Maine Governor Janet Mills vetoed a bill that would have imposed a moratorium on approvals for new datacenters requiring more than 20 megawatts of power until October 2027. The legislation, passed by Maine lawmakers last week, would have frozen approvals while a state-appointed council analyzed the impact of such facilities on the local grid, electricity bills, air and water.

In a letter to the Maine legislature, Mills said she supported a temporary moratorium on datacenter projects and would have signed the bill if it had included an exemption for a project in the town of Jay. "A moratorium is appropriate given the impacts of massive data centers in other states on the environment and on electricity rates," Mills said. "But the final version of this bill fails to allow for a specific project in the Town of Jay that enjoys strong local support from its host community and region."

The Androscoggin paper mill in Jay shut down in 2023 after a boiler explosion, leading to hundreds of job losses. Work to develop a $550 million datacenter in the town is expected to create more than 800 construction jobs and at least 100 permanent jobs, and would contribute property tax revenue to Jay.

Mills plans to issue an executive order establishing a council to examine the impact of datacenters in Maine. She has also signed a bill to prohibit datacenter projects from the state's business development tax incentive programs.

The vetoed bill was sponsored by Melanie Sachs, a Democratic state representative, who called the governor's decision "Simply wrong." Sachs said the veto posed risks beyond the Jay project. "While a veto might protect the proposed data center project in Jay, it poses significant potential consequences for all ratepayers, our electric grid, our environment and our shared energy future," she said.

More than a dozen U.S. states, including Virginia, are weighing legislation that would halt or restrain development of datacenters. U.S. technology companies have pledged to spend more than $600 billion on artificial intelligence datacenters this year, and large technology companies signed a voluntary pledge at the White House to bear the cost of new electricity generation to power their datacenters. The Trump administration is pressuring states to stay out of artificial intelligence regulation. At the federal level, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have introduced legislation to halt all construction on datacenters until Congress passes artificial intelligence safety legislation.