[nazgulsenpai]

I clicked the article expecting to see some feel-good political grandstanding (I'm a bit cynical these days) but honestly, this seems like a decent approach. Pause approvals for a year giving breathing room for researching the impacts, and hopefully address them.

[declan_roberts]

Are data centers a new and mysterious technology?

[lenkite]

> Are data centers a new and mysterious technology?

They are quite a polluting technology. https://www.staxengineering.com/stax-hub/the-environmental-i...

They also consume significant water causing water scarcity in many places.

https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-cent...

[runarberg]

Cars were not a new technology either when they went nuts on highway infrastructure which ruined the city centers. Perhaps if they had slowed down and studied the impacts before bulldozing neighborhood for highways some damage might have been prevented.

[kube-system]

There's a serious concern that we're in a bubble and many of the pending disruptions to land use and infrastructure might be soon abandoned with no one left to clean up the mess

[cucumber3732842]

What mess? It's a big empty metal box with a heck of an HVAC system and a parking lot sized for industrial use. Just about any less specialized use could be pivoted to at any point during or after construction.

These things only become static "messes" or "blighted" because regulation prevents fire sale and pivot to a new use from being viable.

Edit: People really seem to be ignoring the sentence prior to this edit. For a hundred years it was common for old industrial sites of all shapes and forms to have their equipment if any remained scrapped and then be subdivided among small tenants. Most space leased by smaller businesses in the eastern half of the country probably fell into this category until fairly recently.

[kube-system]

I lived for many years in the rust belt -- abandoned industrial properties aren't particularly attractive to have in your community. Nor are they attractive to industry unless they're already outfitted for their particular use.

Many of these projects are making messes to local infrastructure, the construction and municipal costs associated with that, the wear on local roads, etc. And abandoned buildings are a mess because of their lack of maintenance.

[quickthrowman]

Data centers are not industrial. It’s a 6” slab with prefabricated walls, bar joists, and a metal roof. There’s no continuous distillation column, smelter, fly ash pond, tailings pond, or anything remotely industrial.

Data centers are essentially an Amazon distribution center that is filled with servers instead of racking with a shitload of electrical and HVAC equipment.

[kube-system]

Both an AI hyperscaler and an Amazon warehouse would be typically classified as "light industrial".

> There’s no continuous distillation column, smelter, fly ash pond, tailings pond, or anything remotely industrial.

This is typically classified as "heavy industrial"

[trumpdong]

Or if nobody wants to buy them

[throwaway198846]

How much land do data center use and of which type of land?

[kube-system]

Nobody is concerned about the quantity of land used by an active datacenter.

Local municipalities are having to upgrade municipal infrastructure as a result of these projects -- which wouldn't be too bad, if they can be guaranteed the tax revenue to pay for those things -- and the employer sticks around and maintains their property.

But in a bubble, it is foreseeable that many of these properties will go under when the bubble pops, and local municipalities will be left footing the bill without the tax revenue.

[square_usual]

> Local municipalities are having to upgrade municipal infrastructure as a result of these projects

Then they could pass a law requiring the data centers to pay for these instead of banning them outright, should sort itself out no?

[kube-system]

Part of the idea behind a moratorium is to allow time for impact analysis so those regulations can be written appropriately.

Part of the reason we have big tech getting away with regulatory capture in the US is because they have enough capital to entrench themselves in the economy faster than regulators can react.

[AlecSchueler]

Will they also pay for rolling back the infrastructure and restoring the land to its previous state after they go bust and no longer need the data centre?

[babypuncher]

The mad rush to build datacenters at this unprecedented scale is already wreaking havoc on the consumer economy. The needs of everyday people are far more important than the whims of a few trillion dollar tech companies run by billioinaires.

[gruez]

That's a fair complaint, but banning data centers in NY isn't going to make RAM or GPU prices cheaper.

[autoexec]

Anything that slows their expansion will at least delay some of the impact on RAM and GPU prices since they aren't buying up GPUs until the places are built. In the meantime NY doesn't have to deal with the harmful environmental and health impacts.

The data centers will ultimately end up being built elsewhere, until those places start pushing back. Without federal protections for the environment or the people all we can do is hope that state, county and city governments step up to make sure that data centers aren't harming them directly.

[fintechjock]

How are they harming consumers?

I would think that consumers would vastly benefit from cheaper software, nearly unlimited cloud storage, lower property taxes. Heck, the next generation of data centers are looking like they will actually be net energy producers.

Consumers might not know that they benefit from data centers, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t

[autoexec]

> How are they harming consumers?

Consumers like breathing (https://spectrum.ieee.org/data-centers-pollution) and drinking clean water (https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/data-center-accused-m...). The noise is loud enough to cause hearing damage, and the smell and light pollution isn't helping consumers either.

[fintechjock]

Those are residents, not consumers across the US

[autoexec]

Consumers across the US are the residents. They're the same people. Especially when it comes to those living around data centers. The CEOs of amazon, google, and microsoft aren't living next to data centers and being subjected to the worst of the harms those data centers cause. The people who live near data centers are the consumers of those companies (while also being the products those companies sell). The consumers buying RAM and GPUs are the same people suffering from the pollution data centers cause and paying the price for the environmental harms. We are the consumers. You, me, and our families.

