By Ellis Ward | October 29, 2026
The Order
On July 14, 2026, Governor Kathy Hochul signed Executive Order No. 62, titled "Establishing a Temporary Moratorium on Data Centers in New York While the State Develops Higher Standards for Data Center Development and Benefits Blueprint to Support Localities." The governor's office describes it as the nation's first statewide data center moratorium.
The mechanism is precise and administrative. The Department of Environmental Conservation will not issue new discretionary permits or approvals for the construction or expansion of data centers that "consume or can consume" 50 megawatts or more, but only for applications that were not yet deemed complete by DEC before the order took effect. Applications already deemed complete before July 14 escape the pause entirely. Facilities that support manufacturing, research, education, or the provision of medical care are exempt. A group of facilities on contiguous sites counts as a single data center for purposes of the threshold.
The pause runs until the Department of Public Service finalizes a Generic Environmental Impact Statement. The governor's office says that process will take up to a year. Jones Day's analysis of the order notes that the order's own text states no one-year cap. The GEIS examines energy demand, water use and quality, air quality, disproportionate impacts on disadvantaged communities, and noise. It runs through the Energize NY Development proceeding at the Public Service Commission, Case 26-E-0045, the large-load interconnection reform case opened February 12, 2026. On September 17, 2026, the PSC issued a positive declaration under the State Environmental Quality Review Act and a Draft Scope for the GEIS, with public comments due October 20, 2026.
Energize NY, announced in Hochul's January 13, 2026 State of the State address, is the policy doctrine underneath the order: data centers will either pay more for their energy or supply their own.
What the Order Is Not
The executive order is a narrower instrument than it can appear.
The New York Legislature passed the Responsible Data Center Development Act in June 2026. Both chambers voted on June 4. The bill, sponsored by State Senator Kristen Gonzalez, reaches well beyond what Hochul signed. It would impose a one-year moratorium beginning at 20 megawatts rather than 50. It would require a public hearing in the host community, a DEC environmental impact report, new electric and water rate classes for facilities over 20 megawatts, energy-efficiency goals for facilities over 5 megawatts, a host community benefit program for facilities over 20 megawatts, and labor standards for facilities over 5 megawatts. Hochul did not sign the bill. The executive order followed discussions between the governor and the Legislature and took effect immediately, without waiting for the Legislature to reconvene.
The order also does not touch local government permitting. Towns retain full authority to approve or block projects on their own; the pause binds only DEC's discretionary approvals. That gap has significant practical consequences, running in both directions.
The complete-application exemption is not theoretical. In Massena, in St. Lawrence County, the affiliate NCCS applied in 2020, well before the order. St. Lawrence County Planning Director Jason Pfotenhauer has said the exemption could be legitimate, meaning the largest proposed project in the North Country may never face the pause at all.
The Framework That Arrived During the Pause
Empire State Development, directed by the order to produce a Community Investment Framework within 60 days, released the document in October 2026.
The framework is voluntary. It is a template that localities may use and modify as they see fit, not a regulatory floor. Its central benchmark is a recommended community investment of one million dollars for every megawatt of utility demand. The governor's office's illustrative example is a 50-megawatt data center carrying a recommended $50 million investment level, potentially administered through a locally managed Community Investment Fund.
ESD President Hope Knight offered the stated rationale plainly: data centers "are not major local job generators." The investment menu the framework lays out covers roads, water and sewer, parks, transit, affordable and workforce housing, training and apprenticeships, schools, childcare, broadband, public safety, small business support, and vacant property revitalization. Good Neighbor Commitments address water, noise, lighting, and design and landscaping, with prevailing wages for construction and structured local hiring. The framework advises caution on developer nondisclosure agreements, counseling localities to limit them to material exempt under the Freedom of Information Law, and it calls for early resident engagement and annual reporting after a facility opens on employment, water and utility usage, energy demand, fund contributions, and environmental impacts.
Senator Gonzalez, who applauded the framework's release, offered context from the road: "This summer I visited 13 communities across the state fighting hyperscale data centers, and it was clear that from Brooklyn to Buffalo, communities are looking for real long term investment and a seat at the table."
Hochul, in the release, described the frame around it in terms she had been using since July: "In the absence of federal leadership, someone has to write the rules and New York is leading the way."
