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Start spreading the news: Datacenters may face one-year ban in NY
The bill awaits Gov. Hochul's signature after passing the state legislature
New York lawmakers have approved a bill imposing new labor, energy, environmental, and community-benefit requirements on datacenters, including a one-year moratorium on certain permits for facilities drawing 20 MW or more.The bill now heads to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul for a signature. A spokesperson for the governor told the New York Post she would review the legislation, but gave no signal as to whether she would sign it. Hochul has previously said she hoped to leave regulating datacenter construction to the local communities. “Today we face an unprecedented wave of proposed large-scale data center development across New York,” the bill’s sponsor Assemblymember Anna Kelles wrote in a statement posted to Instagram. “My legislation seeks to provide New York with the time necessary to fully evaluate the environmental, energy, water, and ratepayer impacts of these facilities and to develop appropriate regulatory safeguards before additional projects move forward.”
The Assembly approved the bill on Thursday, the same day Anthropic, the AI giant behind Claude, called for a pause on LLM development sprints as developers believe the models could soon be capable of building themselves. In light of that possibility, researchers at Anthropic said the world would benefit from a slowdown in the race to make models more powerful.
