The public backlash against data centers has become a potent political issue across the country, and one battle is playing out just 30 miles north of New York City, where residents are fighting a project that’s moving forward despite a statewide moratorium.
Gov. Kathy Hochul announced the moratorium last month to much fanfare — but the executive order applies only to data centers requiring 50 megawatts of energy or more.
That leaves out projects like one in Rockland County that would use 45 megawatts of energy if a planned expansion goes through. The data center has become the subject of protests, including one outside Orangetown Town Hall on Tuesday.
“We think it has a major environmental impact,” said Dave Rosen, co-founder of the Bi-State Datacenter Crisis Coalition NY/NJ and a leading opponent of the project.
“The biggest issue that we have,” he said, “is that these are next to residential areas and, most importantly, Lake Tappan.”
The data center operator is DataBank, a company that says it’s been a good corporate citizen.
“There is no harm to the environment,” said JP Laqueur, DataBank’s senior vice president of marketing. He says some community concerns, including those regarding water use, are not rooted in the facts.
“They’re not using evaporative cooling. They’re not wasting water,” Laqueur said. “We take no water out of the reservoir. We put no water back in the reservoir.”
This week, the town of Orangetown in Rockland County passed its own data center moratorium, but exempted the DataBank project because it’s already in the approval process — drawing outrage from some residents.
Opponents are now pinning their hopes on legislation sponsored by State Sen. Kristen Gonzalez that would create a moratorium on data centers as small as 20 megawatts. Gonzalez, who represents a district covering parts of Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan, has been on a statewide tour of data center locations, pushing her bill.
The DataBank site — which overlooks Little League fields — connects to Manhattan via high-speed fiber.
“A lot of these large data centers are being proposed near New York City because we have a massive consumer base that are using AI-powered tools,” Gonzalez said. “And that’s why these tech companies are rushing to invest here.”
Gonzalez’s bill passed in June, but Hochul has not committed to signing it, which has made her the target of protesters.
The opposition is also driven by concerns over artificial intelligence, but Databank says its data centers overwhelmingly support other services like banking, healthcare and even government systems.
“We’re saying, ‘Not every data center is an AI data center.’ And some of these things we really do rely on for our modern lives, and we’ve got to protect them,” Laqueur said. “And if you want to have a moratorium, you want to have regulation that slows some of this stuff down, great. But let’s be smart about how we go about doing it and not have this knee-jerk reaction.”
Hochul has until the end of the year to decide whether to sign or veto Gonzalez’s bill.
