Data centers and water
Data Center Water Use in Cumberland County, ME
Cumberland County, Maine has 3 mapped data center facilities, including FirstLight, carrying about 11 MW of estimated power load.
Water pressure for new demandHow hard a large new water user, like a data center, would press on this county's water. It blends recent drinking-water compliance, drought, and existing industrial demand. Higher pressure means new demand competes harder with current uses. It is not a judgment about whether one should be built.
Moderate water pressure
Cumberland County has no health violations in the last 5 years, extreme drought, low existing industrial water demand.
- Mapped facilities
- 3
- EPA + OpenStreetMap layers
- Estimated power load
- 11 MW
- IM3 Atlas capacity estimate
- Permitted discharge
- Not reported
- Clean Water Act permit fields
- DCWSI national rank
- #978
- of 318 scored counties
The operators
How many data centers are in Cumberland County?
3 facilities are mapped to Cumberland County, Maine across the EPA and OpenStreetMap layers, run by operators including FirstLight. Counts reflect mapped footprint, not an operator's total fleet.
- EPA ECHO
CADC PORTLAND 340, LLC
PORTLAND, ME
- OpenStreetMap
FirstLight Data Center
FirstLight · Portland, ME
- OpenStreetMap
Oxford Networks
FirstLight · Brunswick, ME
Supply versus demand
How much water do Cumberland County data centers use?
Exact facility water draw is rarely public. As a screening proxy we compare the Clean Water Act permitted discharge mapped to these facilities against the county's entire industrial water baseline from the USGS 2020 series.
No Clean Water Act permitted discharge is reported for the mapped facilities in Cumberland County. The figures below show the county's industrial water baseline for context.
- Mapped facility discharge
- Not reported
- County industrial baseline
- 6.43 Mgal/day
Model a build
Can Cumberland County support more data centers?
Cumberland County carries 29 on the water-pressure scale, so new large-load demand warrants closer scrutiny. Size a hypothetical build to see the daily draw against the county industrial baseline.
Data Center Water Budget Calculator
Estimate daily water use for a hypothetical facility in Cumberland County.
Your facility would use 12.4% of this county's industrial water baseline — manageable but worth monitoring against drought trends.
Based on USGS 2020 water-use data and EPA-standard cooling intensity constants. Not a substitute for site-specific water rights analysis.
In context
How does Cumberland County compare nationally?
- DCWSI build-out rank
- #978
- of 318 counties with a stress score
- Water pressure vs median
- +10
- national median is 19 of 100
- Share of mapped load
- 0.0%
- of 166.02 GW mapped nationally
Cumberland County is one of 330 US counties with mapped data centers. See the full ranking and the interactive map in the national atlas.
Facility data combines EPA ECHO, EPA Clean Water Act permits, OpenStreetMap, and the IM3 Open Source Data Center Atlas (DOE/PNNL), geocoded to county FIPS. Capacity and water baselines come from IM3 and USGS 2020 water-use data. These are county-level screening figures, not a facility-level water-use audit. Read the full methodology.