{"id":296645,"date":"2026-07-15T15:18:17","date_gmt":"2026-07-15T15:18:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/296645\/"},"modified":"2026-07-15T15:18:17","modified_gmt":"2026-07-15T15:18:17","slug":"new-york-pauses-data-centers-over-water-and-power-concerns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/296645\/","title":{"rendered":"New York pauses data centers over water and power concerns"},"content":{"rendered":"

New York just became the first state to enact a moratorium on new large-scale data centers.<\/a> Governor Kathy Hochul signed the one-year pause<\/a> yesterday and also said she wants to repeal sales tax exemptions for data centers in the state.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Louisiana is offering big tax breaks to try to attract AI companies, and Governor Jeff Landry just announced a massive expansion of a data center supercluster<\/a> that Meta is building there.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an issue that has gained a lot of attention across the U.S. \u2014 and not a lot of agreement.<\/p>\n

More than 70% of Americans<\/a> oppose the idea of a data center being built in their community, according to Gallup. Hochul said one of her big concerns is how much energy they use. <\/p>\n

\u201cThese hyperscale AI data centers consume massive amounts of power, truly threatening to outpace our grid’s capacity,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd they drive up costs for local ratepayers.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a big point of contention around the country, but Dany Bahar, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, said there\u2019s actually evidence that data centers can reduce electricity costs.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cNow this is super counterintuitive, but one way to think about this is that, these data centers are picking up some of these fixed costs<\/a> for the infrastructure of the grid,\u201d Bahar said, \u201cand that actually allows consumers to pay less.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

Though, he said, that\u2019s not necessarily the case everywhere. New York is an outlier with this new moratorium.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of states right now are pursuing data centers in hopes of economic development,<\/a>\u201d said Kasia Tarczynska, a senior research analyst at the nonprofit research and policy resource center Good Jobs First.<\/p>\n

But Tarczynska said it\u2019s not clear what the economic benefits<\/a> are, if any. There\u2019s evidence data centers don\u2019t create many long-term jobs,<\/a> and in most states, they get all sorts of exemptions<\/a> from sales tax, property tax, and income tax. <\/p>\n

\u201cFor every tax there is that data center companies should be paying across the country, most likely they’re receiving quite big tax breaks,\u201d Tarczynska said.<\/p>\n

And she said all that money data centers aren\u2019t paying is money local communities aren\u2019t receiving for things like schools, roads, and other services. <\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New York just became the first state to enact a moratorium on new large-scale data centers. Governor Kathy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":296646,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[100339,62087,30535,1775,9,11,10,49,51,50],"class_list":["post-296645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-ai-data-centers","tag-energy-costs","tag-job-creation","tag-louisiana","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-new-york-state","tag-new-york-state-headlines","tag-new-york-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296645\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/296646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}