FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — Multiple rounds of negotiations between Hancock town selectmen, federal officials representing the EPA, and The Lobster CEO Bernard Hoskins have resulted in a $2.1B deal to convert the former Hancock Tannery site into an AI datacenter.
The datacenter will host The Lobster‘s proprietary AI platform NewsBrain, developed by MIT graduates Anand Shah and Vitaly Petrov. NewsBrain is a large language model capable of generating thousands of news stories a day – a vast improvement over the output of human journalists that The Lobster has been forced to rely on prior to the advancement of AI technology.
NewsBrain is anticipated to consume 9,000 cubic feet of tidal estuary water each day in order to cool the server infrastructure needed to host such an advanced model. An estimated 42,000 megawatt-hours of electricity will be needed to power the datacenter each day, enough to power a city the size of Philadelphia for just 12 hours.
Negotiations took place over 6 months between February and August of 2026. Because the deal was intentionally not disclosed to Hancock taxpayers, it faced no public opposition and construction is set to begin in early 2027.
The Lobster is proud to become Maine’s largest consumer of tidal estuary water in order to keep bringing you the latest and most up-to-date news from the Downeast region.
