Residents of Eastport, Maine are set to attend a public hearing Monday evening on two proposed ordinances to halt the construction of large artificial intelligence data centers, with proponents of the proposals hoping the coastal city’s planning board will be able to prevent the build-out of a 27-acre, $100 million facility that a Massachusetts-based developer aims to build underwater—right near Eastport’s working waterfront.

The public hearing is being held days after President Donald Trump’s Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) accepted a preliminary permit for DeepGreen Holdings, LLC, the firm managed by luxury real estate development Louis Wolfson, which aims to build the facility that would be powered by tidal energy.

The 48-month permit does not allow DeepGreen to start construction, but gives approval for engineering and environmental studies needed to secure funding and officially begin the project.

DeepGreen would use ocean water to cool the heat created by the facility’s massive computer servers. The company has also proposed using ocean tides to power turbines that would generate up to 5 megawatts of electricity.

The approval came weeks after FERC asked DeepGreen to amend its application, lowering its energy output from 51 megawatts to 15 megawatts and creating scalable project phases.

The community has mobilized against the proposed data center since DeepGreen applied for the permit in February, with the Eastport City Council voting unanimously earlier this month in support of a 180-day moratorium halting all progress on the center.

The local policymakers said the moratorium would give the city time to consult with the planning board about the two citizen-led initiatives to pass new ordinances—one that would permanently ban data centers in Eastport, which the city’s legal counsel has said could be put to voters with a minor formatting change to the question, and another that would require voter approval for any new industrial or commercial development larger than 10,000 square feet in the ocean or 25,000 square feet on land.

The second ordinance was found by the legal counsel to be “unenforceable and unlawful,” as the town is not permitted to regulate elections via ordinance.

But residents, officials with the Sipayik Passamaquoddy community, and local groups like Eastport Coalition for Healthy Oceans are all pushing to stop DeepGreen and the development it incorporated a month before applying for the permit, DeepGreen Western Passage SPV, or special purpose vehicle.

DeepGreen has also applied for a permit to build an underwater data center in Cook Inlet, Alaska.

Opponents say thermal pollution from the project would be destructive to the habitat of lobsters off the coast of Eastport, which are crucial to the city’s fishing economy and working waterfront. They have also raised concerns that a data center off the coast would harm tourism as well as whales and other marine wildlife.

One local opponent, commercial fisherman and renewable energy developer Nathan Curtis, said DeepGreen carries "unmitigated risks of thermal pollution.”

The proposed data center would “require continuous ocean cooling, converting Western Passage into an unmetered industrial heat sink,” wrote Curtis in a letter to FERC before the commission issued the permit. "Continuous thermal discharge into the water column threatens local water temperatures, localized current dynamics, and critical benthic habitats that support Eastport’s commercial fisheries and working waterfront.”

Wolfson denied that the data center, which was approved for an energy output up to 15 megawatts, would harm the coastal region of Eastport.

“As a property manager and developer who has operated within coastal dynamics for 40 years, I have too much respect for working waterfronts to introduce a project that threatens them,” said Wolfson in a letter to Monitor Local.

But Eastport resident Suellen Hendrix, who was part of a local effort to gather signatures in support for the proposed ordinances, told Maine Public that locals appear unconvinced by any assurances from the data center developer.

“Everyone was behind ‘we don’t want this data center,’” Hendrix told Maine Public. “Nobody was questioning, ‘Well, we need the jobs.’ Nobody was questioning why it should be here because no one really wants it here.”

As Common Dreams reported last week, as the Trump administration and AI executives have aggressively pushed for the expansion of data centers, public support has collapsed, with 75% of respondents to a poll by Embold Research saying they would not support a data center near where they live.

“This has happened nationwide, folks, it’s nothing new,” Dwayne Tomah, a historian with the Sipayik Passamaquoddy community adjacent to Eastport, told a crowd of data center opponents at a recent rally on the town’s waterfront. “We’ve got to resist.”

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