New York passes a one-year moratorium on AI data centers
last weekend highlighted, people living near AI data centers find water coming out of their pipes cloudy and brown, if it comes out at all; one woman interviewed had to manually fill her toilet tank with water so she could flush it.
And that’s to say nothing of the constant humming noise put off by the centers throughout the day and night. yesterday, New York just passed a moratorium on building AI data centers for one year. Governor Kathy Hochul signed the act yesterday, making New York the first state to pass a statewide moratorium on the issue; the Maine state legislature passed a similar bill in April, but Democratic governor Janet Mills vetoed that bill in defense of one particular data center.
have also introduced similar bills, including Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Virginia, though several of those have already failed. Still, the moratorium in New York doesn’t go quite as far as some advocates would like. Last month, the New York state legislature passed a moratorium on data centers operating at over 20 megawatts, while the order signed by Kathy Hochul extends only to centers operating at over 50 megawatts.
But it’s undeniably a start, and one that has AI advocates spooked. As one lobbyist, “I wouldn’t call it panic, but the concern is real and it moved fast… The real worry in the industry isn’t New York specifically, it is the precedent. ” Another admitted that the public opinion on data centers is “devastating” and said, “If the industry doesn’t wake up quick and start solving this, it’s going to get a lot worse.
” Maybe one option would be to stop building super loud and dirty data centers, especially behind people’s houses.
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