I've been very curious about these, because of course these are measures that are anti-tech in a number of ways (or at least unpopular in the tech circle).
I have trouble understanding why Sanders has decided to be vocal about these, especially as he's been on the right side of the societal debate fence since forever. My guess is that he cares more about what AI is going to do for the common people, and he knows that we need to have this debate early (obviously, technology seems to increase disparity in places like the US). But still I'm not sure he's taking a stab at it in the right way.
For New York state (not city, no Mamdani), it seems like it's a much more pragmatic view: it increases people's costs (energy, water, etc.) and there's too much tax exemption(/evasion) for data centers currently.
It’s a one year moratorium. I don’t see a problem with this. A lot of voters are concerned about the impacts data centers will have, those concerns are not entirely unwarranted.
We don’t actually have to be moving at breakneck speeds, the AI companies just want you to think we do. A pause to investigate seems warranted.
I also feel like there has been very little discussion of a localized benefit of data centers compared to the negative impacts. As someone who uses AI and other services that need data centers, I certainly understand why they need to exist. I have not heard a compelling argument for why they need to exist anywhere near me. I'm generally anti-NIMBY, but usually with the understanding that there is actually benefit to certain things existing in my proverbial backyard. If that argument exists for data centers I've yet to hear it.
Small town politics generally fly below the radar but this is a real hot button issue in a growing number of communities. Town meetings are dominated by residents lacking the room for otherwise sleeping zoning hearings that nobody attends. Folks don’t want data centers in their town and they’re increasingly successful in chasing developers out.
Outside the bubble of tech the attitude towards AI and everything associated with it has turned quite negative. It’s hard to see that sitting in silicon valley but venturing out into “the real world” it’s hard to ignore.
I'm sure that their citizens who work as traders and investors on Wall Street will see this, acknowledge that there are serious problems with how data centers are being built in other parts of the country, and stop throwing mountains of money at companies that are participating in such schemes.
Don't worry, they'll just build the data centers in NJ and still considered NY 1-20.
Sarcasm aside, I don't really know where they would build data centers in NYS. Electricity rate in northern and western NY is going thru the roof. ADK/Catskill have very sensitive environmental laws. Can't really build in lower hudson as real estate cost would be killer.
Here's a view that I've not seen AI/DC proponents engage in (for example, Carmack's recent pro DC post)
AI is an exciting and promising new tech, much like the web/internet in 90s and smartphones in late 2000s. Back in those times, the tech industry was far, far smaller, tiny in the 90s and maybe like 1/20th of the current size in the late 2000s. Tech companies were not a big part of people's every day lives, so these technologies could be seen as something exciting happening off to the side that you didn't need to engage it if you didn't want to.
Today, Big Tech is absolutely ginormous and huge parts of people's lives are mediated by one of a half dozen companies that together form an interlocking set of barely accountable duopolies. It is this overbearing unescapable structure that is causing the backlash, because many people understand intuitively that this exciting new tech will be leveraged against them in every way possible by this structure. We cannot treat AI as neat new thing to play with, experiment with, find novel uses for, we have to put our guard up and defend against Big Tech and DC opposition is a very easy and straightforward way. DC opposition is also highly compatible with existing NIMBY networks and mindsets, which are bipartisan and widespread. Thus
All that is to say is that it's not the technology, it's that bad people are in power and are weilding it to make your life worse in myriad ways - layoffs, increased electricity rates, slop, etc.
I'll say it again. If these data centers are really going to be so profitable, then it should be easy to pay for closed loop cooling, self-built renewable energy and storage, noise and light mitigation, and still pay taxes. Attempts to dodge those is pure greed and people are right to fight back.
These feels like bribe seeking behavior. Pol sees an industry that likely will have a lot of potential market within the pol's jurisdiction, pol publicly puts a speedbump or roadblock in front of the industry causing the industry to start lobbying pol/pol's friends.
A good solution for this is just the AI companies to cut access to this types of areas. After all AI is just bubble that will pop any second. It obviously have no economic values as the tokenmaxxing fiasco showed. I know it is true because NYTimes wrote on the matter.
A lot of people run production, non-AI servers out of New York data centers. This will be a serious problem for a lot of people, including smaller companies, when they can't expand capacity in New York anymore and prices for what's left start going through the roof. It's not always easy to move servers to other data centers, not everything is an eventually consistent database.
Oregon has a 1-year moratorium on new data centers qualifying for the state's Enterprise Zone (EZ) property tax incentive programs (as of June 5, 2026. We shouldn't be giving tax incentives to these Data Centers. But it looks like this NY moratorium goes way beyond that to actually stopping construction.
