> modern factories are often highly automated and also don't provide too many local jobs.

The factories in Maine employ thousands of people. Bath Iron Works alone has over 7k employees.

The Lewiston datacenter that was planned to be built was expected to employ less than 30.

The major data centers being built for AI are much more energy-hungry than car manufacturing, and they're being built at a pace that the US energy grid simply cannot accommodate in the short term... or quite possibly even the long term, considering the US's extreme aversion to expanding nuclear power.

Also, you can call it Luddism if you want, but a car factory is going to bring a lot more net benefit to the average person than an AI data center. Motorized transportation is essential to modern civilization, fancy chat-bots are not.

It's a temporary ban (until 2027) and I think it totally makes sense to do so during a boom that has no strong evidence of long-term sustainability. I would absolutely support temporary bans for industries at the peaks of their hype cycles

Why not just require factories /data centers invest in solar/wind/renewables to cover their power usage.

Banning is so childish when there is easy solutions.

Bad dichotomy they aren't saying no to data centers to spite them. They are saying no because that data centers are a major public drain and net negative on public resources.

Often they don't pay high taxes nor do they employ large numbers of people. Most of the money made by leeching of public power infrastructure and cheap electricity and export the profits to somewhere else. They are building and selling a non tangible good i.e where do you tax it?

Their is also noise pollution concerns which can destroy communities near by and water usage concerns. These plants drain aquaifers.

I just think you haven't substantially thought about the effect these have on the actual people living nearby. AI being .000001cent cheaper just doesnt help people that much

I imagine Maine would support bans on both, yes. Most of their economy is tourism and being known for their coasts and forests, I don't think anything that could possibly have environmental impacts to support industries/businesses that are primarily not housed in Maine would be seen as a good thing.

The more interesting question to me is do you support full bans on these things in states that could easily allow them with strict regulations, knowing that they will instead likely be built in places with no regulations?

I'm not sure how I'd feel about a ban on factories, but I think cars, as bad as they are in terms of environmental effects, are far less harmful to our society than "AI" companies and the big-tech companies that are intertwined with them (e.g., Google and Facebook).

On the flip side, I'd ask the question: if someone supports banning these data centers, why not support just banning the AI companies entirely?

Yes, I would support a ban on new factories for, say, slot machines.

> I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts.

Those factories employ people.

> Like data centers, factories use a lot of power -- which drives up electricity bills

No. They have nowhere near the power consumption density unless it's a metallurgical facility doing aluminum smelting or scrap recycling in arc furnaces.

Historically the factories in Maine were mills, which use water for power. Those days are long gone but in a different time you would find no resistance to more factories in Maine, it’s a wasteland now

For people who don't support this kind of ban, I'd ask: What's the alternative? _Requiring_ that states house data centers?

They expect the coming crop of data centers will be used to hurt them, and don’t want them built anywhere?

People are worried about their power and water costs rising.

I think this is a legit worry. The fact of the matter is that local governments often don't care about their constituencies and sell them out in order to boost tax revenue of new business moving in, and this creates a race to the bottom.

I would love a situation in which datacenters also paid for their own power upgrades and infrastructure so that locals did not experience high bills. That would be the best case scenario.

But barring that, banning the data center seems like a legit second base case scenario.

I heard one rationale that has nothing to do with factories > AI data centers. It is the only lever that legislators currently have. They want some bargaining chip to get more control over AI firms.

Your profile indicates you're head of engineering at an AI startup. Can you provide a reason why someone who isn't financially motivated by their stake in an AI company should support new data center development for AI? Especially someone who lives in the area and will be disproportionately negatively affected by the construction and operation?

Why not cut straight to the jugular and ask them how they feel about raising local taxes to fund stadiums? Then ask them how they feel about beef and almond farming if they pivot to water as the next complaint. FWIW stadiums create about twice as many jobs as the current crop of datacenters so there's that I guess but the bang per tax dollar is still godawful.

It's not an environmental issue, data centers are overleveraged in the US due to a belief that they need to win the "AI race". The government is putting their hand into the market to try and shift this balance, when they should be creating basic infrastructure and services.

I think a temporary ban makes sense when there are market bubbles driving investment that has a high likelihood of being abandoned shortly thereafter... and I think that could apply to any industry.

A lot of what is going on right now is debt-financed speculation, and the losers will leave behind empty industrial buildings on deforested land in their wake.

>For people who support this kind of ban, I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts.

If car parts factories produced nothing, employed no one and were made with equipment that will get outdated in a couple of years... Oh, gee, I dunno, it's a tough one.

