Maine’s 1st AI data center is coming to Aroostook County

Maine’s first artificial intelligence data center will be housed at the former Loring Air Force Base in Limestone.

Loring LiquidCool Data Center, owned by the Minnesota-based company LiquidCool Solutions, has signed a “long-term” lease for 115,000 square feet of space within the 450 acres of the former base owned by clean energy and development firm Green 4 Maine, the group announced in a release Tuesday.

The company is operating out of building No. 7230, a warehouse formerly used by Maine Military Authority and New England Kenworth, at the corner of Florida and Kansas roads on the eastern side of the campus. It’s unclear when the data center could become operational.

The center is intended to be the first in a “campus” of data centers within what Green 4 Maine calls its “innovation hub,” co-founder Scott Hinkel said Tuesday. A company from Silicon Valley looking to operate an AI data center was at Loring Tuesday, he said, and Green 4 Maine is in talks with several others.

“We’ve got three or four buildings now that are perfect for data centers,” Hinkel said.

A handful of other data centers exist in Maine, but none are designed to support AI, which requires high computational power and vast storage.

That specialized server infrastructure is needed to train and run AI services, which can be used for anything from image generation to customer service chatbots.

The centers have become pivotal in the global race for AI innovation, but companies have previously only dabbled with the idea of putting them in Maine.

A $300-million, 60-megawatt data center in Millinocket announced in 2021 that would have supported AI never came to fruition because it would not have produced enough power, the Bangor Daily News reported earlier this year.

A 300-acre hyperscale data center that could cost upwards of $5 billion was proposed in Wiscasset earlier this year.

Loring, far away from major technological hubs, is in a unique position to attract data center companies. The 1,100-mile upgrade to the state’s fiber optic network, which was completed in 2012 and called the “Three-Ring Binder,” ran optical fiber cables through the former base, directly connecting it to the Metropolitan Area Exchange-East internet exchange point.

That, along with access to ample electricity from hydropower generation in New Brunswick and existing buildings that fit the needs of data centers, make the location attractive to companies such as LiquidCool Solutions, Hinkel said.

“When we figured out that, ‘Oh, my God, we’ve got this huge fiber optic pipeline that comes right into the campus, and then we go, ’How much power do we have?,’ we figured that out and everything shifted,” Hinkel said. “Loring is on the backbone of the internet.”

There are currently 50 megawatts of power available at the base, he said, two of which are “preloaded” in the building that will house the data center. That capacity could scale up through what Hinkel called Green 4 Maine’s “energy roadmap,” potentially increasing available power by several hundred megawatts to meet demand by purchasing additional electricity from New Brunswick and other power opportunities.

The Loring LiquidCool Data Center will begin with five to six megawatts, Hinkel said. It’s currently unclear how many people the center will employ.

The company, which connected with Green 4 Maine through a “mutual friend,” calls itself the “leader in immersion cooling technology.” It will utilize its patented liquid-cooled, rack-based servers in the data center, which it says allows for high-density, cost-effective cooling.

“This is more than a data center — this is a blueprint for the future of clean tech infrastructure,” LiquidCool Solutions Vice Chair Herb Zien said in the release. “By combining LiquidCool Solutions patented cooling technology with the unique footprint of the Green 4 Maine Campus site, and pairing it with future clean advanced energy technology solutions, we can meet growing AI, HPC, and cloud computing demands while drastically reducing capital expense and operating costs.”

Tuesday’s announcement comes one month after Aero Intelligence, a global aerospace company, moved into the former base’s colossal arch hanger, as Green 4 Maine heightens its push to bring investment to the campus.

But greater investment means more people living and working in Limestone and its surrounding areas, which are not prepared for a sudden boom of new residents. In an attempt to get ahead of that issue, Green 4 Maine is now looking for capital investment for as many as 2,000 housing units on the base, Hinkel said.