AI Data Centers Are a Good Problem for Blue States to Have

We know a little bit more about New York’s AI data center moratorium than we did yesterday. Here’s what stands out to me:

Governor Kathy Hochul says this won’t become a ban. “I’m not expecting the need for a ban. I want [the AI companies] to work with us,” she told Bloomberg’s “Odd Lots” podcast. “I understand how important AI is.”

The moratorium isn’t enough for some left-wing groups. As I wrote on Tuesday, Hochul’s order allowed her to avoid signing a more stringent moratorium that included wage requirements and renewable energy mandates for a much wider scope of projects. Kristen Gonzalez, a democratic socialist and a cosponsor of that bill, hailed Hochul anyway for “protecting everyday New Yorkers with a first in the nation moratorium on new large data centers.”

Some New York City progressive groups, while endorsing that more restrictive bill, suggested that she should have gone much further. The New York City chapter of the Sunrise Movement and other left-wing organizations, for instance, posted an Instagram carousel that said: “The dream isn’t better data centers. The dream is no data centers at all.”

New York is also exploring a grid acceleration fund. The governor’s order hints that a few policies should be in place by the time the moratorium ends. These include a new rule that data centers either bring their own power or “pay their fair share” for electricity, and a new state program to help local governments negotiate for community benefits with developers.

But it also opens the door for requiring projects to pay into a grid modernization fund. Such a fund could finance upgrades, set up new virtual power plants, or pay for new sources of zero-carbon energy, the order says. That idea — which resembles proposals from the Searchlight Institute and Groundwork Collaborative — suggests that the state is exploring ways to harness the AI boom for the public. “We want to make sure [data center developers] are investing in the grid,” Hochul said on Tuesday, “but they’re not being asked.”

Which brings me to my larger point. We’re seeing an efflorescence of interesting policymaking on data centers from Democratic governors and state legislators. New York has now enacted this moratorium, of course. Pennsylvania, a true national epicenter of data center construction, has passed new disclosure requirements, and Governor Josh Shapiro has pushed for serious reforms in the country’s largest electricity market.

In New Jersey — where surging power prices were central to last year’s gubernatorial election — the data center buildout has already produced a flurry of new laws. In its most recent session, the state legislature pared back tax incentives for data centers, required utilities to offer a rate for large electricity users, and required data center operators to publish water and energy data. It also set up a novel program that will let data centers pay to reduce electricity demand elsewhere on the grid, such as by setting up virtual power plants (or paying those who participate in them).

It’s been exciting to see different states — and, to be blunt, to see Democratic-governed states, particularly those in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic — try to take on the data center boom. It’s good to see them test out ideas, solve problems through legislation, and harness this moment for the public good without strangling the buildout entirely. For too long, blue states have leaned into a particular economic model, one in which states want to attract varying forms of development but in fact succeed only in creating new suburbs, office buildings, and warehouses.

Soon after Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, observers noticed that the law’s fruits — and notably its manufacturing investments — were sprouting in red or purple states, particularly in the Southeast and Sun Belt. The so-called Battery Belt bloomed in the Mid-South, for instance, not the Rust Belt. As I discussed with the political scientist Alexander Gazmararian on Heatmap’s podcast Shift Key, that was often due (counterintuitively, I think, for liberals) to a failure of governance: It is GOP-governed states that have the local expertise, institutional capacity, and political muscle memory to attract big new economic development projects.

If Democrats want to see their states do big things — build new housing and transit, decarbonize their power grids, or give birth to new industries — then they will need to develop the same kind of capability. That’s why I’ve so relished seeing blue states reckon with the data center boom. It should be encouraging that New Jersey policymakers, for instance, have to figure out how to manage a new and fast-growing industry on the technological frontier. Even questions that may seem troublesome right now — around land use, for instance, or how to relieve a congested power grid — will likely lead to policies that improve the state.

This kind of policymaking helps the Democratic Party, too. After all, the party’s future national leaders — its members of Congress, cabinet secretaries, and even presidents — are currently serving at the state and local level. The data center boom’s lessons — for good and ill — will resound among the party’s leadership for a long time.