A bill passed by the New York State Legislature would pause the development of new data centers in New York for a year, if Gov. Kathy Hochul signs it into law.
Lindsay Anderson, a professor at Cornell University and chair of the Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering, said data centers are essential to many of the things people use every day.
"Anything you do on your phone or your computer or on the internet… you're accessing a data center to actually do the work for you, to provide the information for you, that's where the computing actually happens,” Anderson said. “When you store things in the cloud, it's in a data center."
Anderson is seeing the data center dependence growing even more with the rise of AI technology.
With its natural resources and large population, New York state has the potential to be a big part of that development, and a data center is already being proposed in the Tompkins County town of Lansing.
"If you can find open spaces where water and electricity are available, and you can get land to build the data center, and you also have a lot of consumers that are going to use the data centers then, that's a win,” said Anderson.
But she said data centers can also strain electrical grids and possibly increase costs for consumers as the state needs to use more expensive electricity resources.
The state is replacing aging infrastructure with cleaner options, but Anderson said that transition could 5-15 years.
"If we grow the electricity demand in this state too fast and too inflexibly, then we could find ourselves in a situation where we're just stressed with a lack of generating capacity,” she said.
The one-year moratorium on building new data centers is getting pushback from some Republican lawmakers and businesses who argue the move could sideline the state at a time when many communities are hoping for economic growth.
Anderson said while the pause is not enough time to build new resources, it could give the state time to make a plan.
"What is our strategy for approving these data center developments? What do we need from the data center developer and operator in terms of their investment in infrastructure to make sure it doesn't end up costing New York state residents?” she said.
Anderson said despite the pause, more data centers are needed as technology develops, and it’s crucial that community members, system operators, and developers work together as conversations continue.
