Maine Looks to Become the First State to Outlaw Data Centers
Or new data centers, anyway. Sorry for the headline bait and switch, but good luck finding any state in the union where the idea of banning data centers in toto is being taken seriously by anyone other than jaded anarchist zine publishers. Commercial artificial intelligence has already wormed its way into the heart of the American psyche, and that’s not even considering the many additional governmental, research, and corporate applications that might flow through the same water-guzzling data center plopped down next to your child’s elementary school. Maine, however, aims to become the first state to vociferously declare: “No more of this bullshit. Er, temporarily.”
Because yes, even when you reduce the scope to “no more new data centers,” there must be caveats. The bill, which this week passed both chambers of Maine’s state legislature, would put a moratorium on new data center construction in the state for 18 months, allowing time for an assembled study group to assess the impact of these facilities and make recommendations for new legislation providing guardrails for them, as well as stripping those facilities of certain tax exemptions. Unsurprisingly, the Maine State Legislature is controlled on both sides by members of the Democratic Party. It’s the first state to get such a bill all the way to the finish line, but by no means the only state weighing one right now.
That doesn’t mean, however, that the bill will inevitably become law. Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, may also be a Democrat, but she’s a centrist locked in a grueling primary race (it’s not looking too hot) for a U.S. Senate seat against gruff oyster fisherman/progressive/Nazi tattoo-haver Graham Platner. And like a good centrist, she’s trying to balance the electoral calculus of just how many votes a signature or a veto of the bill will cost her, clearly worried that signing it into law will in particular cost her in certain rural areas that are desperate for any kind of economic development–even data centers. She has about a week left to either veto the legislation, sign it into law, or take the third and most bluntly cowardly route of just not interacting with the bill and allowing it to become law anyway.
Reported 4/9: Lawmakers have given final approval to a moratorium on data centers larger than 20 megawatts — the first statewide ban of its kind in the country.
Reported 4/10: Maine Gov. Janet Mills Expresses Reservations About Data Center Ban. Will she veto?
#MEpolitics #AIDataCenters #MaineLD307
— Pine Tree Activism (@pinetreeactivism.org) Apr 13, 2026 at 9:43 AM
In all fairness, Mills does have the threat of arbitrary punishment for her entire state from the chief executive of the United States hanging over her head as well. Donald Trump has made it clear that he doesn’t want any state to utilize its sovereignty in any way when it comes to writing laws regulating AI, issuing an executive order in December that threatened federal lawsuits on states that didn’t do everything possible to kowtow to his technocrat billionaire chums. As that executive order put it: “We remain in the earliest days of this technological revolution and are in a race with adversaries for supremacy within it. To win, United States AI companies must be free to innovate without cumbersome regulation. But excessive State regulation thwarts this imperative.”
And suffice to say, despite Trump lying and bluffing in most of his dealings on topics such as the Iran War, when it comes to threats to specifically enact petty vengeance on blue states, he’s quite a truth teller. Just look at Colorado, where Trump has withheld funding and shot down various public works projects specifically because the state has not yet pardoned one of his favorite felon election deniers, former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters. Trump in fact used the very first executive veto of his second term in order to veto a unanimously passed bill from Congress that would have helped to provide fresh, clean, non-irradiated drinking water to the Trump-heavy voting population in Southern Colorado, saying as he did so that he would not approve “funding expensive and unreliable policies.” To reiterate: He told his own voters to keep drinking radiation-tinged water, because the governor of Colorado has not yet freed a convicted felon from prison. You can see why Janet Mills might wonder what Trump would decide to do to Maine, considering that he faces zero repercussions for blatantly favoring one state over another, even when it comes to subjects like FEMA disaster declarations.
Lauren Boebert Rebukes Trump for Using First Veto to Spike Her Colorado Water Project
www.yahoo.com/news/article…— Meow Yoga (@meowyoga.bsky.social) Dec 31, 2025 at 7:37 PM
The calculus is also complicated by the fact that some small, rural Maine communities do in fact want data centers, with causes seemingly more rooted in economic desperation than anything else. A typical example would be the rural town of Jay, a prototypical mill town that, well, lost its paper mill, which shut down in 2023 and took roughly 200 jobs with it. In a grim sign of the times, a data center had been planned to move in to the very building that once housed said mill. It would actually use less water than the mill once did, and would provide some tax revenue, but would provide only a tiny fraction of the jobs that the mill once provided for local laborers. Still, to bitter rural residents who have struggled to adapt, even a sparse, noisy data center probably sounds better than allowing the town to continue withering away without outside investment. To that end, an amendment was proposed to allow certain data center projects like the one in Jay to proceed as an exemption from the rest of the bill, but said amendment was resoundingly defeated in the Maine House of Representatives.
This is perhaps the saddest thing about the AI data centers issue: Both the people building them and the communities receiving them increasingly see them as a foregone conclusion that is pointless to resist, even if they would otherwise be opposed. The concerns continue to mount, from excess energy and resource usage, to pollution, to noise and environmental disruption, but then you get a guy like the man in the quote below and you have to just take a moment to stop and appreciate how screwed we all really are.
“People are afraid of A.I.—I’m afraid of A.I.—but guess what, it’s coming,” said Tony McDonald, one of the developers of the planned project in Jay—the one that would be stuck in the decayed skeleton of the paper mill that once gave the town life. This is the guy leading development of the data center, saying that even he is afraid of the technology that said data center powers … but it’s not going to stop him from continuing to spend every day building those data centers. It would be like me condemning AI chatbot usage while simultaneously using ChatGPT to write this article, while saying that I might as well because AI is inevitable. It’s like noting that because everyone eventually dies, there’s no point to getting out of the way of traffic while crossing the street. Just an utter surrender to inevitability as you toil to build the very thing you’re pretty sure will destroy you.
If that’s the pro-AI side, then you can probably consider me on the side of Maine’s legislature.