New York just became the first state in the country to hit pause on big data centers. Governor Kathy Hochul signed Executive Order No. 62 on July 14, halting discretionary environmental permitting for any new data center facility with a power demand of 50 megawatts or more.
The temporary moratorium lasts up to one year, giving regulators time to develop stricter standards around energy consumption, water use, and grid reliability.
What exactly got banned, and why
The executive order targets what the industry calls “hyperscale” data centers, the warehouse-sized facilities that power everything from cloud computing to large language models. The 50 MW threshold is significant. For context, 50 MW is roughly enough to power 40,000 homes.
This wasn’t a decision made in a vacuum. The New York State Legislature had already passed the Responsible Data Center Development Act on June 4, which aimed to implement a similar one-year moratorium but cast a wider net. That legislation defined large data centers as facilities with a peak demand of just 20 MW or greater.
