New York Governor Kathy Hochul Is Walking a Narrow Lane on Data Centers

New York Governor Kathy Hochul tried to pick out a middle way with her data center moratorium, carefully charting a course between the demands of industry, advocacy groups, and voters who are increasingly suspicious of the data center and artificial intelligence industries. Did she succeed? Only time will tell.

Hochul’s first-in-the-nation permitting pause has been hailed by data center opponents who want to re-orient American politics around the artificial intelligence backlash and lamented by the technology sector and its allies, including several in the Trump administration. President Donald Trump himself wrote on Truth Social, “New York State has made a terrible decision.” adding that the “Radical Left Dumocrats must not be allowed to cause us to lose Data Centers, AI, and all of this incredible new Technology, to China.”

Before we discuss what Hochul did, we must first discuss what she didn’t do.

What Hochul’s moratorium is not is her signature on the Responsible Data Center Development Act, a data center moratorium that passed both houses of the state legislature in June. That moratorium had a lower energy use threshold for the moratorium: 20 megawatts, compared to Hochul’s 50 megawatts.

One of that bill’s sponsors, democratic socialist Kristen Gonzalez, appeared alongside Hochul when she signed the executive order Tuesday and hailed the governor for “protecting everyday New Yorkers with a first in the nation moratorium on new large data centers.” When asked about this discrepancy by reporters, Hochul said that “we want to make sure we didn’t touch the data centers that are powering hospitals and schools and research centers,” and specifically mentioned data centers used by “bank back-office operations.”

Protecting bank back-office operations is not typically top of mind for democratic socialists. Gonzalez’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

The goal of the moratorium, Hochul said, is to develop a process for data centers to pay their way in terms of grid costs and electricity rates.

“We expect this process, which we already launched, to be completed within the year,” she said. “Once this policy’s in place, the moratorium will be reviewed and lifted.”

What is still unclear is how this moratorium interacts with renewables development, especially upstate where there is enough open space for both wind and solar power as well as large data centers.

While the New York governor has pulled back on the state’s climate goals as renewable energy and transmission has come under the dual assault of the Trump administration and rising costs, Hochul has made a point of promoting clean power development across the state, especially nuclear and hydropower, which can be built and maintained close to her western New York home base.

A New York data center industry could — emphasis on could — be a major customer for renewable power in the state, especially as there’s little prospect of large-scale new natural gas development.

During her speech announcing the moratorium, Hochul emphasized that “we’ve invested so much in other forms of power to meet the current needs of New Yorkers and our businesses,” and that “New York will require data centers to either produce their own energy or pay a premium to tap into our grid.”

The executive order itself lays out a process whereby, once the moratorium is lifted, new data centers may be required “to fund new clean electric generation and/or battery storage dedicated to their operations, consistent with the State’s clean energy goals, including customer-sited distributed energy resources, to the greatest extent feasible.”

When discussing her energy and economic policies on Bloomberg’s “Odd Lots” podcast this week, Hochul connected her data center moratorium with economic development efforts, especially upstate, where large data centers are more likely to be sited.

Referring to Micron’s $100 billion Syracuse-area semiconductor manufacturing project, Hochul told hosts Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway, “I’ll work with you to get the power you need.” (The state approved a transmission line for the project last year.)

“If I have to choose between powering a largely vacant data center with the same amount of power I can have with a Micron with 1,000 jobs, I can tell you right now where I’m going,” Hochul said. “They can come under the conditions we lay out.”

But it may be just as likely data center developers take the hint and avoid a state with expensive power and high costs of doing business in the best of times.

“I don’t think we know yet how this will impact what’s known as behind-the-meter or off-the-grid power solutions: natural gas, cogeneration, solar, wind, battery storage,” Jeffrey Moerdler, a partner at the law firm Haynes Boone who chairs the data center practice, told me. “I assume it will hold up data centers powered by alternative energy sources.”

As for whether Hochul can successfully keep the one-year moratorium a year (temporary policies have a tendency to become permanent), develop new rules to address her concerns about grid costs and local opposition, and then have data centers line up to get back into New York, Moerdler was skeptical.

“It’s going to take years to make up for that shift” against data center development, he told me, predicting that the moratorium could lead to “many years of new data centers not locating here because they already started during that one-year period somewhere else.”

Something else that must be noted in all of this: “New York is not a high priority location for data centers.” Whether the state’s governor wants it to be remains to be seen.