Maine seeks moratorium on AI datacentres

Maine lawmakers just voted to stop most new large data centers before the state has even landed a giant artificial intelligence campus. The bill blocks permits for data centers with electric loads of 20 megawatts or more until November 1, 2027, and both chambers approved it this week. (legislature.maine.gov, cnbc.com) A 20 megawatt threshold is not small. One 20 megawatt facility can draw about as much power as a medium-size industrial site, and one project discussed in Sanford was described by a Republican lawmaker as a 100 to 300 megawatt proposal. (legislature.maine.gov, mainepublic.org) The pause is aimed at the kind of warehouse-size buildings that run cloud computing and artificial intelligence systems. Those facilities pack in servers, cooling gear, backup power equipment, and networking hardware, which is why lawmakers wrote the bill around electricity demand instead of square footage. (legislature.maine.gov, mainepublic.org) Maine did not get here out of nowhere. In Wiscasset, a town of about 4,000 year-round residents, local officials paused talks in November 2025 over a proposed $5 billion data center on town-owned land along the Back River. (themainemonitor.org) A month later, Lewiston city councilors unanimously rejected a $300 million artificial intelligence data center after residents organized against it between December 11 and December 16, 2025. Local opponents said they had too little information about power use, water use, and the project’s end customer. (themainemonitor.org) State Representative Melanie Sachs, a Democrat from Freeport, folded those fights into a statewide bill that also creates a Maine Data Center Coordination Council. The council would be convened by the Department of Energy Resources and must send lawmakers a final report by February 1, 2027. (mainepublic.org, maine.gov) The council’s assignment is unusually specific. It has to study electric load growth, grid reliability, resource adequacy in the ISO New England power market, water use, emissions, land use, and whether other states have adopted tools like zoning changes, impact fees, efficiency standards, or energy supply obligations. (legislature.maine.gov) The politics are really about power bills. CNBC reported that Maine already has some of the highest electricity rates in the country, and lawmakers backing the pause say they do not want artificial intelligence demand landing on top of an already expensive grid. (cnbc.com, eia.gov) Opponents are talking about lost jobs and lost momentum instead. In February, Senator Matt Harrington, a Republican from Sanford, said a moratorium could kill a project in his district and cost around 100 long-term jobs, while Maine contractor Sargent Corp. warned this week that developers can move quickly to other states. (mainepublic.org, cnbc.com) Maine is also moving ahead farther than most states. The National Conference of State Legislatures said lawmakers in at least 11 states introduced temporary data center moratorium bills this session, and MultiState said none had passed their originating chamber as of March 13, 2026. Maine has now cleared both chambers. (ncsl.org, multistate.us, cnbc.com) The bill is not fully finished yet. CNBC reported on April 9 that final passage was still expected in the next few days and that Governor Janet Mills could still veto it after failing to get exemptions added. (cnbc.com) If the moratorium becomes law, the immediate effect is simple: companies that want a big new campus in Maine will have to wait, shrink the project below 20 megawatts, or go somewhere else. In artificial intelligence infrastructure, that turns grid access and local politics into the same bottleneck. (legislature.maine.gov, cnbc.com)