On Tuesday the Maine legislature passed LD 307, a temporary ban on new data centers drawing twenty megawatts or more. The House voted 79 to 62, the Senate 21 to 13, both on party lines with a handful of exceptions. Governor Janet Mills has ten days to sign, veto, or let it become law by inaction. If she signs, Maine becomes the first US state to pause construction on what the industry calls hyperscale facilities, and what everyone else has started calling AI data centers.

Twenty megawatts sounds like a lot until you look at what a contemporary data center actually pulls. The Regional Plan Association pegs the current average at around forty. The early ones used two. So the Maine threshold isn't a ceiling on something exotic; it's a line drawn roughly at the median. The bill walks the state back to a posture from fifteen years ago.

The politics are messier than the vote count suggests. Mills is running in a contested Democratic primary for a US Senate seat and has signalled hesitation about signing without a carveout for a proposed 82MW facility in Jay. Tony McDonald, the developer, has argued his project is the wrong target — not a hyperscaler chasing AI training loads, just a large tenant that got caught in a dragnet. He may be right. He may also lose anyway, because the dragnet is the point.

What makes Maine interesting isn't the substance of the bill, which is mild. Eleven other states tried something similar in the last year and stalled or failed outright — Georgia, Maryland, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin, per Gizmodo's count. Maine's version passed partly because Maine barely has any data centers yet — the first large one is still under construction at the old Loring Air Force Base — so the industry hadn't staked out enough ground to defend.

And it passed while the federal direction runs the other way. Trump's December executive order explicitly warned that excessive state regulation thwarts the AI race, with threats to withhold funding from states that restrict growth. That's the same playbook I covered in the broadband money fight — use federal dollars as leverage against state AI laws. Maine will be a test of whether that threat actually bites a small New England state with a pipeline of maybe two data centers.

The Sachs argument, delivered in plain committee language, was that the tradeoffs haven't been shown to benefit ratepayers, water use, or community economic activity. That's a boring sentence until you remember that Maine already ranks fourth in US electricity prices. A hyperscaler sized at forty megawatts is a quiet permanent tax on every household on the grid — which Turley at OpenAI basically conceded when he admitted unlimited AI plans are like unlimited electricity plans.

The moratorium ends November 2027. A new Data Center Coordination Council gets the interval to write policy recommendations. By the time it reports, the federal posture may have shifted again, or it may have hardened. Either way, Maine's bet is that the study period is worth more than the projects it blocks. Given the two projects on the table, that math isn't hard.

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