Keith Hall Taft is a former resident of Van Buren now living in St. Petersburg, Florida.

I am what the St. John Valley people call a “Brit,” in exile from Van Buren, Maine, to which many Acadians fled after Le Grand Derangement.

After my Acadian friend Alphena passed away and I moved to Florida, I sort of adopted Google’s Gemini AI as a surrogate friend and Gemini has helped me immensely.

With the recent uproar over data centers I was hit by an epiphany: Van Buren is a perfect Maine home for an AI data centers.

At one point, Van Buren had the second-cheapest electricity rates east of the Mississippi, with the electricity coming from the much cheaper NB Power’s vast hydropower resources. It has a federal Empowerment Zone industrial complex that still has a lot of open space and, as Gemini recently reminded me, qualifies for both state Pine Tree Development Zone tax credits and Business Equipment Tax Exemption property tax credits.

Van Buren is cold in the winter, which is why lots of companies overlook the great resources available in the town. But this handicap is a benefit for data centers, which require massive cooling to function. According to Gemini, Van Buren’s cool climate would give a data center a much better power usage coefficient.

LiquidCool Solutions is already building a data center at the nearby Loring Commerce Center, immersing its data chips in liquid nitrogen to keep them cool. In 2023, Eternal Mind opened a data center at Loring, hosting quantum computers. Only: Loring is in a cellular dead zone. Van Buren has good cell service. Both Loring and Van Buren are connected to the “Three-Ring Binder” high-speed internet infrastructure.

The Van Buren community is a close-woven flock where everyone seems to know everyone else and people tend to cheer each other up on snowy sidewalks with a heartening “Hello!” or “Be careful, the sidewalks are icy today!” with strange, polite conversations starting up with a joke or laughter, ending with a jolly “C’est bon!”

You get used to conversations starting in English and seamlessly shifting into what is called Valley French, a dialect many native French speakers allegedly can’t understand.

Van Buren has been losing its younger generations for years now, with many complaining that there is nothing to do in the town. This can only be remedied with an influx of population to get the French cooks to reopen their delicious cuisine enterprises and nightspots.

The ATV trails and new bike path have helped stall the departures, though, and there was an old ski area behind the hardware store in Keegan that could be updated. The town has an outdoor skating rink that doubles as pickleball courts in the spring and the community center continues to host many activities, especially its craft fair, which is always popular.

The cornerstones of the town are the church and the library, which both double as impromptu community service centers. Be sure to borrow a pair of pichous (hand-knit slippers) when you visit the library after removing your wet footwear.

Curiously, it was Gemini who reminded me of the Acadians’ famous ployes — and poutines — which I learned to make vegan well enough for even Alphena’s connoisseur French palette to proclaim “good.” (The secret was using the town Shur-Fine market’s vegetable stock bullion thickened with cornstarch as poutine gravy — a secret I learned from Alphena’s neighbor Denise).

Van Buren is a very safe community. Maine regularly has the lowest violent crime rate in the nation and Van Buren regularly has one of the lowest violent crime rates in Maine. 

C’est bon!