I have a family member that wants to ban all data centers and I felt like Daniel Plainview in the milkshake scene showing them the AWS region selector interface, explaining that regional data center bans in deep leftist areas won't move the needle.
Nothing short of a totalitarian one world government can stop the development of AI technology, there's simply too much demand. It's just not happening.
These people should make peace with it sooner than later and propose more reasonable terms like mandating AI companies invest in renewable energy.
Regardless of your personal feelings about AI, this is pretty clumsy regulation that will just cause Tiebout sorting away from NY. If there are negative externalities, tax 'em, use the proceeds for some feel-good social programming, and let the data center builders internalize the costs...
I consider myself pretty YIMBY, but the data center build outs are definitely starting to catch my eye.
On one hand I want to stay YIMBY here, my typical problem with arguments against this stuff is that it looks at the resources as finite. We can/should build more power capacity. Water usage concerns already have solutions. The market should be allowed to do its thing.
On the other hand I think there are looming problems with data centers. Energy is the obvious one because its detrimentally affecting residents who had no part or say in someone gobbling up a public resource. And its cheaper to build the centers that don't recycle their water usage, so some legislation is needed there. A moratorium toward those ends makes a lot of sense to me.
I have one other unfinished thought that maybe a wait-and-see mentality is a good thing right now. We might be approaching peak LLM usage, maybe. If we are nearing a bubble burst, I can see how a state's leadership might want to protect its residents however it can, but I don't totally know if a moratorium on this achieves that or just delays the inevitable.
Mind, I don't know, but normally you put in a business, or factory, etc. the state can tax the economic output of the factory.
The factory builds things, sells things, they tax the sales of those things. Local employees get salaries that can be taxed, etc. Of course, property taxes on the land and improvements.
But how does that work with a datacenter?
If I pay $5 for an EC2 instance that happens to be hosted in, say, Virginia, is that a "sale" from the "Virginia Data Center", or is that sale realized somewhere else?
Of course I don't know how that works with, say, a Ford assembly line in Tennessee, with the car sold in California. Does Tennessee get a piece of that Bronco when it leaves the factory, or is it all just internal, corporate money shifting?
As I understand it, the people -> systems ratio is really low. Large datacenter managed by, perhaps, a 1 or 2 dozen people. Most of the "work" is remote, but there needs some hands on to dust the hardware off once a week. But, it's not your typical ratio of people per sq ft of space as other industries.
Just seeing that if you have this datacenter thats "bringing in" lots and lots of dollars, how does the state and local community get their take of that economic activity?
Some guy floated the idea of putting in a small datacenter in the nearby city and asked for public comment. The next town hall had a huge turnout and multiple people got kicked out for rushing the podium. Meanwhile, people are also protesting and suing to try and stop the nearby solar farm construction. What I'm wondering is why can't we have this level of enthusiasm for actual environmental reform and the transition to clean energy? It almost feels like it is just an anti-progress movement in different clothes.
> What I'm wondering is why can't we have this level of enthusiasm for actual environmental reform and the transition to clean energy?
_O&G industry has entered the chat_
O&G industry is the answer to your question. They have the motive to ensure that their energy production method is dominant and have the funds to send lobbyists to convince/pay off lawmakers/politicians to advance their mission.
I live in NYC and think the politics in the city and state have been a disaster for middle class people and see this as a continuation of that.
The electricity is expensive basically due to the state, so we have to block economically productive projects like data centers because we made our resources artificially scarce. I.e. Indian Point 2 GW Nuclear Site was shut down in 2021, replaced by Natural gas. And then we pay high prices for Natural Gas since we block building of gas pipelines.
NYC is also home to some of the worlds most productive financial and tech companies - it makes tons of sense to have datacenters located close by for latency reasons.
All these laws that block tons of economical construction are made by people who have already "made it" financially and then the class who benefits by having a robust construction, manufacturing, and machining type economy is screwed and we need to turn to destructive measures like rent control.
41 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 59.0 ms ] threadI have trouble understanding why Sanders has decided to be vocal about these, especially as he's been on the right side of the societal debate fence since forever. My guess is that he cares more about what AI is going to do for the common people, and he knows that we need to have this debate early (obviously, technology seems to increase disparity in places like the US). But still I'm not sure he's taking a stab at it in the right way.
For New York state (not city, no Mamdani), it seems like it's a much more pragmatic view: it increases people's costs (energy, water, etc.) and there's too much tax exemption(/evasion) for data centers currently.
We don’t actually have to be moving at breakneck speeds, the AI companies just want you to think we do. A pause to investigate seems warranted.
There are a lot of bankrupt companies and fallen nations that believed this. Complacency will hurt you, but only when you realize it too late.
