Wiscasset officials are considering whether to allow the construction of a large data center on land the town was eyeing for affordable housing.

A site assessor approached the town about the possibility of building a center on town-owned property next to the shuttered Maine Yankee Atomic Energy Plant, but the idea is in “its earliest stages,” the town said Tuesday.

Town officials would not say what company is behind the idea because they signed a nondisclosure agreement, according to Economic Development Director Aaron Chrostowsky.

“No formal proposal has been made, no offer to purchase the property has been made, and no commitments have been agreed to,” the select board said in a statement posted on the town website Tuesday.

If built, it could be the first large, AI-aimed data center in Maine, though there are a handful of smaller centers already in operation.

Driven by the boom in machine learning technology, the rapid development of massive data centers has driven up electricity costs nationally. State officials have said that, so far, Maine has been spared.

Wiscasset officials had secured $240,000 in pandemic relief funds to review the site and develop a plan to create affordable housing on the 300-acre parcel on Old Ferry Road.

But last week, municipal leaders asked the Lincoln County Board of Commissioners whether that money could be used for affordable housing projects elsewhere, including on a site less than 2 miles away, possibly freeing up the parcel.

“So we were wondering if there could be some, maybe, use of (…) the ARPA funds to help with that project,” Chrostowsky said at last week’s Lincoln County Commissioners’ meeting.

BIG DATA MEANS BIG DEVELOPMENT

The site drew attention for its proximity to the nuclear plant’s existing electrical infrastructure, though it’s not clear whether there is capacity to support a data center’s high energy demand, the town said.

Chrostowsky told the Wiscasset Newspaper that the project would revolve around data collection and artificial intelligence.

Reached by phone Tuesday afternoon, Chrostowsky declined to provide further details and deferred additional questions to Town Manager Dennis Simmons and the online statement.

“At this point that’s all we’ve done is listen,” Simmons said.

At last week’s meeting, Chrostowsky said a data center at the Old Ferry Road site could be valued at $5 billion and could create 150-200 new jobs. He said it is one of several new leads the town is considering for the property.

Chrostowsky told the commission that talks have been ramping up since December, when things were “very speculative, very nascent,“ but that developers had recently begun their own site review.

“(The developers) are spending their own money now to conduct their due diligence. They’ve contracted with engineering firms to do wetland studies on the properties, more environmental studies and power studies on that property,” Chrostowsky told the commission.

Maine Yankee, once the state’s largest generator of electricity, was decommissioned nearly 30 years ago after producing power from 1972 to 1996. The potential tax revenue of a data center “would likely be on par” with that of the old plant, the select board said.

Any formal proposal would require additional review and permitting, and final approval would be up to voters, the select board said.

Developers have looked to build data centers elsewhere in Maine, but those proposals have fizzled out. After announcing plans in 2021, a California company quietly backed out of building a $300 million data center at a shuttered paper mill in Millinocket after determining it could not produce enough power there or attract the AI customer it wanted, the Bangor Daily News reported.