On June 4, 2026, both houses of the New York State Legislature passed the Responsible Data Center Development Act, a bill that would put a one-year statewide pause on permits for the biggest new AI data centers. If Governor Kathy Hochul signs it, New York becomes the first state in the country to freeze them. But Hochul has already said she does not want a statewide freeze at all.
The fight in the Legislature is over, and the next one starts at the governor’s desk. The bill has passed both houses and is heading to Hochul, per the official New York State Senate page for S10642. The Senate cleared it 43 to 17, with one member absent and two excused, on June 4, 2026, voting on the companion Assembly bill, A11560, which had been substituted for S10642, according to that same Senate record. The measure passed the state Senate and Assembly in the final hours of the 2026 session, WBNG reported.
The word “moratorium” covers more than it sounds. The bill pauses new permits for one year, but only for the biggest data centers: those with a peak electricity demand of 20 megawatts or more, per the bill text on the Senate site. Within 18 months of the bill becoming law, the state Department of Environmental Conservation has to produce an environmental impact report on how much energy and water these facilities use and what they pollute. After that, any new center over 20 megawatts gets its own separate electric and water rate class, has to fund a host-community benefit program, and faces public hearings before it can break ground. A second tier kicks in at 5 megawatts: those projects have to pay prevailing union wages, use American-made iron and steel, and run on 90 percent renewable power by 2040.
The reason comes down to energy bills. The bill’s lead Senate sponsor is Kristen Gonzalez, a former tech worker who now represents the 59th District, which covers parts of Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan, per the district’s public description. Her district office sits on Second Avenue in Manhattan, per her office’s contact page. In a statement on her passage of the bill, Gonzalez said, “For too long Big Tech has benefited from under-regulation, writing their own rules on large scale data center development with little accountability or transparency on local impacts,” and added, “Technology should improve peoples’ lives, not drive up our energy bills or exhaust our natural resources and increase pollution,” per her office’s release.
There are 28 large data centers in the New York Independent System Operator’s queue waiting to plug into the grid, and together they would add an estimated 9,682 megawatts of demand, per Gonzalez’s office. Assemblymember Anna Kelles said the data centers currently proposed in New York, if run at full demand, “could consume nearly twice as much electricity as every household in the state combined,” and Sierra Club’s Roger Downs said the proposed facilities would collectively draw about 10,000 megawatts, “exceeding the total daily power usage of New York City,” both per Food and Water Watch, the nonprofit that pushed hard for the pause.
Somebody pays to build the substations and transmission lines that feed 9,682 megawatts of new demand, and historically that somebody is everyone on the same wires. Liz Moran, the New York policy advocate at Earthjustice, said, “1 in 4 New Yorkers already can’t afford their energy bills, and that’s without the rapid buildout of AI data centers,” per Earthjustice’s statement on the vote. The bill’s separate rate class for big data centers is meant to wall their costs off from your bill rather than spreading the upgrades across every household.
The opposition goes beyond tech lobbyists. Khara Boender of the Data Center Coalition warned that “a statewide moratorium on data centers would discourage further investment, undermine New York’s economy, and send a signal that the state is closed for business,” and Ken Pokalsky of the Business Council of New York State said the bill’s “expansive and unworkable mandates” would result in “significant adverse economic development impacts,” both per Inside Climate News. Labor is split. Ed Nadeau, president of the New York State Pipe Trades Association, did not fight the consumer protections but did not want to lose a year of construction jobs either: “It doesn’t make any sense. We want these jobs,” he told Inside Climate News. Other unions worry less about the construction jobs the centers create and more about the white-collar jobs the AI inside them could displace.
The bill passed both houses by comfortable margins, so the suspense is no longer in the Legislature. It is parked on Kathy Hochul’s desk, and she has already signaled where she stands. On May 29, 2026, before the final votes, she said of a data center freeze: “This is a local decision for municipalities, its land use, which is the purview of local governments. Its not a statewide approach necessarily, but it’s something I’m looking at intensely,” per E&E News. She would rather a local board handle siting than the state. Advocates reject that. Gay Nicholson of Sustainable Finger Lakes argued that “the burden of rigorous analysis and defense against billionaires and their white-shoe law firms should not be put on volunteer planning board appointees,” and called for “state-level intervention,” per Inside Climate News.
The Legislature is on record. The build-out is enormous, and 28 projects are already in line for grid hookups that would dwarf the city’s own power use. The only thing between New York and a first-in-the-nation freeze is a governor who thinks the call belongs to the same local boards the advocates say are outgunned. The decision now sits in one office. You can read the full bill, S10642, and track whether it is signed or vetoed on the New York State Senate’s bill page, and the senator who carried it, Kristen Gonzalez, takes constituent comment through her office’s contact page. The window to weigh in lasts until Hochul signs or vetoes.
Featured image: U.S. Congress / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
