New York became the first US state to enact a moratorium on new datacenters on Tuesday.
Governor Kathy Hochul issued an executive order mandating a one-year statewide pause on the large facilities used to power artificial intelligence products, which she signed at a mid-morning press conference.
“As datacenter development threatens to hike up utility bills, deplete our natural resources, and create uncertainty for New Yorkers, it’s my responsibility to take action and lead,” Hochul, a Democrat, said in a statement.
The order will pause the state permitting process for proposed “hyperscale” datacenters, defined as having electrical capacity of more than 50 megawatts, and direct state regulators to create standards focused on environmental impacts, energy demand, water usage and other factors, the governor’s office said.
Yeah! Let’s get rid of ALL data centers! That way, there won’t be any Internet at all!
You do realize that if it weren’t for data centers, you wouldn’t be reading this message or posting to Lemmy, right?
Your local instance might be hosted on some Raspberry Pi somewhere, but your Internet connection itself is going through data centers and relies on data centers all over the world to work.
You wouldn’t even have a working cell phone without data centers.