Maine Is About to Become the First State to Ban Major New Data Centers

Re:Maine Is About to Become the First State to Ban Major New... by toast0 on Friday April 10, 2026 @02:17AM (#47714280)

Property tax is often assessed on capital equipment owned by a business as well as real estate. So while the real estate may be of limited value, the hosted machines could drive significant tax revenue as AI machines are spendy.

You're right though, that municipalities often waive taxes to woo big projects.

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Re:Maine Is About to Become the First State to Ban Major New... by bigfatkitten on Friday April 10, 2026 @05:39PM (#47723981)

Outside of colo facilities in metro areas, minimising property tax is always a key consideration in choosing a location.

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Re:Maine Is About to Become the First State to Ban Major New... by xphos on Monday April 13, 2026 @10:47AM (#47752795)

Yeah but i think server farms are tricky to access because they have accountants to argue about depreciating CPUs, second hand CPU deppreication is enormous so its possible to wiggle the numbers down. Not to zero but the challenge is that you have to recoup not just hthe land value but the value related all the infrastructure and resource drain this type of business does which is very non-trivial

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