Maine is getting closer to passing a moratorium on the construction of new datacenters, one of the first in the country. The State’s House and Senate have both passed LD 307, a bill that would pause construction on new datacenters until November 1, 2027. The Senate approved LD 307 by a vote of 19-13 on Monday night and now it will go to both chambers for a final vote. LD 307 specifically targets datacenters of 20 megawatts or more and calls for the creation of a Maine Data Center Coordination Council to better plan and facilitate the massive construction projects.
“We can’t afford health care for our constituents. School funding is a nightmare. School construction is entirely underfunded, but we can afford … $2 million out of the general fund for the richest—the richest corporations in the world, Amazon, Google, you name them—we’re going to give them money,” state Sen. Tim Nangle said during debate about the vote, according to the Maine Morning Star.
Maine’s vote comes days after journalists at The Maine Monitor and Maine Focus revealed a secretive plan to construct a datacenter in the town of Lewiston in the southern part of the state. In Lewiston, city councilors didn’t learn about the proposed $300 million datacenter until six days before they were supposed to vote on it. Discussions about the datacenter occurred behind closed doors and the city administrator said the developer had asked for confidentiality. In Wiscasset, the city killed a $5 billion proposed datacenter after residents learned the city had signed nondisclosure agreements with the developer.
As part of the moratorium, Maine’s Data Center Coordination Council would study and oversee the environmental impact and electricity bill increases datacenters often bring to local residents and “consider data-sharing requirements and processes for proposed datacenters.”
Anger against datacenters is mounting across the country. The massive complexes aren’t good neighbors. They use public land, increase the electricity rates of everyone near them, and have negative effects on water quality and noise levels. The deals to construct them are sometimes cut in secret and local communities have little to no say in what’s being built near them. In Texas, a 6,000 acre datacenter plans to consume water from a dwindling aquifer to power nuclear power plants in the desert. In Michigan, a township is pushing back against a $1.2 billion AI datacenter meant to service America’s nuclear weapons scientists.
In Port Washington, Wisconsin, citizens will vote directly on the issue this week. The town of 13,000 is voting directly on whether or not to allow an OpenAI “Stargate” datacenter project. Similar ballot measures are slated in Monterey Park, California, Augusta Township, Michigan, and Janesville, Wisconsin.
In communities with no ballot measures, citizens are letting politicians know they hate datacenters in other ways. Early Monday morning, someone fired a gun at the home of Indianapolis City-County Councilor Ron Gibson and left a note on his front porch that read “NO DATA CENTERS.” A week earlier, Indianapolis city leaders had approved the construction of a datacenter in Gibson’s district.
