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Janet Mills vetoes moratorium on data center development in Maine (www.mainepublic.org)

submitted 1 week ago by FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world to c/usa@lemmy.ml

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Gov. Janet Mills has vetoed legislation to temporarily ban the development of large-scale data centers in Maine.

The bill passed through the state Legislature with bipartisan support earlier this month. It would have enacted an 18-month moratorium on new data centers using more than 20 megawatts of power. If enacted, the law would have been the first of its kind in the U.S.

But the governor had asked for an exception to allow a $550 million facility planned in Jay. But an amendment to the bill that exempted the Jay project was defeated in the Legislature.

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[–] riskable@programming.dev 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Let me ask you a serious question: How would you limit the construction of AI data centers VS regular ones? Or even a data center inside of an existing office building? Or a data center that's just a backup location (where half of the equipment might not even be turned on all the time)?

How do you enforce such a thing? I could build a totally normal data center, then install a bunch of Nvidia HBMs and no one would know. You'd need a specific legal entity, the Data Center Police that dictate how, when, and why any given type of hardware gets used.

On the face of it, it's a huge violation of freedom of speech. Because you'd have to look into what specific software and data was being run/used on the hardware to see if it's related to AI and not, say, a CGI rendering farm. Or protein folding. Or physics/medical research. All of which use the same exact hardware.

I'm not saying you can't regulate data centers. You just can't regulate what people do with any given hardware.

My recommendation: Regulate data centers in these ways:

They must be powered by local renewable energy. None of this, "we bought carbon credits" bullshit.
If they need water cooling, they must use water from local retention ponds. Not the local potable water supply (using reclaimed water would be OK though).

Implement those two requirements and no one would have any basis to be bitching about data centers, specifically. There's much, much worse business/industrial buildings than data centers.

Aside: Data centers are just climate-controlled office buildings (with extra cooling). They just sit there. From a noise perspective, they're on par with a warehouse. In fact, warehouses that stay open 24/7 are much, much worse because of the truck traffic and forklifts. While a data center is a 24/7, low-frequency hum (on the outside, nearby), a warehouse is going to be shaking things nearby.

...and nothing is worse than busy train tracks! I slept at a friend's place for a few days that lived next to an elevated train (across the street from his window). There's no way a data center is worse than that! No way.