New York became the first US state to enact a moratorium on new datacenters on Tuesday.
Governor Kathy Hochul issued an executive order mandating a one-year statewide pause on the large facilities used to power artificial intelligence products, which she signed at a mid-morning press conference.
“As datacenter development threatens to hike up utility bills, deplete our natural resources, and create uncertainty for New Yorkers, it’s my responsibility to take action and lead,” Hochul, a Democrat, said in a statement.
The order will pause the state permitting process for proposed “hyperscale” datacenters, defined as having electrical capacity of more than 50 megawatts, and direct state regulators to create standards focused on environmental impacts, energy demand, water usage and other factors, the governor’s office said.
Ugh. This is the law of unintended consequences in action.
Instead of building large, vastly more efficient data centers, companies will build smaller ones and spread them out over a geographical area that all use the same power provider (so they can save an equivalent amount of money on bulk use). Resulting in more power draw, more land use, and will require more infrastructure.
The only solution to the problem of data center power utilization is to mandate they be powered by renewables.
Thats not the only solution.
Restricting their total energy and/or pollution budgets (so they dont just build their own terrible power plants) will force them to power with renewable energy AND develop more energy-efficient hardware if they want to keep scaling up the capacity.
I like how “just don’t build any more new datacenters” is not even an option for you guys.
The horse is out of the barn. If they want to build a completely solar powered mega slop farm, I say go for it. The whole thing is either going to die out or get better as long as we don’t just let it consume the planet in the meanwhile.
We’ll have to see how it turns out, but there are many more problems with spreading them out. You need more employees, more land, more contracts to build and with power companies. Also, spreading out the datacenters will avoid concetrating the harmful effects in a specific place, usually poorer communities that are ignored by regulations often.
I think the most likely outcome is people moving away from New York entirely. Its already difficult with the higher costs of labor and regulations, so this may be a final nail in the coffin. Data centers aren’t a great asset to have in your community, as it drains resources and has a low economic impact to help improve the local’s resources.