Maine may soon hit the brakes on new data centers—temporarily, but still hard enough to rattle people who’ve been betting on rapid expansion.
State legislators gave a thumbs up to bill text that would prohibit new construction on data centers in the state until November 2027. The bill is set to pass in the next few days. Not long after that news, the opposition lined up—tech companies and the local business community pushing back, arguing the measure would slow investment at the exact moment capacity is needed for artificial intelligence.
“There are a lot of good reasons to like data centers,” Misryoum editorial desk noted, even as the controversy grows louder. They tend to bring economic growth and high-paying blue-collar jobs, and they also power artificial intelligence, which is useful for an astonishingly large number of tasks—from research to coding to instructions and advice on how to do just about anything. It gets a little strange, though, because A.I. can also help you and your neighbors organize a campaign to ban data centers. Misryoum newsroom reported on a real example: this week, The Wall Street Journal published a story about an Ohio woman who, each night, “logs onto Chat GPT and asks it to help her in her fight to stop a data center from being built just steps away from her home.” The woman is part of a cohort of anti-data center activists using the tool to help them organize against new data center construction, one of whom told the WSJ, “I’m using the beast to beat the beast.”
If that sounds like a caricature, it’s not. Glenn Adams, who has built data centers in multiple states, told CNBC that “Things are going so fast. There’s a race against other countries,” adding that if Maine says “no,” builders and investors can “quite quickly go somewhere else.” That’s the argument at the center of the backlash: the moratorium is not just a planning pause, it’s a “decision point” that could redirect where projects land—and, by extension, where jobs and spending show up.
There’s also the broader political mood. From Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) to Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), Misryoum editorial team stated there has been a fair amount of high-profile backlash against data centers recently. Populists on the left and the right are lining up to make data centers and artificial intelligence a political punching bag. Breaking Points’ @esaagar says AI companies are “fighting against a very, very big force” in the US. “There’s this rising populist tide against the data center movement,” the video notes, “and against Abundance-style assurances from politicians and companies.” Something is happening, in other words—though, at least on paper, the opposition can look… mostly incoherent.
And while all this is unfolding in Maine, the wider “tech meets policy” knot is showing up in other ways too. Strait crimes: Iran is demanding that oil tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz pay tolls—and the country wants them to pay in cryptocurrency. Ships intending to pass through the strait must email Iranian officials about what cargo is being transported, at which point they will be informed about the toll, an Iranian official said, according to The Financial Times. The toll is equivalent to $1 per barrel of oil. Misryoum newsroom reported there has been some skepticism about the report from the crypto community, but The Wall Street Journal confirmed similar details in a separate piece, and noted Iran already has a $7.8 billion “crypto economy.” The economy is mostly state-controlled, with the IRGC and proxies accounting for more than half of Iran’s crypto activity, according to Chainalysis.
By late afternoon, when the city noise hums a little louder near my window—car tires on wet pavement, that faint metallic smell—you can feel how politics and technology keep colliding, even when the public thinks it’s just debates about concrete and permits. The same kind of friction shows up in other corners too, from inflation headlines to social media laws, but the data center fight has its own sharpness. It’s not just about energy use or zoning. It’s about who gets to decide how fast the future arrives, and whether “helping” tools like A.I. will end up accelerating the very thing people are trying to stop.
