Discussion
Maine Is About to Become the First State to Ban Major New Data Centers
chasd00: 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.
gib444: 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?
9cb14c1ec0: 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.
shevy-java: 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 ...
Imustaskforhelp: 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
piker: 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.
seniorThrowaway: Don't know why people think Texas doesn't have natural beauty. It's a huge state.
AshleyGrant: 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.
creddit: Because it's Republican, obviously.
lbarrow: 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.
dclowd9901: For people who don't support this kind of ban, I'd ask: What's the alternative? _Requiring_ that states house data centers?
strongpigeon: Taxing them to account for the externalities they bring.
SpicyLemonZest: 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.
9cb14c1ec0: 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.
dpe82: 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.
jeffbee: 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.
cm2012: 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.
cosmic_cheese: 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.
threetonesun: 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?
embedding-shape: > 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?
slabity: > modern factories are often highly automated and also don't provide too many local jobs.The factories in Maine employ thousands of people. The Bath Iron Works factory alone has over 7k employees.The Lewiston datacenter that was planned to be built was expected to employ less than 30.
cloudfudge: In what universe is requiring them the only alternative to banning them? The actual alternative is obvious: not banning them.
mystraline: 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.
smarf: > more power to themthat seems to be the idea!
rockemsockem: Except that's wrong because greater electricity demand stimulates greater investment and leads to lower prices.
nemomarx: 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?
chao-: 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.
beastman82: I'm guessing the population of Lewiston would welcome an employer of 30 jobs
inglor_cz: 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.
seattle_spring: 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.
yxhuvud: Abundant access to a source of cooling can help offset high grid prices. Well places centres can a ton of money that way.
jeffbee: As has been repeatedly demonstrated, 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.
rangerelf: 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.
piker: 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.
ryandrake: 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.
nemomarx: 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.
josefritzishere: 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.
tacostakohashi: 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.
taormina: 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.
AvAn12: 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?
Legend2440: >If they produce large negative externalities like data centers doThey don't though. All the things you listed are basically made up, by people who don't like AI for other reasons.Especially the claims about water usage ("one water bottle per prompt") and environmental degradation are straight-up lies.
pb7: 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.
bsimpson: I know little about this region. Why would it be unreasonably more expensive to build on one side of the state line than another?
kube-system: 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.
culi: 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.
unicornporn: 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?
fr4nkr: 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.
orenlindsey: 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.
pojzon: 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.
km3r: 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.
culi: The title is misleading. It's not a "ban", just a "moratorium" until November 2027And 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...
ainch: 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.
bigfatkitten: 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.
gmm1990: 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
efromvt: 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.
mlsu: 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.
einpoklum: 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.
petre: 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.
swarnie: 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.
donmcronald: > 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.
zdrummond: 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.
jph00: "already substantially completed" isn't accurate. $450m of the eventual $1.65b cost had been spent at that point - so less than half.
john_strinlai: 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)
bparsons: 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.
cma: 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.
irishcoffee: Surely you realize that building the infrastructure and driver of the 1GW provider would be, hopefully, carbon neutral?
ainch: 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?
Bratmon: 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.
carefulfungi: 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...
tacostakohashi: The progressive community is not about progress, it's about being progressive.
DrewADesign: 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.
bitexploder: 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?
hermanzegerman: 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
ronsor: Ironically railroads almost always got their way in the past.
marcosdumay: Railroads were incredibly useful for the entire population.
throwaway27448: > 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.
jsnell: 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.
cucumber3732842: >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 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.
rvz: 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...
throwaway27448: > 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.
yxhuvud: For cooling you can also use a heat exchanger and dump it into a river or an ocean or so.
jeffbee: Closed loop heat exchange costs more electricity. It's not a free lunch that data center designers are overlooking.
yxhuvud: 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.
WarmWash: 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.
jagged-chisel: What does this have with the use of AI? You can use the services of data centers thousands of miles away.
DrewADesign: 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.
bitexploder: 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.
throwaway27448: 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.
carefree-bob: 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.
bastardoperator: 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.
bombcar: 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.
marcosdumay: > 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.
AgentK20: 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.
bryanlarsen: 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.
xphos: 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
tjohns: [delayed]
physhster: Less than 30 makes no sense. It's easily in the hundred if you account for shifts and the specialized jobs required.
bombcar: 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.
pixl97: 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.
BlueRock-Jake: 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.
franklinter: Yes but totally insane that so many on this site seem to approve such a ban.
unethical_ban: 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?
bombcar: 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).
fc417fc802: 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.
shaky-carrousel: Yes, I would support a ban on new factories for, say, slot machines.
inglor_cz: 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.
pixl97: >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.
mediaman: 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.
no_wizard: 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
j2kun: My favorite class of HN comment: bringing concreteness to a vibes fight.
andsoitis: > a mcdonalds is probably 1% of the land and employs more than 30 people.Fast food chains are damaging to human health.
order-matters: 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
burnished: Think i'd be ok with a year and a half halt for things in general every now and again.
BrenBarn: 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?
pesus: > 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.
xphos: 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
Bratmon: 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.
cucumber3732842: 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.
dreambuffer: 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.
TheTaytay: 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.
0cf8612b2e1e: 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.
bluGill: That isn't the factories job - that is your utilities job.
mmmm2: And when it's the utility's job, who's footing the bill?
johnsimer: AI is incredibly useful for the entire population
marcosdumay: Is that why the US's GDP is currently booming into infinity? Or is it only responsible for their unprecedented median standard of living?
irishcoffee: 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?
hatthew: I'd call that substantial
overfeed: > 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.
bluGill: There are many customers to spread that over in proportion to their usage. This is standard acconting they have been doing for years
8note: 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
unclad5968: 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.
ch4s3: > AI are much more energy-hungry than car manufacturingThis 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...
jmyeet: 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.
cheriot: Property taxes come to mind.
xphos: 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 localsTheir is typically high paying jobs in factories but these places dont employ a large staff beyond construction. It a tough spaces.
givemeethekeys: Why not mandate that all data centers must be completely off the grid instead?
unethical_ban: So they install noisy, loud fossil fuel generators that pollute the surrounding area.
givemeethekeys: That certainly is one way to do it, but I'm certain not the only one.
cloudfudge: > 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.
bnewbold: 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.
WarmWash: 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.
Acrobatic_Road: They sure have a right to enact policies that keep them economically & demographically irrelevant.
bdangubic: Data Centers would have made them sooooooo rich, very silly policies indeed, they’d be swimming in money
fc417fc802: > 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.
bsimpson: 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.
taormina: 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.
Anechoic: 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).
jesse_ash: 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)
fc417fc802: > 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.
harimau777: 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.
jeffbee: 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.
butvacuum: 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.
fc417fc802: 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.
butvacuum: 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.
tadfisher: New AI data center builds are being specified in gigawatts, my friend.
jasonwatkinspdx: 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.
DrewADesign: 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.
dawnerd: A sandwich shop would also be infinitely more useful to the population.
