Across the country, discontent has exploded over the ever-growing glut of server farms that have accompanied the AI boom. Anger has grown so loud that it’s begun to shift legislative agendas. Some states and communities are mulling temporary bans on new data center development altogether. Earlier this month, New York joined the club, with a bold new proposal to halt the local cloud build-out in its tracks.
A new bill in New York State would impose a three-year moratorium on the issuance of new permits for data center construction throughout the state, while local regulators are given a chance to study the environmental and economic impacts the industry is having on communities. The bill’s co-authors, state senator Liz Krueger and Assemblymember Anna Kelles, have called the legislation the “strongest” introduced in the country.
While no statewide moratoriums have passed so far, local bans are proliferating fast. Several weeks before Krueger and Kelles introduced their bill, the New Orleans City Council passed a moratorium, pausing all new data center construction in the city for one year. In early January, Madison, Wisconsin, passed a similar law after protests erupted over regional tech projects.
Similar policies have also passed in droves of communities throughout construction hot spots like Georgia and Michigan, as well as in many other regions throughout the country.
Environmental activists have long taken aim at data centers, but the more recent concerns have come from high-level lawmakers, drawing on populist anger at the tech industry broadly. In conservative Florida, for instance, Gov. Ron DeSantis recently announced an AI “bill of rights” that gives local communities the right to limit new data center construction.
In liberal Vermont, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders has suggested a nationwide moratorium. And in Arizona, where the political milieu is decidedly mixed, Gov. Katie Hobbs recently said she supported pulling the industry’s tax incentives. Politicians have even begun to fight over the topics, with the governor of Mississippi taking shots at Sanders online over his moratorium proposal.
The political resistance is coming just as tech companies commit more and more money to building out infrastructure. The four biggest spenders — Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft — plan to spend a whopping $650 billion in capital expenditures over the next year, the vast majority of it going to data center build-outs. Even more spending is planned in the following years, as the companies race to secure as much compute capacity as possible.
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