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Maine Set To Become First State With Data Center Ban (cnbc.com) 58

Posted by BeauHD from the put-on-hold dept.
Maine is on track to become the first U.S. state to impose a temporary statewide ban on new data center construction. "Lawmakers in Maine greenlit the text of a bill this week to block data centers from being built in the state until November 2027," reports CNBC. "The measure, which is expected to get final passage in the next few days, also creates a council to suggest potential guardrails for data centers to ensure they don't lead to higher energy prices or other complications for Maine residents." From the report: Maine's bill has a few steps to go through before becoming law, notably whether Gov. Janet Mills will exercise her veto power. Mills asked lawmakers to include an exemption for several areas of the state where data center construction could continue. However, an amendment to do so was stuck down in the House, 29 to 115. Complicating Mills' decision is her campaign to become Maine's next senator. Mills is facing off against Graham Platner, an oyster farmer, in a high-profile Democratic primary. Platner is leading Mills in most recent polls by double digits.

Maine Set To Become First State With Data Center Ban More | Reply

Maine Set To Become First State With Data Center Ban

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  • Bans are not the answer. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by smithmc ( 451373 ) on Monday April 13, 2026 @12:12PM (#66091720) Journal
    People are building data centers because people are using the services that are supported by those data centers. Either make the builders of data centers (a) put as much (clean/renewable) energy on the grid as they use, and/or (b) charge them more for the electricity they use, so that the higher energy costs don't splash onto the general public. Maybe... progressive rates for energy usage?

    • Re:Bans are not the answer. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Junta ( 36770 ) on Monday April 13, 2026 @12:29PM (#66091748)

      I think a fair argument can be made that the buildout is not because people are using, but instead based on an expectation that people *will* be using them.

      If it were the case that we overrun the capacity then one would expect companies to be a bit more restrained. Instead almost every google search gets an "AI Overview", inflating the query cost a hundred fold without the user ever actually opting in. So many companies are embedding AI implicitly into existing flows without user demand being actively expressed. This is not the behavior of a market starved of resources that would be saving the capacity for those that specifically opt into it and further the ones that would pay for it.

      The scenario that we are under sized for the current demand would imply that no one should be able to see 'free' usage of AI in their experience and would be expected to pay up.

      It's not just about the energy, we have water and land usage concerns as well. A few cases around here of farmland potentially going to datacenter buildout, and I'm not sure that's a good long term trade.

      It's abundantly clear this is a tech bubble, with some undefined durable demand, but the current speculative buildout may never get fully utilized. By the time the non-bubble demand catches up, there's good chances that we have a whole other approach that dramatically changes what sorts of resources are needed. For example people sometimes defend the dot-com buildout as rational because, eventually, we surpassed even the dreams of back then, but we had to scrap a lot of that buildout as hopelessly irrelevant to the market that was all-in on internet.

      • Most of the build outs happen where energy is cheap/subsidized. or there's tax advantages or incentives given out. There's no need for laws to prevent them. Remove all the subsidies and tax incentives and they'll go look where it's cheaper.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by havana9 ( 101033 )
        This data center build frenzy reminds me the commercial centers build frenzy of 30 years ago. They were built with the expectancy to get an anchor and all the small shops filled, and people getting there to buy groceries and other stuff. At the beginning it worked, but after some time they got to saturation, because in these mall you found the same shops, and you clearly can't eat at two McDonalds or KFC at the same time and people started to go to the nearest mall, maybe the one that was at walking distanc

    • Part of what gets the average ratepayer are the infrastructure costs. Datacentre buildouts require sometimes-massive grid connections. Those upgrades often fall on the general public.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by smithmc ( 451373 )
        Yes, I'm sure they do; I'm suggesting that maybe instead of banning data centers altogether, the state and/or utility could... not let those upgrades fall on the public and instead require the data center builders to foot that bill?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Junta ( 36770 )

          Note they only temporarily ban it, which would buy them time to work out details precisely like what you say.

          Such restrictions to manage the impact can take time to work out, moreso if all the business interests involved benefit by stalling establishing and enforcing such nuanced measures. If the status quo is build without worry and consequence, it's very hard to subtly move things toward still building, but with more responsibility and accountability.

          If there is a moratorium, then the business interests h

        • It depends on the controlling authority for individual utilities what will be their policies. Most local utilities are government-controlled affairs that get caught up in whatever public/private boosterism prevails in the local political scene. "Pro-business" policies usually include some incentives for locating your business in a particular city or county. And part of that may be a sweetheart deal when it comes to utility hookups (which inevitably leads to costs being passed somewhere else). These poli

    • Agreed. I wish people would stop treating data centers as bogeymen. Most people aren't opposed to data centers per se, they're opposed to the side-effects. They're concerned about the energy usage and its effect on consumer energy rates. They're concerned about water usage. They're concerned about noise. They're concerned about heat pollution in the surrounding environment.

      The thing is, all those things (with the possible exception of heat pollution) are fixable! They just take money and regulators with t

      • Re:Bans are not the answer. (Score:4)

        by Junta ( 36770 ) on Monday April 13, 2026 @03:31PM (#66092180)

        Some of the concerns are fundamental.

        They tend to prefer getting rid of farmland or forests. Maybe if they tended to target abandoned retail spaces like dead malls and shopping centers, maybe they wouldn't be so bad.

        Especially since the current frenzy is a bunch of competitors of whom only some will likely survive a correction in the market. Hell, even without investment failures, a large number of these projects are plagued by logistics issues stemming from people eagerly making commitments they could have never realistically met. So we will end up with some 'datacenter blight' just like overdoing retail has left us with blight.

