Welcome back to Power Play! Each week, senior writer Molly Taft tackles a topic around this midterm season’s biggest issue: data centers. If you’ve got a question or thought for the column, feel free to shoot Molly an email at [email protected] or reach them securely on Signal at mollytaft.76.
When New York became the first state in the country to enact a moratorium on data center development, Adrienne Yocina was excited. For the past two years, the mom of three has been organizing in western Genesee County to stop a 600-megawatt data center from coming to a site close to the Tonawanda Seneca Nation’s reservation and a federal wildlife refuge.
But almost four months after the one-year moratorium began, Yocina tells me that she’s “getting nervous.” She’s worried that Democratic governor Kathy Hochul won’t sign a stronger bill to impose a stricter moratorium, and is concerned that the state Department of Environmental Conservation is not adequately involved in the process of evaluating data centers in New York.
“I feel like she’s just trying to shut us up,” she says of Hochul.
Data centers are at the center of midterm races across the country, with politicians of both parties making promises to enact regulations or moratoriums on development. After next week comes the tough part: Newly elected officials must either break their word or follow through on those promises as they weigh large infrastructure projects coming to their states and residents who say they’ll reject data centers no matter what.
How will those compromises go—and will they appease voters? New York’s moratorium, and the continued opposition from some groups, may offer clues.
In July, just two months after dismissing the idea of a data center moratorium, Hochul signed the nation’s first executive order to put a pause on development. Her order was a compromise. Just weeks prior, the state legislature had passed an omnibus bill that would have implemented a one-year moratorium throughout New York. The bill contained several provisions that made it more aggressive than Hochul’s moratorium, including stricter limits on the size of data centers and a mandate that the Department of Environmental Conservation conduct a thorough environmental impact review of data center operations. Rather than sign the bill, Hochul issued her own order. (The governor has until the end of the year to sign that bill, and her office says they are still looking at it.)
One of the bill’s State Senate sponsors, Democrat Kristen Gonzalez, has been publicly supportive of Hochul’s moratorium. The governor’s office, Gonzalez says, proactively reached out to her after her bill passed to help design the moratorium for more immediate relief for New Yorkers.
Gonzalez went on a data center tour of New York at the end of the summer, talking to residents around the state about their concerns. She told me that the people she talked to overwhelmingly wanted Hochul to go further and implement more aggressive measures to protect communities from data centers.
“There are local communities statewide that are living near existing data centers, dealing with significant air pollution and noise pollution, who are struggling with rising utility bills and rising water bills,” she told me. “We see the moratorium as a first step, but it can’t be the last.”
Hochul has a comfortable lead over Republican challenger Bruce Blakeman ahead of Tuesday’s election—something that may have been helped by the moratorium’s passing. In a recent Quinnipiac poll of New York voters, 53 percent of respondents said they trusted Hochul to do a better job in handling AI and data centers, compared to just 31 percent trusting Blakeman. Blakeman, who has voiced support for data centers, called Hochul’s moratorium “crazy” when it was passed in July. His campaign didn’t immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Hochul has also touted her tough-on-data-center bona fides on the campaign trail. Early last month, she hosted a roundtable discussion on data centers with agricultural, environmental, and business leaders at a farm in the Hudson Valley. There, she told reporters that she wanted to work with the state legislature to implement more aggressive protections, including banning tax breaks for data centers. At the event, Hochul was flanked by Gonzalez and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of Washington’s most prominent data center critics.
I asked Hochul at the event how she anticipates handling continued opposition after her moratorium ends. How does New York balance economic development with community opposition if some people don’t want data centers in their backyards under any circumstances, even with the assurances from the state that Hochul’s office is working to create?
The purpose of her pause, she said, was that communities should be able to choose. “This is democracy in action,” she said. “If you want it, it should come with all kinds of guardrails and restraints, but if you don’t want it, it doesn’t come.”
More New Yorkers may end up choosing the latter option. A Siena poll from September found that 63 percent of New Yorkers would oppose data centers being built in their area even after Hochul’s moratorium expires. (It’s even higher for New York Democrats, with 75 percent saying they’d remain opposed to data center development post-moratorium.)
Many newly elected (or reelected) governors will face a similar dynamic: At least 20 gubernatorial candidates have promised a data center moratorium or pause, according to research compiled by government relations company MultiState. Even more have promised to regulate the industry more tightly. Formerly data-center-friendly incumbents like Texas’s Greg Abbott and Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro have also made pledges to be stricter on their development.
Come January, new governors will face highly engaged constituents who are finding a political home for the first time in the fight against data centers. That includes Yocina, who says she had never voted in a local election before.
She says she understands the need for industries and jobs in upstate New York: Her youngest son decided to join the Army after a fruitless job search and is about to be deployed. Now, her organizing group is moving from focusing on just stopping the data center to brainstorming new ideas for the site.
“We’re trying to figure out what we can say yes to that’s not a data center,” she says.
What We’re Writing
Buried in Anthropic’s IPO documents filed last week was a startling admission. The tech giant’s plan to develop its own data centers exposes it to financial risk, thanks to its projected reliance on natural gas. Of course, Anthropic isn’t alone in its reliance on gas, and the filing acknowledges that’s a real problem. The heavy demand could “drive up the price of natural gas” and make it harder to purchase. I took a look at Anthropic’s plans for data centers and the brewing competition between data centers over natural gas supply in the US.
What We’re Reading
- The Verge’s Gaby Del Valle takes readers out west for a deep dive on data centers’ water woes in Arizona—and why a massive and thirsty chip manufacturing plant seems to have escaped the public’s ire.
- New findings from Pew Research Center show that advertisers spent $12 million on political ads mentioning data centers in a 90-day period leading up to the midterms.
- Two professors who study real estate and urban economics write in The Conversation about their most recent research on data centers and job creation. Their findings: Data centers lead to modest job growth in certain sectors like transportation and warehousing, but not in local services like restaurants and retail.
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