Unlike her counterpart in Maine, Healey won’t support a ban on data-center proposals
By Jon Chesto, Boston Globe
While Governor Janet Mills supports a moratorium on new data-center proposals in Maine, Governor Maura Healey is taking a different position here in Massachusetts.
After speaking to the New England Council business group on Monday, council president Jim Brett asked Healey about her stance on data centers in light of a pending moratorium bill in Maine.
Healey responded by saying, in essence: We need more of them.
“In Massachusetts, we need to have data centers of some sort for the kind of … innovation economy we want to have,” Healey said to the crowd of 400-plus people at the Seaport Hotel. “We need to find a way to build out the infrastructure that’s going to help us get to where we need to be. … A ban, that’s not going to help our economy. That’s not going to help our future.”
Healey acknowledged concerns about community impacts and electricity costs but suggested the pitfalls could be avoided by collaborating and communicating. “There are smarter and better ways to do things, and I know we’re capable of doing that in Massachusetts, if we work together,” Healey said.
Healey’s stance wasn’t particularly surprising, considering she signed an economic development bill in late 2024 that included language exempting data center proposals from the state’s sales tax.
Massachusetts has largely avoided the data-center controversies that dog many other states in part because the high electricity and land costs here tend to keep developers at bay. However, concerns are growing about the potential for such a project in Everett, at a former oil tank farm, and Lowell city councilors recently enacted a one-year ban in their city in response to an expansion proposal for an existing data center there. (In Maine, Mills’s support of a temporary ban is conditional on allowing one project, for an old paper mill in Jay, to be exempt.)
Healey’s response to Brett’s question was also in keeping with the theme of the speech that she had just given to the council, which was focused on innovation in the state.
She kicked it off by citing examples of how innovations from MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Cambridge-based Draper Labs, and the David Clark Co. in Worcester support NASA’s current Artemis II moon mission. She rattled off some of the AI tech leaders opening offices in Massachusetts — Nvidia, Anthropic, Lovable, among others. And she wrapped up her speech by describing her TechGeneration pilot program to support tech interns, beginning this summer with 100 college students.
“We are focused on what do we need to do,” Healey said, “to make sure all those bright talented young people who are in classrooms stay in Massachusetts.”
Of all her lines, a mention of the Vineyard Wind offshore wind farm, recently completed in the face of Trump administration obstacles, seemed to generate the most applause. Healey also talked up her energy legislation — currently before the state Senate after the House approved its version — that’s aimed to curb some of the state’s high electricity costs.
She got the most laughter from the crowd when she talked about the MBTA’s improvement under general manager Phil Eng, one of her appointees.
“We have a much better T,” she said. “[But] the bar is pretty low considering the trains were on fire when I started.”