New York moved closer toward becoming the first US state to enact a moratorium on large datacenters this week. On Thursday, the state legislature approved a one-year ban on the facilities powering the AI boom.
The measure now heads to Kathy Hochul, the governor, who will decide whether to sign it into law. The Guardian spoke to a state senator in the wake of the historic vote about authoring the bill and the wider US backlash against datacenters.
Thursday’s vote comes as anger toward datacenters, and AI, sweeps the nation. Almost three-quarters of Americans oppose a datacenter project being built near their homes, according to a new Heatmap poll. Many local communities across the country, including in New York, have already enacted a patchwork of moratoriums on datacenters. But some residents are feeling overwhelmed by the pace and secrecy of development – and they’re calling on state governments for help.
Kristen Gonzalez, a New York state senator, Kristen Gonzalez wanted to buy her state some time. She co-authored a bill that would temporarily ban “hyperscale” datacenters over 20MW.
“Big tech has been used to writing their own rules, or not having rules that they have to play by, when it comes to new technology,” Gonzalez says. “This is one of the first times that we’re really drawing a line in the sand and saying that as a state legislature, we have the responsibility to make sure that New Yorkers are in the driver’s seat.”
How would New York’s temporary ban on datacenters work?
The moratorium largely targets datacenters built by “tech goliaths” and will not apply to facilities already possessing the necessary state permits, Gonzalez says. She notes that currently, there are at least 28 large data centers being evaluated by the state for their impact on the grid and that they would “add an additional 9,682MW of energy onto the state’s already constrained and aging grid”.
“We should not have to sacrifice our water, our energy, our green space and local communities for big tech and specifically for generative AI, which is oftentimes used for things like AI slop,” Gonzalez says. Gonzalez says she introduced the bill after hearing from concerned New Yorkers and a coalition of environmental justice advocates.
In addition to imposing a one-year moratorium, the bill would also require an environmental impact report, which would document water and electricity usage, as well as new labor, energy efficiency and transparency standards, and ratepayer protections aimed at keeping New Yorkers’ energy bills low.
The original proposal included a three-year pause on datacenter development but was reduced to one year as a compromise.
A part of a nationwide pushback
More than a dozen US states have considered moratoria in response to residents’ fears about the potential costs of living next to datacenters, especially higher utility bills and negative environmental impacts. Only Maine got as close as New York in hitting pause, with the legislature passing a temporary ban – but in April, its governor vetoed the measure.
New York’s moratorium bill is still awaiting the governor’s signature. Her office has said she will review the legislation. While Hochul has previously dismissed a statewide approach to regulating datacenters, she has advocated for protecting New Yorkers from taking on additional energy costs driven by datacenters.
The Data Center Coalition, a trade association that has championed the expansion of these facilities, worries that a statewide moratorium would “discourage further investment, undermine New York’s economy, and send a signal that the state is closed for business”. Datacenters are the backbone of New Yorkers’ digital economy, powering everything from remote work and telemedicine to e-commerce and education, the group says.
The scene in Albany
In Thursday’s debate on the legislative floor in the state capital of Albany, lawmakers against the ban echoed industry worries that it was a one-size-fits-all measure that would stifle economic growth and supersede local control. “We shouldn’t be imposing blanket moratoriums that punish every community in the state for a problem that may not be universal,” said Paul Bologna, a New York state assemblymember. “We should be letting markets and local governments drive this policy, not fear and environmental overreach in Albany.”
Gonzalez disagrees with that approach. “It’s an abdication of our responsibility to ask a local government to engage and take on the wealthiest companies in the world. That is what state government is for,” she says. “This notion that we can let these local governments take on tech goliaths and assume that everything will beOK is, for me, very misguided.”
Cheryl Cordes, a resident of rural Genesee county, is watching Albany closely. For months, Cordes – a retired nurse who has lived in the town of Alabama, New York, for more than four decades – has been trying to pressure her local government to stop developers from building a massive datacenter campus just over half a mile away from her home. “They’re trying to shove this datacenter down our throats,” she says. Cordes is worried about potentially harmful health effects from the noise, as well as disruptions to the nearby habitat of all sorts of birds: bald eagles, trumpeter swans, Canadian geese and snowy owls. She has knocked on dozens of doors in her town to survey residents and recalls one neighbor telling her: “If my electric bill goes up another $50 I can’t live here.”
Cordes hopes Hochul approves the moratorium. “These regulations have to come from above,” she says. “I’m not a person who’s about big government – but come on: please help us here in these small rural towns.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
