This fight is about your electric bill, even if you have never thought about a data center in your life. New York’s Legislature just passed a one-year moratorium on building large new data centers, the warehouses of computers that power AI. It is sitting on Governor Hochul’s desk, unsigned.
Data centers use power on a scale that is hard to picture, and a lot of them want to plug into the same grid you do. The number of large projects asking to connect in New York jumped from six in 2022 to 48 by the end of 2025, according to an analysis of the bill. Every one is new demand on a system that already strains, and when demand outruns supply, rates go up. As Earthjustice put it in backing the bill, “1 in 4 New Yorkers already can’t afford their energy bills.” The bill asks who pays when AI plugs in: you or the company?
The bill, the Responsible Data Center Development Act, does not ban data centers. It pauses permits for one year on the biggest ones, those drawing 20 megawatts or more, while the state writes the rules. By 2030, it requires utilities to put large data centers in their own separate rate class, so their costs do not get spread across everyone’s bill. It sets energy-efficiency targets. It makes each big new center fund a benefits program for its host community. And it orders an 18-month statewide study of what these centers do to the grid, to water, to land, and to greenhouse gas emissions.
It passed both chambers on June 4, in the final hours of the legislative session. If Hochul signs it, New York would be the first state in the country to pause data centers like this.
Hochul has not said whether she will sign it. Her office has said only that she will review it. In an election-year summer, with a first-in-the-nation bill on her desk and a quarter of the state already unable to pay for power, she gets to decide whether the AI boom pauses for a review or moves ahead.
You can read the bill yourself on the State Senate site (it is S10642), and Hochul’s office is where to weigh in before she signs. The Legislature has passed it. The rest is up to her.
