PORTLAND PRESS HERALD • June 8, 2021
A California company is betting that even in the age of cloud computing, geography does matter. Nautilus Data Technologies has picked Millinocket to be the site of its new $300 million, 60-megawatt data center. The building is proposed for a small part of the former Great Northern Paper site, once the world’s largest paper mill, which was torn down in 2014. With so much difference between the paper-making industry of the 20th century and the information economy in the 21st, it’s fascinating that Great Northern and Nautilus Data picked the site for the same reason: Its location on the Penobscot River. The Millinocket data center will use cold river water to cool the servers, pumped through a closed loop system that won’t release any coolants or other chemicals into the river. One data center with 30 jobs will never replace the economic impact of GNP, which employed thousands of people in the company’s heyday. But it shows that the natural and human resources that attracted industry to rural Maine in the last century still have value in this one.