing a lot from this decision. There's actually a good chance a data center ban is a net gain for the average Mainer materially, because the change in electricity demand (and thus prices) will outweigh all other effects.
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?
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...
Carbon offsets are a sham, but you could just require them to directly pay for the actual energy infrastructure required. If you need 1GW of electricity, develop 1GW of solar.
Surely you realize that building the infrastructure and driver of the 1GW provider would be, hopefully, carbon neutral?
Sorry, I'm not picking up on the connection - could you expand? Do you think they should also pay for offsets alongside developing energy infrastructure?
I guess what I'm asking is how long it takes, soup-to-nuts, for the 1GW installation to be carbon neutral or better? I've read anywhere from 7 months to 25 years. Maybe its dependent on location?
> 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.
And when it's the utility's job, who's footing the bill?
There are many customers to spread that over in proportion to their usage. This is standard acconting they have been doing for years
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.
It still makes more sense to directly regulate the thing that actually matters. People don't really care about the presence of a DC in their state. They care about the effect it might have on energy prices and potentially the effect it might have on public land use. You can always regulate the electricity market and public land use directly, instead of regulating the construction of data centers which is more of a second-order effect.
These approaches might very well result in the same outcome: fewer DCs, but it leaves the details up to dynamic market forces.
A Technology Connections video recently changed my opinion on this. The land required to power the entire U.S. would be less than the farmland we currently use for ethanol production.
Alec presented it well- but we don't even need to take his word for it.
The Department of Energy has all the data available, so do a dozen different other private and public institutions. It didn't click for me till I ran some napkin math.
> I think the number of people opposing the construction would increase when they release its half the county.
What's the math on that?
It's interesting to see the US mandate ethanol production the way they do, which could be argued to be a farm subsidy, and then balk at the land needed for solar installations.
For arguments made in good faith- I think it's humanity's inability to comprehend scale. We can't get the volume of a glass of water right if we change it from tall to wide. Why would we think that terrawatts worth of PV would be a square shorter on a side than most people's daily commute?
It's not a If/Or Question. Agrisolar is even beneficial to farmers
Horrifically pessimistic numbers for PV (winter in maine with conversion efficencies half what they are now)... comes out to about a 50x50 mile square of panels to generate the entire USA's power demand from the most recent DOE numbers. Ignore that we can have wind, solar, and crops* in the same area. Turns out, btw, crops don't like high noon beating down on them. As a result we can reduce water usage and get nearly the same crop yield if part of the field is covered with panels- at least according to some studies.
That isn't the whole story. At least some of these new datacenters are gigawatt class. That's multiple sq km of solar.
Water usage is also an issue. A continuous 1 gigawatt is enough to boil off 1.3 million liters per hour which over 24 hours equates to very roughly 90k residential users. If it isn't boiled but is instead returned lukewarm it will require many times that amount due to how large the heat of vaporization is. Compare to the entire state of Florida at "only" 23.5 million people.
did you move the goal post, or erect a new one? either way- residential use is penny ante in terms of water usage. So much so that comparing data center use to residential use without including industrial, commercial, and irrigation can only be in bad faith.
Particularly since usage reports typically present all the numbers in the same chart or grid.
The concern is resource usage. Water had been left out, so including it isn't shifting the goalposts given the context.
The comparison was intended for illustrative purposes. Residential usage provides something relatable and is the general standard for these sorts of discussions.
Even comparing to industrial most operations don't use anywhere near as much electricity or water. The new gigawatt class datacenters are in the same ballpark as aluminum smelters, but rather than melting metal they sink all that energy into water.
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'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.
>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.
> 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.
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?
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.
>who already use or (say by 2030)
Luckily it's only a memorandum and not a ban then.
>do not mind importing nuclear-generated power from their neighbours if needed.
Which does put some distance between you and whatever disaster occurs because someone thought pocketing $5 was more important than safety.
You're also assuming there won't be a massive crash in the next year or two would leave a lot of stranded assets around. If there's not, then they'll build DC's then.
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.
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.
The consequence of saying they cannot choice to not have them. Is saying your requiring them to have them whether or not the people their want them. Its also a temporary moratorium. Maybe the industry should have been more responsible and not pasted so many externalities on to the public sector if they didnt want to face regulations.
I think the highest parent comment basically hasn't engaged in any of the cost benefit analysis just strawman the subject to banning all industry. They are not doing that and allow other manufacturing to exist maybe the data center business should learn from those industries how to conduct themselves
> The consequence of saying they cannot choice to not have them. Is saying your requiring them to have them whether or not the people their want them.
Sorry, but this is nonsense. They are currently not banned in Maine, yet they do not have them. There is obviously no requirement to have them.
Taxing them to account for the externalities they bring.
This right here is the right take.
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.
It's a free state. Like the Swiss banned minarets in Geneva the Mainers should be allowed to vote to ban datacenters. AI bros can always opt to build their stuff elsewhere, like Texas or Abu Dhabi.
That’s not what a free society is.
That’s like saying “Mainers should be allowed to ban speech they don’t like, and private sex acts they find offensive”. Your view of what constitutes freedom is nonsensical.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It's self-selecting. Pro-growth states will flourish, attract intellectual talent. Support auxiliary careers, and grow their educational institutions.
The rest will fallow.
One must also consider the other impacts such as water use and noise pollution.
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?
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.
I don't know if I get you're points because lobster farms are tied to certain external factors in a way things like data centers aren’t.
but either way, the argument feels very NIMBY: it’s not ‘no housing,’ it’s ‘just not here.’
so when someone say ‘let someone else host them,’ it really comes across as: I want the internet, just let other communities pay the environmental cost.
The cost of running a datacenter and the impact it has is also tied to external factors. The environmental cost is not the same in all locations. There are differences in land use, environmental requirements, power generation methods, and the downstream impact of all of those.
> 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…
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Did any major data centers want to locate in Maine, or is this just an empty gesture?
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
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.
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.
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.
Why would anybody outside of tech care if the cost of AI goes up?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
https://www.consumerreports.org/data-centers/ai-data-centers...
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?
Like how demand for RAM and hard drives drove prices of those down, because of all that greater investment, right?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
That is of course true, but it is at least not a totally unreasonable practice, unlike using fresh water straight off the grid as a cooling source.
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?
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?
Retarded.
All the concerns around data centers have technological solutions.
A key characteristic of a society in decay is banning productive assets because there is no will to build the infrastructure anymore. Hopefully this changes
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 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.