Municipalities across the country are fighting tooth and nail to stop data center construction. But not Jay, Maine.
The town with a population of just 4,600 people has been so desperate for one of these power-hungry facilities that the state governor Janet Mills vetoed a bill that would’ve banned new data centers of a certain size for the sole reason that it didn’t make an exception for Jay.
But why? According to a new piece in The Atlantic from a reporter who visited the town, it’s for a fairly simple reason, but with an elaborate backstory. The summary: Jay is a dead-end backwater whose biggest employer literally went up in smoke. The data center, supposedly, could be an economic boon to rescue it from slow ruin.
The developer pushing the project, Tony McDonald, wants to build the data center on a 1,000 acre plot of land that was once the site of the town’s lifeblood, the Androscoggin Mill. Once the site, because the mill that employed over 1,500 people suddenly exploded in 2020. The whole sprawling complex was reduced to smithereens, though thankfully no one died: when the explosion struck, everyone was on their lunch break.
McDonald, according to The Atlantic, has heavily mined the nostalgia for the mill’s past to paint an even rosier picture of a data center driven future.
Summarizing the arguments he deployed, the magazine wrote: “Would a data center be loud? Can’t be as loud as the mill! Could it smell bad? The mill smelled like rotten eggs! Would it pollute the environment? The river was covered in toxic foam in the mill days!“
The data center would use just a fraction of the tens of millions of gallons of water per day the mill used, McDonald claims. And it could use 82 megawatts of power the mill was already permitted to use, and rely on solar panels to generate the rest of the electricity it needed, thereby protecting the town from additional energy costs.
All this charming rhetoric worked. When McDonald first conceived of his plan to get the data center firm Sentinel to build on his land, he didn’t bother to tell the town’s five-member board, at least not at first. But when he heard that the state was going to pass a moratorium on new data centers, he ran to them for help. Less than an hour after McDonald told the board of his plans — and apologized for not mentioning it before — they voted to draft a letter to send to governor Mills.
It was a bewildering moment.
“Analyze the footage as much as you like,” The Atlantic reporter write, “it will provide no clear answers as to why, in this moment of bipartisan resistance to new data-center construction, these town leaders would go from total ignorance to unanimous support in the time it takes to bake a lasagna.”
But for all the mining of the mill’s legacy McDonald has done to sell his project, the completed thing will only create between 125 to 150 full-time high-paying jobs, he admitted. That’s just a tenth of the old mill’s workforce.
In what may be the final plot twist in this saga, the data center project may be dead in the water after all. On June 11, the town announced that the data center firm Sentinel had backed out, and McDonald’s dreams have been put on indefinite hold.
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