It's also basically impossible to extract taxes on the products of data centers. It seems like a way to drain a locality of value while providing nothing in return but slightly lower latencies for corporations.

This is one heck of a straw man argument: “if you wanna ban datacenters but not factories they’re basically the same thing”.

The current datacenter boom isn’t general compute, but AI compute - a highly specialized form that’s not adaptive or recycled into other, demonstrably useful forms of compute should this end up being a highly speculative bubble or dead-end technology. The demonstrated environmental impacts are very real, and the reason they’re shoved through has everything to do with secrecy around their known impacts in an effort to get cheap land and government buy-in before locals protest the harms of the buildout.

As for a modern, highly automated factory like what China builds? At least then we get cheaper goods and services to buy while still creating jobs (repairfolk, technicians, roboticists, etc) as opposed to AI datacenters, which just slurp up resources while delivering chatbots that kill society’s best-paying jobs and careers and centralizing power under fewer hands.

So yeah, I’d be totally in favor of factories that build things and employ people, versus AI data centers that just hoover up resources and shunt costs to locals without consent.

there's a lot of work already done on understanding what makes factories safe or not.

whats the infrasound danger of a factory? how long can a new factory use emergency nat gas generators because they ignored the environmental regulations?

data center owners are much much more powerful than factory owners having the ear of the president, supreme court, and congress. if you tried to regulate one after it gets opened, youre screwed, and theyre gonna ignore your regulations

As someone who lives in Maine (inland, mountains), I have two reasons why this make sense: 1) this state has a lot of natural wilderness that should stay untouched, the gulf of maine is the fastest warming body of water in the world. we feel global warming more than anyone, we dont need more of it. 2) electricity is extremely expensive here. also, the majority shareholder of the spanish company that owns the electric grid is the qatar government, so our electric grid is pretty much owned by qatar.

One must also consider the other impacts such as water use and noise pollution.

It's self-selecting. Pro-growth states will flourish, attract intellectual talent. Support auxiliary careers, and grow their educational institutions.

The rest will fallow.

If the factories only employed 50 people, polluted the earth at a much higher scale, and were mainly used to product fake cat videos and scam dating profiles, then yes I would support banning them too.

Think i'd be ok with a year and a half halt for things in general every now and again.

> For people who support this kind of ban, I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts.

Car parts factory?

With the an (energy-use + water-use + land-use)/employee ratio comparable to an AI data center?

I did not know those existed.

But, yes. I think in that case, the right answer is "Yes".

A pro-corporate viewpoint, without calculation of tradeoffs, reminds me of Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk's blatant illogic: Bitcoin means green energy!

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56844813

(For anyone not familiar with Bitcoin source, I can report that the green energy preference/requirement in the hash code is hidden very well. And that the non-benefits of holding Bitcoin in a third parties repository, or the micro-benefits of making a few transactions a year, are unusually minimal relative to the enormous global resource consumption. Not because crypto has to be so wasteful, but because the Bitcoin blockchain implementation has been an "entire-population-of-all-dinosaurs-that-ever-lived" efficiency lemon for most of its existence.)

> For people who support this kind of ban

I support the ability of local jurisdictions to create laws that are intended to benefit it's citizens. If that means banning a particular new and pernicious development in their borders, then yes, of course I support that.

> would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts.

Has anyone actually done that?

Do you support a ban on tobacco? If yes, then what's different about your desire for this type of ban?

Car parts are tangible. Even if the product doesn't stay onshore forever, it has to enrich people onshore in order to move.

All the output of a datacenter effectively goes offshore immediately.

It depends what the factory is producing.

> If, given all that, you'd support factory construction but not data center construction, I'd be curious as to why.

Personally I'd support either/both, but I could easily see someone's else perspective being that you support the usage and selling/purchasing of whatever the factories make, but you don't feel the same about what the data centers provide. So regardless of impacts, in one case the tradeoffs feel OK, and in the other it doesn't, all because your personal preferences and opinions.

To be honest, it's a bit surprising this is even a question? Did you really not understand that people have different preferences in what exists and is available in a society, and especially near them?

No because the people who make car parts aren't promising to kill my livelihood and everyone else's.

The people who make car parts aren't telling me that the cars they build are likely to murder everyone I love.

The people who make car parts aren't writing long screeds about how if our dysfunctional government doesn't step up to implement a solution to the problems created by all the car parts, we're going to to see mass poverty and social chaos.

(To be fair, I don't believe all these forecasts by AI companies, but when they're making them, why on earth would I support letting them go about their business?)

If they produce large negative externalities like data centers do, then yes absolutely.