Separately, DPS is considering a New York Grid Acceleration Fund that would require data centers to invest in the grid, potentially including clean energy procurement and an insurance pool against speculative large loads, and is considering requiring data centers to fund new clean generation dedicated to their operations. The governor is also pursuing legislation to repeal state sales tax exemptions for large data centers.
The Landscape
The scale of what is proposed in New York takes several different forms depending on how you count it.
Hardware Busters tallied at least 25 proposals in the NYISO interconnection queue totaling roughly 9,340 megawatts, alongside four hyperscale facilities operating and applications pending for 39 more. A Tribune Content Agency count found 38 proposed large projects combining for roughly 11,900 megawatts, described as nearly double the electricity demand of all New York households. The methodologies differ; the figures are not directly comparable.
NYISO's own figures tell a consistent directional story. The large-load interconnection queue grew from six projects totaling 1,045 megawatts in 2022 to 29 projects totaling nearly 6,055 megawatts as of July 2025. NYISO's Power Trends expects more than 2,500 megawatts of additional large-load demand by 2035, including 2,567 megawatts counting semiconductor manufacturing. Forecasters anticipate roughly 2,500 to 4,000 megawatts of queued demand actually reaching the system by 2035. NYISO's 2024 Reliability Needs Assessment assumed roughly 1,200 megawatts of large-load demand could flex at peak, a potential grid benefit if loads can be managed that way. Against all of that: New York's operating base is currently about 264 megawatts, against more than 17 gigawatts operating in Virginia.
Massena
Massena drew roughly 10 data center proposals by May 2026. The most significant involves NYDIG and its affiliate North Country Colocation Services, which propose a 1.5 million square foot, 635-megawatt data center on the former Alcoa East site near the St. Lawrence River, as reported by North Country Public Radio. The site's proximity to the Moses-Saunders hydroelectric dam matters: 635 megawatts represents about 70 percent of the dam's output. NCCS projects roughly 200 permanent jobs and becoming one of the town's largest taxpayers.
The town board voted 3 to 2 against imposing a six-month local moratorium. Former Mayor James Hidy supports development. Former public works superintendent Hassan Fayad has noted years of economic struggle in the town. And, critically, NCCS says it needs no new DEC permits because it applied in 2020, which would place it among the applications exempt from Hochul's order under the complete-application carve-out.
East Fishkill
East Fishkill, in Dutchess County, is the case that put the politics of this issue in sharpest relief. Treetop Companies explored a roughly one-gigawatt campus, more than one million square feet on about 143 acres, on a wooded site near homes, a daycare, and a house of worship. The project surfaced in the state grid queue before any formal town application was filed. Residents protested before Treetop had made a formal approach to the town.
The town is a former IBM semiconductor center; a 460-acre IBM campus operated there for nearly 50 years. One reported comparison put the campus's projected electricity consumption at more than the city of Buffalo uses, a city of about 275,000 people, in a town of about 30,000. Resident and professor Tanya Radford described the stakes in local terms: "We're at this moment where things are happening very quickly, we need to get our ducks in a row and think about the various ways in which datacenters and new energy usage will affect our long-term community cohesiveness, environmental quality, and character."
In late June 2026, the East Fishkill town board adopted a unanimous three-year moratorium on data centers over 20 megawatts, running to July 2029. Reporting in October 2026 indicates Treetop has formally challenged the moratorium. Brookhaven on Long Island followed East Fishkill with an 18-month moratorium of its own.
Niagara County
Niagara County has five operating data center complexes: TeraWulf's Lake Mariner in Somerset, DigiPower X in North Tonawanda, H5 in Lockport, and U.S. Bitcoin and Blockfusion in Niagara Falls. Five more are proposed in Niagara Falls alone.
Lake Mariner has 185 megawatts built, a 250-megawatt allocation drawing mostly on New York Power Authority hydropower, and potential to reach 500 megawatts. In October 2026, TeraWulf won planning approval for additional buildings, including 50-megawatt and 20-megawatt phases. The campus currently mines bitcoin; the company says it may convert to high-performance computing and AI work.
North Tonawanda's DigiPower X facility operates at the former Fortistar gas plant. A November 2024 court ruling required the PSC to complete a Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act review of the plant-sale approval; that ruling was affirmed May 28, 2026, and the review remains incomplete while the facility operates. The company's filed AI and high-performance computing conversion is blocked by the city's own moratorium, imposed in July 2024 and extended around June 2026.