      • "Require closed-loop cooling instead of evaporative."

        Then you get big fans that sound like a WW2 propellor-driven 4-engine bomber making racket 24/7/365 as actual fans force the not-all-that-cool air (here in Texas, anyway, where ambient can be 106 degrees Mid July to late September) and drive everyone absolutely over the edge.

        • That's the beauty of data, you can put the data center somewhere far from where the data is used. Put it somewhere appropriate, not Texas or other places that are high on ambient heat and low on water.

          I've been wondering if geothermal might be a solution, only use the ground as a heat sink instead of a heat source. Here in Michigan's Upper Peninsula the abandoned mines stay at 40F all year round, regardless of the air temperature. Place the servers in the mine, drill some cooling loops into the rock. I do

          • In Michigan's upper Peninsula, one out to build their data center in a waterproof tube, submerge it in lake Superior, and never worry about cooling it again.

    • This is putting the cart before the horse. If people are using the services supported by the data centers, then why do we need more?

      The reality is that the data centers are being built because the AI companies are desperately trying to give the impression that there's going to be a massive increase in demand for *checks notes* spicy autocomplete in the future. But it's far from certain that's true. Everything we've seen so far suggests a bubble - the technology is overhyped, a fair amount of usage of it is

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mudimba ( 254750 )

      I agree. I don't care if you have a datacenter or a widget factory, if you are disrupting the electrical grid or polluting rivers you are a problem. Instead of legislating a specific industry, they need to put broader environmental laws in place. That way if somebody wants to make a green datacenter they can, and when the next environmental nightmare fad comes along no new legislation is needed.

    • Something like 60% of the country reads at a 6th grade level or below.

      As a country we don't do nuance. We are All or nothing. We just do not have the educational equipment to pull off nuance.

      AI data centers are bad. Really bad. They guzzle drinking water and they go straight for drinking water because their design requires very pure water and its pricey to purify it and they're already losing money hand over fist. They also guzzle subsidized electricity. When one of them gets crapped down into your

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by whitroth ( 9367 )

      Nope. Hyperscale datacenters are for AI. Which has NO major revenue stream in the foreseeable future. They're burning through venture capital, to the point were reports say there's almost no VC for other business.

  • Move the datacenters to the arctic circle be it Alaska or Canada or Greenland, all that glacier ice melt should be nice and cold
  • Better to let the market sort out how many data centers we need and where they should be. There's absolutely no need for government to get involved, beyond very narrow national security concerns (i.e. don't put all the data centers in the same spot where they can all be easily taken out).

    Plus, any state that bans them is literally handicapping themselves economically. They're definitely tax revenue and job generators, although the job numbers are fairly low after the construction phase.

    • Building the data center brings some temporary jobs but under normal operation only a handful of people work there. Mostly to change out failed hardware.

    • Was anyone planning on building a data center in Maine in the next two years? Probably not, so all this amounts to is a meaningless law that politicians can say they worked hard on to ensure that the citizens of Maine were blah blah blah. Even though it did nothing expect it to be talked about excessively when the candidate is up for reelection. This is just a hot button issue that a lot of people are worried about or feel strongly about so it's easy to score points with voters with something that cost no p
    • "Better to let the market sort out how many data centers we need and where they should be. There's absolutely no need for government to get involved,"

      I grew up with coal mines & "crackers" in my back yard and coal-trains rumbling past at 2-AM. Across town subsurface mine-fires burned for decades spewing massive SO2 & CO into the air. Pretty flames at night ... City buildings fell into mines where the "pillars" were robbed. Mine cave-ins tried swallowing the Susquehanna

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      Problem is a lot of local communities do not understand these facilities.

      Was a news story around here where a datacenter project was deeply regretted by the local politicians. They saw "business will build facitlity with huge amount of square feet" and their closest comparison was a textile plant of about that size and how many jobs they used to provide. So they excitedly bent over backwards to accommodate the datacenter project and then ultimately had an enduring employment of about 6 jobs.

      Tax revenue? Th

    • Better to let the market sort out how many data centers we need and where they should be.

      I can tell you've never actually studied economics. The free market is a horrible allocator of resources and never works in the best interest of all parties. A well functioning market is governed by regulations that resolve a whole world of resource allocation issues to avoid things such as the Tragedy of Commons and similar economic outcomes.

      The only one benefitting from letting "the market" do its work are those people billing you for using a datacentres. Both directly and indirectly by driving up your co

  • I don't think bans are the answer. But also, governments that offer bribes [youtube.com] to get data centers built are also doing the wrong thing.

    I think data center construction needs to be regulated. The data center must pay property taxes just like everyone else, and it must provide money for every watt of power that it uses... money to build new energy generation capacity and transmission infrastructure so that other people's electricity rates are not affected by the data center.

  • ....part of me wonders about the opposite end of the 'tragedy of the commons'.

    If a state were, for example, to ban all power plants within its borders, should it benefit from electric power created by such plants? (Of course the libertarian capitalist answer is they they're free to do so, but this gives pricing leverage to the states that ARE willing to suffer the siting of a power plant in their borders....)

    Same with data centers. I recognize all their ills, and that (it certainly seems) that much of the

  • Their services/products do not require local production to enable consumption.

    That people eat pork does not mean they should want a hog farm and its nasty environmental impacts nearby. There is plenty of land elsewhere. The US is enormous and most of it lightly populated. Logistics is a long-solved problem.

    That people may use AI does not mean they need a data centers impact on their aquifers or nor its impact on their power production industry.

    Those businesses are already often more distant than not from co

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