Two New York lawmakers on Friday announced that they are introducing a bill that would impose a three-year moratorium on data center development. The announcement makes New York at least the sixth state to introduce legislation putting a pause on data center development in the past few weeks—one of the latest signs of a growing and bipartisan backlash that is quickly finding traction in statehouses around the country.
Data center moratoriums are “being tested as a model throughout states in this country,” said state senator Liz Krueger, a Democrat, who presented the bill at a press conference Friday with its cosponsor, assemblymember Anna Kelles, also a Democrat. “Democrats and Republicans are moving forward with exactly these kinds of moratoriums. New York should be in the front of the line to get this done.”
The new bill comes as a wave of bipartisan anti-data center sentiment that has swept across the country in recent months. In December, Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, became the first national politician to call for a blanket moratorium on data center permitting, saying that a moratorium would “ensure that the benefits of technology work for all of us, not just the 1 percent.”
Just a day before the New York bill was introduced, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida sharply criticized data centers at a roundtable on AI policy. DeSantis had previously proposed legislation that would offer a variety of consumer protections and limit the expansion of data centers in Florida.
“I don’t think there’s very many people who want to have higher energy bills just so some chatbot can corrupt some 13-year-old kid online,” deSantis said at the roundtable, to applause. “That’s not what anybody is signing up for.”
New York currently has more than 130 data centers, with several large-scale projects—including a 450-megawatt project sited on an old coal plant—proposed or under construction. One of the state’s utilities said there is currently 10 gigawatts of electric demand, mainly driven by data centers, in line to be connected to the grid; that demand tripled in just one year. These projects are colliding with mounting concerns over impacts from data centers on the electric grid, environmental worries, and whether or not consumers would be footing the bill. Last month, as part of a larger set of actions intended to protect ratepayers from high energy costs, New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, launched a new initiative to improve interconnection and grid upgrades while requiring data centers to “pay their fair share.”
In early December, days before Sanders’s call for a national moratorium, more than 200 national and local environmental groups from around the country convened by environmental group Food and Water Watch signed on to a letter asking members of Congress to pass a national moratorium on data center development, calling data center expansion and the AI boom “one of of the biggest environmental and social threats of our generation.”
The New York bill was “our idea,” says Eric Weltman, the senior strategist and organizer for Food and Water Watch’s New York chapter. The bill imposes at least a three-year moratorium on issuing permits for new data centers. During this time, the Department of Environmental Conservation and the Public Service Commission must issue reports on the impacts of data centers on the public and the environment, and suggest new regulations or orders to minimize impacts.
“There are a lot of extraordinarily well-intentioned and well-meaning bills that have been introduced to attempt to address the many impacts that data centers have,” says Weltman. “Our concern was, and remains, that they’re not adequate.”