STAMP and Lansing
In Genesee County, Stream Data Centers proposes a $6.3 billion, 250-megawatt campus at the Science and Technology Advanced Manufacturing Park. The project projects closed-loop air cooling designed to use roughly the water of a small commercial office building per day, more than 1,000 construction jobs, and more than 120 long-term positions.
In Lansing, Tompkins County, TeraWulf's proposed Cayuga Data Campus would reach 400 megawatts at the former Cayuga Power Plant site. Hearings drew near-unanimous opposition, followed by zoning battles and lawsuits. The company does not expect operations before roughly 2029.
Also in the pipeline: a proposed data center in Lysander, Onondaga County, from Ranalli Super DC in early planning; IBM's announced quantum computing data center in Poughkeepsie; and Anthropic's announced $50 billion national data center program with Fluidstack, with New York among the first announced locations for custom AI facilities, as reported in January 2026.
The Stakes
Three overlapping conflicts run through this debate, and none of them is fully resolved by a moratorium.
The first is who pays for the grid. Utilities recover infrastructure investment through rates, which means grid upgrades built to serve large new loads get distributed across all customers unless the rules assign those costs specifically to the load that caused them. Case 26-E-0045 is built on the beneficiary-pays principle. JD Supra's analysis of the order notes that as utility bills climbed, data centers became a symbol of the affordability squeeze, and that the governor framed the pause inside an affordability campaign in the run-up to the November 3 election. Acting through executive order let the state move without waiting for the Legislature.
The second is water. Cooling design determines the order of magnitude of consumption. Reported ranges put evaporative cooling systems at hundreds of thousands to millions of gallons per day; closed-loop systems, by contrast, run at roughly 22,000 gallons per day. The GEIS scope covers water use and quality, and the executive order directed an assessment of water withdrawal rules.
The third is jobs. The arithmetic is genuinely complicated. A typical hyperscale facility generates a few dozen permanent positions. Construction phases generate hundreds to more than a thousand jobs per project. In post-industrial towns carrying years of fiscal strain, a major new taxpayer matters in ways that do not show up in permanent headcount. ESD's own framework acknowledges the tension directly, offering the $1 million per megawatt benchmark as a mechanism to translate large infrastructure demand into durable community investment regardless of what the payroll looks like at the ribbon cutting.
The Balance of Interests
The alignment of interests around data centers in New York is neither simple nor stable.
For development: the developers themselves; host-town officials and boards who see tax base and payroll, including Massena's board majority; the county IDA, whose Patrick Kelly cautions that proposals are potential activity, not commitments; and construction labor, which the governor's framework writes in through prevailing wage requirements. The governor's own posture is conditional welcome, framed most directly at the October 6 roundtable in East Fishkill, where she stood with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Representative Pat Ryan and said: "Our job is not to protect the profits of billion-dollar corporations. My job is to protect New Yorkers."
Against or skeptical: host-community residents in Lansing, East Fishkill, and elsewhere, who showed up to hearings before permits were filed; environmental litigants including Earthjustice in the North Tonawanda proceeding; Senator Gonzalez and the bill's sponsors, whose more stringent measure the executive order effectively displaced; Representative Ocasio-Cortez, who has introduced federal legislation for a national moratorium; and industry critics who warn that permitting uncertainty will redirect investment to states that have not paused.
What remains unresolved is the core of it. The GEIS has no fixed deadline; the governor's office says up to a year, and Jones Day notes the order's own text states no cap. The Legislature's bill, which passed both chambers, has never been signed. The tax exemption repeal is a legislative pursuit, not a completed action. The Community Investment Framework is voluntary, its benchmark persuasive rather than binding. The PSC proceedings on cost allocation are ongoing. And the complete-application exemption means some of the largest proposals in the queue may never face the conditions the pause is meant to establish. The order created a pause. What comes after it is still being written.
Sources
- Governor's Community Investment Framework announcement
- Executive Order No. 62
- PSC Draft Scope release
- Jones Day
- NYISO
- North Country Public Radio
- South Shore Press
- Government Technology
- Data Center Dynamics
- JD Supra
- Sue Data Centers (North Tonawanda case record)
- Our earlier coverage: East Fishkill's three-year moratorium