Outside the bubble of tech the attitude towards AI and everything associated with it has turned quite negative. It’s hard to see that sitting in silicon valley but venturing out into “the real world” it’s hard to ignore.
</sarcasm>
Come on .. this is not worthy of HN, we deserve better;
Sarcasm aside, I don't really know where they would build data centers in NYS. Electricity rate in northern and western NY is going thru the roof. ADK/Catskill have very sensitive environmental laws. Can't really build in lower hudson as real estate cost would be killer.
AI is an exciting and promising new tech, much like the web/internet in 90s and smartphones in late 2000s. Back in those times, the tech industry was far, far smaller, tiny in the 90s and maybe like 1/20th of the current size in the late 2000s. Tech companies were not a big part of people's every day lives, so these technologies could be seen as something exciting happening off to the side that you didn't need to engage it if you didn't want to.
Today, Big Tech is absolutely ginormous and huge parts of people's lives are mediated by one of a half dozen companies that together form an interlocking set of barely accountable duopolies. It is this overbearing unescapable structure that is causing the backlash, because many people understand intuitively that this exciting new tech will be leveraged against them in every way possible by this structure. We cannot treat AI as neat new thing to play with, experiment with, find novel uses for, we have to put our guard up and defend against Big Tech and DC opposition is a very easy and straightforward way. DC opposition is also highly compatible with existing NIMBY networks and mindsets, which are bipartisan and widespread. Thus
All that is to say is that it's not the technology, it's that bad people are in power and are weilding it to make your life worse in myriad ways - layoffs, increased electricity rates, slop, etc.
Texas is physically larger and 'business frienedly' so suspect they will be getting a lot more.
Taylor Sheridan can do a new series where a Ranch owned by a family for many generations is targeted by a Datacentre company.
Nothing short of a totalitarian one world government can stop the development of AI technology, there's simply too much demand. It's just not happening.
These people should make peace with it sooner than later and propose more reasonable terms like mandating AI companies invest in renewable energy.
On one hand I want to stay YIMBY here, my typical problem with arguments against this stuff is that it looks at the resources as finite. We can/should build more power capacity. Water usage concerns already have solutions. The market should be allowed to do its thing.
On the other hand I think there are looming problems with data centers. Energy is the obvious one because its detrimentally affecting residents who had no part or say in someone gobbling up a public resource. And its cheaper to build the centers that don't recycle their water usage, so some legislation is needed there. A moratorium toward those ends makes a lot of sense to me.
I have one other unfinished thought that maybe a wait-and-see mentality is a good thing right now. We might be approaching peak LLM usage, maybe. If we are nearing a bubble burst, I can see how a state's leadership might want to protect its residents however it can, but I don't totally know if a moratorium on this achieves that or just delays the inevitable.
Mind, I don't know, but normally you put in a business, or factory, etc. the state can tax the economic output of the factory.
The factory builds things, sells things, they tax the sales of those things. Local employees get salaries that can be taxed, etc. Of course, property taxes on the land and improvements.
But how does that work with a datacenter?
If I pay $5 for an EC2 instance that happens to be hosted in, say, Virginia, is that a "sale" from the "Virginia Data Center", or is that sale realized somewhere else?
Of course I don't know how that works with, say, a Ford assembly line in Tennessee, with the car sold in California. Does Tennessee get a piece of that Bronco when it leaves the factory, or is it all just internal, corporate money shifting?
As I understand it, the people -> systems ratio is really low. Large datacenter managed by, perhaps, a 1 or 2 dozen people. Most of the "work" is remote, but there needs some hands on to dust the hardware off once a week. But, it's not your typical ratio of people per sq ft of space as other industries.
Just seeing that if you have this datacenter thats "bringing in" lots and lots of dollars, how does the state and local community get their take of that economic activity?
_O&G industry has entered the chat_
O&G industry is the answer to your question. They have the motive to ensure that their energy production method is dominant and have the funds to send lobbyists to convince/pay off lawmakers/politicians to advance their mission.
The electricity is expensive basically due to the state, so we have to block economically productive projects like data centers because we made our resources artificially scarce. I.e. Indian Point 2 GW Nuclear Site was shut down in 2021, replaced by Natural gas. And then we pay high prices for Natural Gas since we block building of gas pipelines.
NYC is also home to some of the worlds most productive financial and tech companies - it makes tons of sense to have datacenters located close by for latency reasons.
All these laws that block tons of economical construction are made by people who have already "made it" financially and then the class who benefits by having a robust construction, manufacturing, and machining type economy is screwed and we need to turn to destructive measures like rent control.