New York just passed a one-year temporary ban on data centers

binarymax

I submitted this link, which is clearly written by an LLM but has a good overview. Here's the actual bill: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S10642

defmetrix

I want to continue to build data centers, but I dont really want one in my back yard either. But New York seems to be hurting itself lately, the states job growth has slowed over the past few years. This reminds me of them canceling the Amazon HQ.

nazgulsenpai

I clicked the article expecting to see some feel-good political grandstanding (I'm a bit cynical these days) but honestly, this seems like a decent approach. Pause approvals for a year giving breathing room for researching the impacts, and hopefully address them.

CodingJeebus

Glad to see this, the rate at which these developments have been getting approved clearly isn't sustainable and developers have a major incentive to getting projects locked in before regulators come in to change the laws around how data centers connect to the grid, which is almost certainly happening.

arjie

Am I the only one who wants a datacenter in his backyard? I actually went down a little over a year ago to get a cabinet down at Hosting.com’s old location round the corner only to find that they’ve been gone from there (and the DC business) for a few years now and the new owners have kept it fallow. I have to drive down to Fremont for a similar price point now. I would gladly have paid 30% more to just go down the street in SF’s SOMA. Perhaps I should have considered Digital Realty’s facility down on Paul Ave but they’re harder to get a small system up on. It does mean I try to make sure I get it right when I set up. But it also means that if I goofed some cable management then that’s it because I’m not going back to fix it till next time. Something that would be cool for the future would be if luxury apartment buildings offered their own cabinets for the use of residents. Haha, a man can dream.

FergusArgyll

I don't get it, nyc wants to add government programs, they obviously need to tax something. Here come massive corps willing to invest a ton of money, just tax them at some reasonable rate and voila, you can now pay for city funded grocery stores or whatever

ecshafer

Populist nonsense like this is all that New York passes. Data Centers have minimal impact, provides some jobs, and New York needs to upgrade their power system and build more power plants anyways.

satellite2

How is a data center defined? Is a small business dedicating a room to server racks a "data center"?

ks2048

It would be ironic if irrational anti-data center actions was the one thing that prevented an irrational AI bubble. (I’m thinking of a bubble in building/funding/economics, not in abilities).

mhb

Other than data centers being the bogeyman du jour, why isn't the bill written more generally to address potential impacts of any large new business that is anticipated to create effects like noise, pollution, infrastructure requirements, etc. It's not already required for proposed businesses to address these issues?

saltyoldman

B. THE TERM "DATA CENTER" SHALL NOT INCLUDE FACILITIES MAJORITY-OWNED, OPERATED, OR OTHERWISE CONTROLLED BY A PUBLIC RESEARCH INSTITUTION AND USED FOR RESEARCH PURPOSES. Lol, always a carveout for the commies.

deepsun

And that is why China wins in production.

loudmax

The AI-driven data center roll out raises some legitimate concerns that really ought to be considered and discussed at the political level. I doubt that a blanket ban on data centers is the right approach. These are the data center issues as I understand them, in ascending order of importance: * Water use: Almost always a red herring or non-issue, unless the DC is being built in an area with water shortages. DC's use a lot of water, but their use is negligible compared to many other industries. * Neighborhood appearance: They're not particularly pretty to have in your back yard, but much less ugly than, say, a factory. They're not inherently polluting. * Power draw: This is a legitimate concern as DC's use an enormous amount of electricity. In the short run, it could make sense for deep-pocketed investors to subsidize residential or non-DC power consumption to keep everyone's electric bills from skyrocketing. Longer term, power companies will need to build much more generating infrastructure. I'd love to see a carbon tax to encourage the construction of renewable (or nuclear) power. Sadly, the current US administration seems intent on vice-maxing and ruining as much as they can for future generations. * AI-driven job displacement: I think this is the real worry people have. The water use thing is an excuse people are looking for to oppose AI. IMHO, that last one is the crux of the issue, and banning DCs from being built in New York will do absolutely nothing to alleviate this concern. The tech billionaire class has been harping about how they'll make money for investors by automating everyone's job, and the people have noticed. My optimistic take is that AI companies won't in fact capture all of the value from automation, because they'll be competing against each other, and against open weights models. But who knows? Maybe a single company will achieve Super-AGI first and they'll own the world. I doubt that will happen, but this is what they're aiming for, and a lot of the money invested only makes sense in light of that goal. And even in my optimistic scenario, the job disruption will be quite real. New jobs will be created as other jobs are lost to automation. That's well and good after things have settled, but it is very disruptive to people's careers and ambitions in the mean time.

WarmWash

It's pretty obvious the outrage around datacenters has nothing to do with datacenters and everything to do with knee capping AI progress. People should just focus on that, because you really really have to reach to make a metal box that hums into an existential environmental crisis. Ultimately you end up looking stupid and uninformed, because you have to lie and half-truth to make datacenters look evil. And the people protesting are all factually incorrect about what they are protesting. Just go after AI directly, or at least frame the arguments against datacenters in the context of AI.

postalrat

We aren't even trying any more. China and the east are the future.