Data centers are coming for rural America

At its peak, the Androscoggin paper mill in Jay, Maine, a rural town about 67 miles northwest of Portland, employed about 1,500 people — until a pulp digester exploded in 2020, forcing the mill to close permanently. Data centers are coming for rural America And the jobs they promise don’t really exist. Data centers are coming for rural America And the jobs they promise don’t really exist. In 2023, the 1.4 million-square-foot facility was purchased through a joint venture by JGT2 Redevelopment and a number of other holding and capital companies. The project is led by developer Tony McDonald. Over the next three years, McDonald and his team broke down the mill’s machinery and shipped it to Pakistan, and worked to clean up the industrial site for resale. That resale agreement was finalized earlier this year, according to McDonald — turning Jay into the latest flashpoint over giant data centers in America. Maine is particularly appealing for data center developers for its relatively cool year-round temperatures, lax land-use statutes, and 54 percent renewable energy mix, the eighth highest in the nation. There is a handful of planned data centers around the state, which recently prompted the state legislature to pass a bill ordering an 18-month moratorium on permits and building of any proposed data center that consumes more than 20 megawatts of power. Lawmakers wanted to pause construction in order to study data centers’ impact on local economies, the power grid, and the environment. But that bill, which would have been the country’s first, was vetoed by Maine Gov. Janet Mills last month. In her veto, she cited one overriding reason: jobs. A $550 million facility proposed for the shuttered paper mill in Jay, she argued, would create 125 to 150 permanent, high-paying positions in a town that had watched its largest employer close. From mill towns in Maine to farm counties in Indiana to desert plots outside Abilene, Texas, data center developers are telling local governments: Bring us in, give us what we need, add some tax breaks, and the jobs will follow. More than 35 states have responded by offering incentives and more to attract the industry. There’s little research into whether massive industrial sites actually deliver the long-term economic gains they promise, but early reports suggest otherwise. Experts say that rural communities often lack the governmental expertise to properly assess how data centers might impact an area. According to recent Pew Research Center data, 67 percent of planned data centers in the US are headed to rural areas, and 39 percent are going to counties that currently have none. As data center development scales rapidly, it’s becoming clear that what rural communities around the country are actually getting isn’t jobs, but a power- and water-hungry industrial facility that temporarily employs about as many people as a midsize restaurant. The data center fight in Maine Originally, Tony McDonald had planned to sell the mill to an oriented strand board company called Godfrey Forest Products, which would have employed…