LEWISTON, Maine — In a non-descript Lewiston warehouse Thursday, Dynamics owner Bill Stewart rang a small bell on a pole and smiled.
"It came fully equipped with the, you know, 'ring the bell, I closed a deal,'" he said. He then pushed a button and green lights illuminated the ceiling of a sales floor right out of a movie.
Stewart leads a sales, web and data storage services firm for upwards of 5,000 clients, he said.
Thursday afternoon, his team was moving some 3,000 servers and "quantum computers" to warehouses in Brunswick, Oxford, and Lewiston.
Stewart hopes the new location will also create new jobs.
"We want to bring people who have an interest in working in technology and make that a viable option for them," Stewart said, sitting at a lone desk in a still-empty sales office. The office was a comfortable 72 degrees. On the other side of a wall, industrial fans blasted air from open exterior doors through hallways and into a room holding dozens of the quantum computers and servers. Despite the efforts to move cool air, Stewart read the thermometer aloud: 98 degrees.
For every degree the outside temperature increases, it gets two degrees warmer in the server room, he said.
Stewart chose Maine, in part, for its colder climate. A bitter cold winter means fewer fans to keep the hardware from melting. And, what Mainers consider a summer heatwave won't hold a candle to what he needs to keep his Georgia warehouse cool.
Misty Parker, with Lewiston's Department of Economic and Community Development, said the city has the fiber internet needed to serve tech businesses like Dynamics.
"We do have an image of being a blue collar manufacturing town, and we still have a lot of that," she said. "But, as those industries have evolved, we have also grown to support more of the tech industry."
He hopes to hire 40 people for the Lewiston office by the end of the year, with another 25 to be added in the Oxford location, which will store the majority of Dynamics' servers.