Craig Peterson's Tech Talk

Maine has passed a first-in-the-nation ban on data centers, now awaiting the governor's signature. The concerns behind it are real and Craig says so plainly: electricity prices do go up. What he disputes is the shape of the response. His industry view is that it barely dents the AI business. These companies save money siting in cold places — it is why data centers went to Iceland and Greenland — but with current high-speed networks they do not need to be near anyone. If most states did this it would matter; Maine alone declining mostly means Maine declining. He puts the job loss in the hundreds, and notes what the state is turning down given its geography, cold water and cold air, and its existing technology base. The interesting part is his alternative. Craig has been a proponent of new nuclear for over a decade, and the argument he makes is not the one people expect. Plants of this generation now in service are producing more power than they consume and feeding the surplus back to the grid — so a data cente