Maine set to become first state with data center ban

Is that same person who told trump "see you in court"?

Mills selling us out as her senate run flounders is least surprising part of all this.

Not too familiar with Maine government system but most (all?) state government system has a way of overruling a veto and making the bill a law anyway. Otherwise the state governor would have had too much power and there wouldn't be any point of the rest of ruling body. Even US president's veto have been overridden and pushed into law

She is, 100%, going to veto this.

She will be shooting herself in the foot then. This is an issue that is playing well across the country, and politicians who pledge to block new datasets are winning everywhere.

It’s almost always based on power usage and/or physical size, not a server count.

So it is basically: *“let’s not approve a bunch of 100+ MW projects before we even have the rules in place.”*

20mw is not a small data center. It's not a major hyperscaler but it's not small.

That power calculation is a bit off. A Vera Rubin NVL72 rack is 200kW.

I think we need to do a serious reality check on your proposition. Maine does *not* have this kind of computational infrastructure generally. There are probably a handful - at most - exceptions to this in the entire state right now. And this would only impact new applications, not existing facilities. Maine has some of the poorest counties in the country, and many of the poor are retirees. There are areas that are exceptions, but they stand out exactly because relative to the rest of the state they are exceptions - mostly Portland, and some scattered coastal pockets. Even the areas you might imagine are economically flush like Bar Harbor are only barely so in a good tourism season, the full-time resident population is in the low 4 digits. And Maine is not itself flush with loads of excess electrical power. Anything done to turn Maine into a DC haven would be at the instant, immediate disadvantage of residents already living marginally above a subsistence level.

That seems small. I can totally understand banning the crazy mega data centers, they cause all sorts of problems. But tons of data centers all over the country have been around for decades without causing any issues.

I'm not an IT person, so i could be wrong, but I think the 1000w / unit estimate you're using would be very high. For the kind of hardware you'd see in a traditional data center that's not packed full of GPU's, I think you'd expect quite a bit lower power draw. From what I've seen, small-mid size data centers are pretty much always <10MW.

New Zealander here, we have 50+ data centres and almost all of them are in the single digit MW range. The company I work for owns five, and they’re all in the 3-5MW range.

They're wanting to stuff 1MW in a single cabinet these days, so over 20kW per U. What I want to know is what happens when the estop is hit at one of these gigawatt-in-a-single-room datacenters.

Hey I manage datacenters and no rack has only 1000 watts, my BASE order is 208v 60a so 12k watts. We dont even host servers that just for networking equipment.

We have close to that and we are just a university.

Numbers are a bit high. 3.5kw is a standard half sized feed, where I've been. 7kw for the main racks, usually see a 3:1 density of Full:Half It's more like 3,000 racks, which is a medium sized DC, could be classed as small in bigger cities. I've worked for companies with multiples that were larger, and housed in their own offices, for what it's worth. Tricky bill to enforce, with a size like that, probably should have consulted someone in the know Add GPUs and this could be banning server closets in offices that do AutoCad, let alone AI

1KW per rack/cabinet would be very low power 20 years ago. At that time they were about 15KW each, and now they can easily be 50KW if you load it up with DGXs and their networking.

1kw a rack is pretty low I know we uses over 3kw on avg

I don't think 20K servers is "pretty small" for on-premise data center.

I mean it's obviously just slopulism designed to sound good and not actually improve peoples' lives. An attempt to get attention and applause instead of helping people. Data centers aren't going to stop getting built, and the solution isn't to ban them, it's to up their tax burden to offset the increases in energy demand.

But he already wrote a story called IT.

It's very sensible. Right now we have loads of examples of states and communities that haven't managed the impacts at all. And a serious risk of DC overbuilding. A year and a half to curb facilities massively outsized relative to the level of industrial infrastructure in Maine is not at all unreasonable. This is a state that hasn't even fully figured out residential internet, ffs. There are towns where "town hall" is a mobile home and a couple of part-time employees, and maybe the town has a local GP for medical services. I know roads you can drive down, see the living conditions, and wonder how the hell somebody survived the winter. Good people but others unfamiliar with the state really need to be careful not to project economic assumptions formed from life around themselves on to a story about a place they know nothing about.

so it's not a ban, it's a pause.

This is exactly what governments are for.

Somehow she conns people into thinking she's a moderate. Maine has a history of moderates being more successful at getting elected because the state tends to split blue south / red north. She uses moderate words, but the voting record tells a different story. She's not MAGA but the doesn't do anything to piss them off either.

Would’ve been nice to have something like this in place before they completely razed all the remaining forested area in eastern Loudoun :(

We also "lose out" on all the potential profits from having billboards statewide. But we banned that shit anyway. Because Maine is beautiful and its nature should remain something everyone can enjoy for generations to come.

I was born and grew up in Maine. It's a beautiful state and great if you like outdoors stuff. Kayaking, hiking, fishing, snowmobiling, skiing, etc. But you do have to put up with essentially 6 months of winter and while we aren't Buffalo with the lake-effect stuff you will get days where you get dumped on with more than a foot of snow overnight. It's also not a very good job market so your career options will be very limited, there's a big brain drain where kids graduate and move elsewhere, hence it having the oldest median age of people in the country.

They also ban billboards! There are some great quality of life and environmental policies in Maine.

It’s a beautiful place. I’m not surprised that people over there want to preserve it.

