Ethan Brooks
speaker
294 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 30 Jul
Ethan Brooks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Walking around in the mill, it was immediately clear why Elon Musk wants to put data centers in outer space.
Paper machine rooms are dark and cold and seem endless.
Did it look much different before demolition, like down here?
But there were still signs of what the place used to be.
Lucian pointed out a mural on one of the walls, a wooden boat full of puppies looking out at a row of ducklings.
The case for the project in Jay rests on the existing infrastructure for the mill.
The reason the Trump administration is pushing to convert brownfield sites for data center use is because operating industrial machinery requires immense power, as does operating a data center.
According to the developer, the site's already allowed to pull a lot of power from the electric grid.
He plans to add solar panels and use the hydroelectric power that's already on site.
Elsewhere in the country, power plants are struggling to keep up with demand from data centers.
The cost of electricity, especially in areas near data centers, is super high.
High enough to become a serious election issue this year, and high enough for Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI to sign a pledge this spring to keep costs down for everyone else.
The pitch then is that the project in Jay will exist in a kind of walled garden.
It would generate much of its own power on site and pull no more from the grid than the mill did just a few years before the explosion.
The argument for water use runs along the same lines.
Especially in states like Arizona, data centers strain the water supply in a state that is very dry.
Maine is wet.
Lucian showed me the water treatment plant on site, another vast room.
The paper mill used to use about 35 million gallons of water from the river per day.
The developer says the data center would use 1% of that.
Showing 161–180 of 294 · page 9 of 15
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