Particle.news
Download on the App Store
41 ARTICLES
·
6d ago

New York Moratorium and Nationwide Protests Deepen Fight Over AI Data Centers

State and federal officials are adopting pledges and new rules to tackle water, grid and ratepayer concerns as industry warns delays could slow U.S. AI buildout.

Image
HAMBURG, GERMANY - JUNE 07: A "Mistral" supercomputer, installed in 2016, at the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ, or Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum) on June 7, 2017 in Hamburg, Germany. The DKRZ provides HPC (high performance computing) and associated services for climate research institutes in Germany. Its high performance computer and storage systems have been specifically selected with respect to climate and Earth system modeling. With a total of 100,000 processor cores, Mistral has a peak performance of 3.6 PetaFLOPS. With a capacity of 54 PBytes, its parallel file system is currently one of the largest in the world. The DKRZ's robot-operated tape archive has currently a capacity of 200 petabytes and allows for long-term archiving of climate simulations such as those carried out with respect to reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (Photo by Morris MacMatzen/Getty Images)

Overview

  • New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed a one-year executive moratorium on new large hyperscale data center permits while regulators develop stronger environmental and ratepayer standards.
  • A coordinated national day of protests organized by HumansFirst took place on Saturday in more than 125 U.S. locations to oppose rapid data center buildouts and demand more local consultation and community benefits.
  • Several governors have joined a Ratepayer Protection Pledge and Congress has introduced a Ratepayer Protection Act to require big data-center customers to shoulder the costs of grid upgrades and related charges.
  • Local opposition centers on concentrated impacts such as high summer electricity peaks, large freshwater use for evaporative cooling, nondisclosure agreements between developers and some local officials, and polling that shows majorities oppose siting centers in their neighborhoods.
  • Reporting of alleged foreign-linked influence in anti–data center campaigns and a federal probe into fundraiser Neville Roy Singham have politicized protests while industry and policy analysts warn permitting slowdowns could delay investment, jobs and U.S. AI infrastructure plans.