If you can work remotely, it's a great state to relocate to. Lots of c**** places outside the few bigger communities like Portland. Southern Maine is very expensive and housing is hard to find.

A group is trying to get a data center ban on the ballot in Ohio we have way too many here some townships and cities are starting to ban them or temporary bans this would be something I'd expect rural residents to support but we might be too red for it also

Datacenters of 20MW+ scale aren’t viable in Maine for general internet functions nor necessary to serve it’s local population. Those DCs have to go near major interconnects and population density. Maine has neither. What could be viable, although rates discourage it, is building DCs for “AI.”

Yes but here in Ohio our power bills continue to skyrocket. They receive tax incentives to build here and still pass the costs onto us

I think most people can gather from context that the AI data centers are the focus of the discussion man

I'm already sold. You don't need to convince me. --- Being sarcastic, of course. But seriously, the head of Microsoft AI said something maybe a month ago that was really prescient. He said something like "[we need to do something useful with AI, or we'll lose social permission](https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/microsoft-ceo-warns-that-we-must-do-something-useful-with-ai-or-theyll-lose-social-permission-to-burn-electricity-on-it/) to spend resources on it". Which is a really important point. There is widespread pushback against these data centers because people don't see them as a net benefit. Public perception is that they're a nascence and a drain. In a lot of ways, they are. Companies need to start addressing this or they will, literally, not be able to function on a fundamental level. Progressive states (funny enough, where there are lots of jobs - California, Colorado, etc) will start blocking them and it's going to be a problem.

Update: Disregard my incorrect information here, the Maine House Democrats [information](https://www.maine.gov/housedems/news/maine-house-advances-sachs-bill-establish-moratorium-data-centers-0) does not match the text of the bill. I've been politely corrected by /u/Pat_The_Hat, but I'm leaving my original comment below despite my shame so the thread makes sense. I had said: Although this article doesn't say so (not fun searching for 'ai' in an article about Maine), [the bill](https://www.maine.gov/housedems/news/maine-house-advances-sachs-bill-establish-moratorium-data-centers-0) is specifically about them (edit: according to Maine House of Democrats, couldn't find bill text easily): > 4/07/2026 > AUGUSTA – The Maine House voted Tuesday to advance a bill sponsored by Rep. Melanie Sachs, D-Freeport, that would institute a moratorium on the construction of artificial intelligence (AI) data centers and create the Maine Data Center Coordination Council to assist towns with future implementation. The vote was 82-62, with bipartisan support.

It's a temporary ban until November 2027, not an indefinite one. Maine also has some of the highest energy costs in the entire country. The idea of adding more costs to people's lives when Maine has an old and relatively poor population was never going to be popular here. We also put high value on our local environment, and locals are skeptical about the "more jobs" claims from these proposals. Overall I can see the logic for why someone business minded would want more data centers in their state, but it doesn't really vibe with Maine specifically.

They don’t even hire local construction crews unless required by the township, too. The entire operation is done with their own guys to avoid hiring local unions to save costs. So all those lines and HVAC units were done by some no-name subsidiary they put up in motels for a few months. Not a single local tradesmen was hired.

I think the main benefit is that they can bring in tax revenue with out a lot of need for city services. So if a community has planned for growth and has the necessary infrastructure capacity, then you can really lessen the impacts. Of course that all goes out the window if the city gives out tax breaks to the data center. However, think places are getting wise to the fact that the don't bring quality jobs, thus shouldn't get a tax break.

Um... no. Demand on regular online services wasn't really increasing that fast. It's the AI stuff that is leading to this nation wide push to slam in massive data centers all over the place. A push for something the majority of people don't actually seem to want. And the people are pushing back. The corporations can build them on the mansions of their wealthy owners for all I f****** care. If they're so important, you'd think they'd be willing, wouldn't they? No, they go where they think they can get the least regulation and best tax breaks, f****** over the citizens whose taxes do NOT decrease but now have to pay for the infrastructure costs to service this new facility which mostly hires out of state remote employees to manage it. Our taxes go up; our electrical bills go up; our water supplies get used up and contaminated. All for corporate bullshit no one is asking for. F*** that bullshit model. We're ending it now. It's over. The corporate sector will need to f****** sit down and shut up while the citizens figure this out.

Greenland. Add datacenters to the list of things for Greenland. Always cold so instant 25% savings. More land than ever needed. Unlimited renewable energy. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/greenland-freedom-city-rich-donors-push-trump-tech-hub-up-north-2025-04-10/

“Stop being a Luddite!” Idk maybe companies could not wildly pollute and ruin the environment for the last grasp at profits they’re gonna get before the AI bubble implodes on itself.

I don't know. Maybe to make sure locals aren’t subsidizing power costs.

Says the person using a service running out of a DC connected globally by other DCs.

Most people don’t want AI and he Cloud.

CDN nodes aren’t being stopped by this. Assuming we want AI is flawed.

> we want AI, streaming, cloud everything… No actually, we don't.

well the thing is that we don't want AI actually. and the rest of that stuff was working fine with the data centers we already had. not to say that those things can't be expanded but the AI boom was building too many data centers in places that can't sustain them without massive negative effects on the local population.

Legislating against something that could happen in the future, instead of trying to be responsive to something already happening, is good governance.

Because as we all know, the only time you should ever do anything is after already becomes a problem. This is why you should never get tested for cancer until you’re already dead.