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.
Thats not the only solution.
Restricting their total energy and/or pollution budgets (so they dont just build their own terrible power plants) will force them to power with renewable energy AND develop more energy-efficient hardware if they want to keep scaling up the capacity.
I like how “just don’t build any more new datacenters” is not even an option for you guys.
The horse is out of the barn. If they want to build a completely solar powered mega slop farm, I say go for it. The whole thing is either going to die out or get better as long as we don’t just let it consume the planet in the meanwhile.
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.
These datacenters are being built or simply being green lit at a rapid pace. Putting a pause to things may not be the best solution, don’t get me wrong, but it certainly buys some time given the situation.