[kube-system]

Residents of homes are typically consumers of utilities, and consumer utility rates are going up in areas of high energy demand.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/confronting-and-addressin...

[j_w]

> consumers would vastly benefit from cheaper software, nearly unlimited cloud storage, lower property taxes.

What data centers are bringing cheaper software, unlimited cloud storage (for free?), or lower local property taxes?

[fintechjock]

Cheaper software – all of them

Nearly unlimited cloud storage - AWS / Google / etc. Data centers are the Cloud

Lower property taxes - data centers increase the property tax base, creating tax compression, which shift property tax from consumer –> company. I'm in Texas, so can only be sure that is true here. I have not looked at all other states.

[j_w]

Cheaper software: where is this cheaper software? Most users don't pay for most software. Facebook/Instagram are introducing paid plans now. LLM companies are seemingly starting to increase prices.

Unlimited cloud storage: Where are consumers getting unlimited cloud storage from? I'm not aware of AWS/Google/others reducing prices/providing unlimited plans.

[babypuncher]

Have you not seen the tech price hikes happening? Steam Decks went up 40% overnight

[wat10000]

The massive spike in the price of RAM is making consumer electronics more expensive and worse.

[fintechjock]

True, for the average HN consumer

But a new iPhone Pro is $154 cheaper than it was in 2020 when adjusted for inflation, and that is probably all the average consumer really cares about

[macNchz]

To my understanding Apple's supply contracts have allowed them to keep prices flat compared to other brands, but the price of non-Mac desktops and laptops are absolutely ballooning right now because of the supply of memory chips. Apple themselves just last month increased the base price of the Mac Mini by 33% from $599 to $799.

The smartphone market appears to be affected as well: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/global-smartphone-market...

[intrikate]

It seems to me that anyone going out of their way to compare current prices against prices from five or more years ago to adjust for inflation is not the average consumer, and shouldn't be juxtaposed as such.

[wat10000]

High margin products are often the last to be impacted at retail because the seller has some cushion. And the impacts are only just getting started. We see the MacBook Neo with a somewhat sad 8GB RAM, most likely due to this. We'll see a combination of just plain higher prices (Steam Deck and Switch 2 have both gone up) and shrinkflation in the form of lower specs.

[kube-system]

The data centers being built due to the AI bubble are predominately increasing costs for public utilities. Many localities are having to make significant investments to keep the lights on and increasing rates for everyone.

If half of these datacenters go out of business next year, it will get even worse when mom and pop will be left with the bill for these projects.

[fintechjock]

I don't see a widespread issue in keeping the lights on, outside of the Lake Tahoe fubar.

Considering utility rates, I would happily pay more for utilities in the short term to have 30+ years of lower property taxes. The data centers property taxes would go to paying for that buildout, and over time it's a great deal for consumers. That said, I'm in Texas so the property tax issue is more prevalent than it would be in New York.

[kube-system]

Lake Tahoe might be the only area literally with issues keeping the lights on, but many more are facing rate hikes and debt spending to build out infrastructure and keep up with increases in demand for utilities.

The prevailing idea is that we're currently in a bubble, especially when it comes to AI hyperscalers, and that the tax revenue will decline when the bubble pops.

Also, not all localities have updated their public utility regs to appropriately assign the costs of infrastructure projects to these new projects. Many, like NoVA have just recently added new utility rate classes specifically for data centers to attempt to do that. In other places, these costs are often are being split among the existing utility customers.

[throwaway198846]

These are not new or unpredictable impacts.

[kube-system]

The scale is new, and impacts are predictable, thus the moratorium.

[sometimelurker]

AI arguably yes (specifically modern really big LLMs)

[boringg]

Whats new about this? We've had data centers for 20 years now? Research which impacts?

Only thing new is speed of deployment and scale - which frankly would align with why we can't build in North America.

I would agree that the political system is the place to push if you have real concerns about the our data center / AI build out - and that will be a huge part of this next election. No other way to either accelerate or decelerate outside of macro economic factors outside our countrol.

[nazgulsenpai]

I agree. It seems reasonable to me in the sense that - only one year - only affects new agreements and not current buildouts - gives times for politicians to do whatever it is they need to do to satisfy their constituents

[recursivegirth]

As a constituent, I see this as the right move.

I would not benefit from an outright ban so that would be too heavy handed. On the other hand - something has to be done. If anything else it's proof the people do have the power to convince their representatives that these affairs matter and we are paying attention.

I wouldn't be to quick to dismiss this as only political theater.

[zerobees]

I'm surprised by your interpretation. As a deliberately polarizing analogy, the first Trump administration pushed for a policy that boiled down to the same principle: pause immigration from certain places "until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on".

I don't think anyone here would describe that example as a good-faith policy. I feel the same goes for the NY bill. It's not a sincere attempt to consider the pros and cons, it's just an effort to shut down unpopular projects to appease the electorate. Maybe that's right, but no need to pretend it's anything more.

[CodingJeebus]

> it's just an attempt to shut unpopular projects down to appease the electorate.

It's weird to see "the government is doing its job by responding to its voters" being framed as some nefarious and underhanded move.

[akramachamarei]

It shouldn't seem that weird. One can like democracy while also disliking its outcomes sometimes.

[recursivegirth]

It's not a comment crafted in good faith. It's telling you what to think and why, using an unrelated analogy to attempt to build credibility.