Municipalities across the country are fighting tooth and nail to stop data center construction. But not Jay, Maine.
The town with a population of just 4,600 people has been so desperate for one of these power-hungry facilities that the state governor Janet Mills vetoed a bill that would’ve banned new data centers of a certain size for the sole reason that it didn’t make an exception for Jay.
But why? According to a new piece in The Atlantic from a reporter who visited the town, it’s for a fairly simple reason, but with an elaborate backstory. The summary: Jay is a dead-end backwater whose biggest employer literally went up in smoke. The data center, supposedly, could be an economic boon to rescue it from slow ruin.
The developer pushing the project, Tony McDonald, wants to build the data center on a 1,000 acre plot of land that was once the site of the town’s lifeblood, the Androscoggin Mill. Once the site, because the mill that employed over 1,500 people suddenly exploded in 2020. The whole sprawling complex was reduced to smithereens, though thankfully no one died: when the explosion struck, everyone was on their lunch break.
