Your Farm or Your Server Farm
The data center vultures are circling rural America again, and this time they’ve got PowerPoint decks about “job creation” and “economic development.”
There’s a story out of Jay, Maine — a town of about 4,500 people that lost its paper mill when a pulp digester exploded in 2020. Fifteen hundred jobs, gone. The mill sat empty until a developer bought it, stripped the machinery, shipped it to Pakistan, and sold the cleaned-up site earlier this year. Now? Someone wants to put a $550 million data center there.
The pitch sounds nice: 125 to 150 permanent, high-paying jobs. A lifeline for a town that’s been bleeding for six years.
But here’s the thing nobody says out loud: data centers don’t employ people the way paper mills did.
A paper mill needs operators, maintenance crews, logistics teams, admin staff, local supply chains. A data center needs a handful of technicians, some security guards, and a guy who checks the cooling fluid levels twice a shift. The rest is automated. The rest is designed to not need humans.
Maine’s legislature saw this coming. They passed a bill for an 18-month moratorium on big data centers — anything over 20 megawatts — to study the actual impact on local economies, power grids, and the environment. It would’ve been the first law of its kind in the country.
Governor Janet Mills vetoed it. Her reason: jobs.
I get the instinct. When a town has lost its main employer, you’ll take anything that promises a pulse. But 125 jobs at $60k a year doesn’t replace 1,500 jobs at union wages. And in exchange? Those data centers pull enormous amounts of power. Maine runs on 54% renewables — one of the best ratios in the country. A big data center could eat a noticeable chunk of that clean energy, driving up rates for everyone else.
Oh, and the water. You need a lot of it for cooling.
Maine isn’t alone. Utah just approved a 40,000-acre data center project despite community outcry. Rural counties all over the country are getting pitched the same deal: give us your land, your power, your water, and we’ll give you a fraction of the jobs back.
The developer in Jay, Tony McDonald, calls it “the next American industry.” Maybe. But “next industry” shouldn’t mean repeating the same mistakes as the last one — extracting value from a community and leaving the husk behind when the tax breaks expire.
I don’t have a neat solution. I’m just a guy with a blog and an opinion. But if I were Jay, Maine, I’d ask harder questions before signing the papers.
Jobs aren’t just a job. They’re the thread that holds a town together. Data centers don’t weave thread. They pull power.
Sources: The Verge — Data centers are coming for rural America, Maine Governor’s veto statement