A temporary ban on data centers in a bill that advanced to the Maine Legislature last week could limit the scale of a data facility in the works on the former Loring Air Force Base
The bill, LD 307, would prevent governmental permits and other approvals from being granted for facilities using more than 20 megawatts of power until late 2027 as a newly formed council studies the possible impacts of building the centers in Maine.
The Loring LiquidCool Data Center has a will-serve agreement with Versant Power to supply 24 megawatts of power to a warehouse leased by its developer, the Minnesota-based technology company LiquidCool Solutions, on top of the two megawatts already available in the building.
Herb Zien, the company’s vice chair, had previously told the Bangor Daily News that the center could expand to up to 50 megawatts.
But under the terms of the bill, the center could not scale beyond 20 megawatts for the foreseeable future.
“We can live with that, I think,” Zien said in a phone call Monday.
The megawatt threshold has become an issue for the company as it works to finalize project financing, Zien said. If the bill remains as is, LiquidCool Solutions hopes to have financing complete within a month — and the data center operational around six months from then, he said.
Zien had initially set a six-month timeline from when the center was announced in October 2025.
Once operational, the facility at Loring is expected to be the first large-scale artificial intelligence data center in Maine, housed in a 115,000-square-foot warehouse formerly home to Maine Military Authority and New England Kenworth.
The facility will likely operate as a colocation data center, where companies can rent server space.
It will run using LiquidCool Solutions’ immersion cooling technology, which it says will “eliminate” water usage to cool the servers that house data.
Several other large data centers have been proposed across the state in the last year, including a $5 billion facility in Wiscasset and a $300 million center in Lewiston. Both have fizzled out as pushback from residents caused local governments to back away from talks with developers.
The center at Loring is different because it will be housed in an existing building that already has power, officials from the company and Green 4 Maine, the development group that oversees a part of the former base, have said.
“It’s almost move-in ready,” Zien said in October. “Data centers today, because there’s an explosion of construction, sometimes they’re four or five years away before somebody could actually walk in the door.”
But there remained a hint of caution in Zien’s messaging Monday.
“We believe that this one will move forward, but nothing is 100% until the money is in the bank, as they say,” he said.