In a normal market, tech cos would have to pay for the messes they make (the negative externalities). With so much speculative financing available today, these costs are not being born by the companies creating them. Rather, random people (external parties) are forced to suck up higher electricity costs, noise, environmental degradation, new competition for water, non-employment of local people, oh yeah, and not much more to show for it than a proliferation of new forms of slop.

Tech guys: can’t you think of more economically useful products to launch?

yeah, another way to put it: if you don't want factories, that's fine; just don't buy manufactured stuff .. the same with data centers, if you don't want data centers then don't go on the Internet because by doing so you're becoming part of the problem.

If theyre a grift that takes from the community and taxpayers like that foxconn "factory" at mt pleasant.

Its not being a nimby if no one in the area benefits and all the externalities are being borne by them

Factories for car parts employ about 1000X more people per square foot than a data center and aren't actively contributing to decreasing the amount of jobs for people in a state.

factories aren't as automated as data centers (at least not yet) and still contribute more to the local economy than data centers

So it's hard to get numbers here so I went looking for electricity usage figures for an automobile plant. This obviously depends on the size but the estimates I could find for a theoretical plant that produces 1000 vehicles a day are:

- 300-400GWh/year of electricity usage. It's significantly more for EVs, as an aside;

- Such a plant employes 2000 to 5000+ people.

Data centers also vary in size but I've seen estimates of 20-100MW being a typical range. 20MW run continuously is 175GWh/year.

So it seems like one large AI data center employs probably fewer than 50 people and uses as much electricity as a plant producing upwards of half a million cars per year. Those cars have a lot of utility, obviously, and employ a lot of people.

Let's be fair: AI data centers currently produce almost nothing of value and contribute almost nothing to the local or state economy. They're being built speculatively on the basis of a potential future value add that has yet to materialize.

My view is that the "value" AI data centers will add is for employers, by allowing them to fire people and suppress wages. That's the true use case. So, in other words, AI data centers represent negative jobs.

Five years from now we'll see studies and media reports on the relationship between how many jobs you can eliminate per MW of electricity. The added bonus is all the residents will be paying higher amounts for their electricity for that "privilege".

>For people who support this kind of ban, I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts.

They de-facto banned these things over the past decades by saddling them with requirements that make them non-competitive locally and/or globally while simultaneously opening up international trade. But they're in denial about this so they'll whine about how it's "not technically a ban" because hoops that are a non-starter to 99% can be jumped through at great cost when the 1% profitable enough to justify it example comes along.

AI (in its current form) just needs to get its act together and find efficient alternatives just like cryptocurrencies did.

Bitcoin mining farms were taking lots of electricity and were the ones getting shut down and there was little opposition to that and it didn't matter anyway since there were efficient alternative cryptocurrencies available right away that did not need more data centers and energy requirements.

Now AI just isn't efficient enough to refrain from building more data centers. This is clearly a software problem which is getting to the point that the energy requirements going to surpass Bitcoin alone. [0]

[0] https://www.theverge.com/climate-change/676528/ai-data-cente...

When a tech company builds an AI training datacenter in Alabama, does the model they train there get counted as a created capital asset that they then pay taxes on in that state.

They'll owe some tax from apportionment formula that doesn't really cover the datacenter's contribution to the value of the created model I think, but maybe that's wrong.

A factory that produces physical goods gets more straightforwardly taxed, though they often pit states against each other to reduce it to near zero or negative for bringing jobs.

I’m not particularly excited about construction on either of those but I will not pretend to have a fully formed opinion on “factory construction,” however one would define it. And either way it’s kind of immaterial to me, because 1) we are talking about data centers not factories and 2) what I’m seeing happen with the data centers being built has made me pretty against them so far: https://lailluminator.com/2025/11/22/meta-data-center-crashe...

It's a reasonable choice given that DCs use massive amounts of power and provide very few permanent jobs.

I don't think they are comparable to car parts, maybe aluminum smelters though?

Jurisdictions decline all sorts of developments when the proponent cannot demonstrate a sufficient public good.

Generation capacity is scarce at the moment, and governments have to decide if they would rather have affordable residential electricity or be home to the Grok anime slop generator.

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Several reasons:

AI seems like it would advance the power of the capitalist class over labor more than new factories.

AI is allied with the tech oligarch faction which has allied itself with the fascists.

Datacenter manufacturers seem to have, at least lately, been particularly underhanded in their attempts to force themselves upon communities that don't want them.

If they fail (e.g. due to the AI bubble bursting or a recession), a factory seems like it would be more likely to survive or at least leave a facility and equipment that is useful.