After the Mill Exploded, Jay, Maine Bet Everything on an AI Data Center

In Jay, Maine, the mill was the town. The Androscoggin pulp-and-paper plant, on a 1,000-acre site along the Androscoggin River, once employed more than 1,500 workers and paid the wages that the rest of the town's roughly 4,600 residents organized their lives around. In April 2020, with workers on their lunch break, the sprawling complex exploded. No one died. The mill never came back.

Six years later, the developer Tony McDonald is asking Jay to let him turn the wreckage into an AI data center, and the five members of the town's selectboard are already drafting a letter to Governor Janet Mills asking the state to carve them out of any future moratorium. The pitch works because the mill left behind the one thing a hyperscale AI buildout is short on: a power permit.

The 82-megawatt permit, McDonald says, lets his data-center firm, Sentinel, draw roughly the same electricity the mill was already allowed to pull from the regional grid. McDonald, who presented the plan to the selectboard less than an hour before the board voted to write the governor, has pitched the project to the town as an economic replacement for what the explosion took (The Atlantic).

The framing has been deliberately mill-shaped. Data centers, McDonald has told the town, "can't be as loud as the mill." "The mill smelled like rotten eggs," he says. "The river was covered in toxic foam in the mill days." Each comparison is meant to lower a resident's expectations before the kilowatt-hours start flowing.

The state, however, is not convinced. In April 2026, Governor Mills vetoed L.D. 307, a bill that would have imposed a moratorium on data centers of 20 megawatts or more until November 1, 2027, and would have set up a 13-member Maine Data Center Coordination Council to report by February 1, 2027. Mills argued the bill was premature. She also left Jay's path to a one-town exemption clear.

That carve-out is the part the wire stories have not explained. Most towns that meet a hyperscale data center with pitchforks do not have an 82-megawatt permit sitting on a 1,000-acre brownfield. The Atlantic reports that roughly 70 percent of Americans now oppose data centers in their communities, that about 75 data-center projects were blocked or delayed in the first quarter of 2026, close to the total for all of 2025, and that 1,500 or more projects remain in development. Fifteen states have introduced moratorium bills. Only two, New York the most recent, have cleared a legislature. In that national picture, Jay is the exception, not the model.

What Jay has that losing towns do not is a paper trail. The mill was a regulated industrial site, with a grid connection, a water allocation, and a tax history. Whatever the data center ends up doing to the Androscoggin River, the framework for asking is already in the public record. McDonald has told the town the project will draw on existing mill water rights at a fraction of "tens of millions of gallons per day," and that the rest of the power will come from a solar buildout he has not yet sited. Both claims are developer-stated, not independently verified, and the Atlantic's reporting treats them that way.

The leverage is real, and it is narrow. A hyperscale data center is not a mill. Mills in this corner of New England once ran on a payroll of more than 1,500. A 100-megawatt data center campus typically staffs in the dozens once it is built, and the bulk of the construction hiring is a one-time spike. The tax math, the part of the deal the selectboard has not published in any form the Atlantic could verify, is what actually decides whether the next six years look like the last sixty.

Jay's hour-long selectboard vote, the governor's April veto, and McDonald's nostalgia pitch are now the clearest public record of how these deals are made when a town is willing to be made. The next chapter, a tax-host agreement, a public water analysis, the actual solar siting, is where the test of what should be asked gets answered. The Atlantic's piece on Jay is, for now, the most visible case study in the country where every one of those questions sits on the same page.