With the election just days away, data centers, the facilities that host computer servers, have become one of the most sensitive issues in Maine’s Senate campaign. During the final midterm election debate, a man in the audience interrupted Republican Susan Collins by stating: ‘I am terrified. AI-related data centers are destroying our climate. They are poisoning our water.’
In April, the state legislature passed what would have been the nation’s first statewide moratorium on large data centers, before Governor Janet Mills vetoed it ten days later. The debate has not subsided, however: many towns have enacted temporary moratoriums or will put the question of siting these facilities to voters in November. According to a September poll conducted by UMass Lowell and YouGov, 76% of respondents said they oppose the construction of a data center in their town, including 58% strongly.
The Senate race is already the most expensive per capita ever recorded in the United States, with projected spending of $81 million for Democrats and $114 million for Republicans. A significant portion of these funds comes from the very sector that many Maine residents have been fighting for over a year. The outcome will also weigh on the Senate majority and on federal policy regarding data centers and The AI / news.
Rural states like Maine are becoming prime targets for these projects, as major cities lack land and electricity. Maine, according to the source, has cheap land, industrial brownfields, and abundant access to water thanks to its many rivers. Tech giants and investment funds linked to data centers and The AI / news have thus invested millions of dollars in the midterm elections to convince skeptical residents.
Molly White, a researcher, author, and software engineer behind the site Tech Influence Watch, explains that voters are following this issue closely because they associate data centers with rising energy costs. Many residents are already feeling the pressure from home heating oil prices, which reached a record high this fall. She observes that the question is now: is the candidate going to welcome a data center next to my home, with the resulting increase in my electricity bills?
The Donations Surrounding Susan Collins
Tech and The AI / news interests find an ally in Susan Collins. As chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, she has broadly supported data centers and The AI / news, while believing they should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. She also secured $6.2 million in federal funding for a high-performance computing center in central Maine.
Among her individual donors are Alex Karp, co-founder and CEO of Palantir, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, as well as contributors from Google, Meta, and Microsoft. According to donation tracking by White, Collins has received $325,644 from donors linked to The AI / news and cryptocurrencies. Elon Musk donated $158 million to the Senate Leadership Fund this summer, and his America PAC committee spent about $2.1 million in Maine. The Pine Tree Results PAC committee, with which Collins and her husband have personal ties, has devoted $29.1 million to supporting the candidate.
The senator’s husband, Thomas Daffron, is a former lobbyist. According to a Forbes ranking cited by the source, the Collins household ranks fifth in the Senate for its investments linked to The AI / news and data centers, with an estimated amount between $300,000 and $800,000 in Daffron’s name. Scott Reed, president of Pine Tree Results, runs a lobbying firm that has worked for a developer who built data centers in Maine, according to American Journal News and The New York Times.
An Industrial Past That Weighs on the Debate
Maine has long relied on timber, shipbuilding, fishing, textiles, and papermaking. The forestry industry contributed about $8.3 billion to the state’s economy in 2024, but Donald Trump’s tariffs and rising costs have hit the sector, causing plant closures and layoffs. Mark Brewer, who chairs the political science department at the University of Maine, points out that former industrial towns are sensitive to promises of new tax revenue, but boom-and-bust cycles have made residents cautious. ‘It’s one thing to put up with a paper mill that employs three shifts of 1,000 workers, right? Data centers don’t do that.’
Nicholas Jacobs, director of the Public Policy Lab at Colby College, sums up the feeling of many rural residents: ‘Rural wealth exists, but it is extracted from the community, and that’s the game of rural life.’
