This summer’s biggest AI advancements have sparked a fierce debate in New York, balancing aggressive economic and technological development against growing local anxieties over electricity demands, water depletion, environmental pollution and a lack of public support.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul issued a first-in-the-nation executive order on July 14, imposing an 18-month moratorium on hyperscale AI data centers exceeding 50 megawatts.
“The bottom line is progress shouldn’t arrive with a higher utility bill, depleted water supplies, or noise pollution. So we have no choice but to address these challenges created by these massive facilities,” Gov. Hochul said, referring to the various centers already being built and the massive amounts of natural resources needed, specifically electricity and water, to power these centers.
This executive order will direct state environmental regulators at DEC to temporarily pause the issuance of discretionary permits for data centers using 50 megawatts or more. The pause will give developers a year to design plans which require data centers to generate their own power, pay a premium to use the existing grid or heavily fund local community initiatives.
The Long Island town of Brookhaven held a public meeting to discuss its own moratorium on July 16. Before the meeting, residents already protested the data centers.
This controversy comes from the impact these data centers will have on local communities. Residents fear water shortages, higher electricity prices and increased pollution. Each of these issues play into the complex environmental issues data centers will have in the future.
The town board of Brookhaven voted 6-0, approving the moratorium on new data center applications in order to study grid and water impacts first.
Michael Bowden, the director of development for Wildflower, the company who proposed the data center, says they’ve thought carefully about its impact and kept residents in mind. The company has done an acoustic noise study, establishing the developer will bear all costs instead of taxpayers, while confirming that water is held in a closed-loop system. Not only that, the data center will also bring in thousands of construction jobs and millions of dollars in property taxes.
“The amount of water total that’s needed to fill that system is about 700,000 gallons, which is equivalent to about an Olympic-sized swimming pool,” Bowden said. “So on the grand scheme of water usage, this is very small in comparison to even irrigation for typical uses.”
According to a recent poll from POLITICO, the public’s attitude toward AI, specifically data centers, has grown negative in the last six months. The polls show “41 percent of Americans would oppose a data center being built within three miles of where they live, up from 28 percent in the January survey.” Support has fallen to 24%, signaling a political hurdle for not only the AI industry but leaders across the political spectrum.
The OpenAI-Hugging Face breach is one of the many AI controversies having sparked public concern. Hugging Face, an artificial intelligence and machine learning company, detected the models and released a Security Incident Disclosure detailing their discovery. The models escaped their sandbox testing environment, exploited a software vulnerability and hacked the company in order to cheat in its task to solve ExploitGym.
Soon after the OpenAI-Hugging Face breach broke, federal lawmakers responded by proposing the bipartisan “AI Kill Switch Act,” a bill which mandates that frontier artificial intelligence companies maintain emergency shutdown capabilities to prevent another model from escaping.
Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., spoke about the opposition in data centers and warned his constituents about national security implications of AI infrastructure at Semafor’s World of Work event. Marshall argued decisions of this nature should be made on local levels in government, not on state or federal.
This has already been seen in states like California, Ohio and Utah passing laws requiring AI data center developers to cover their own energy infrastructure costs rather than passing them to local residents.
AI has advanced enough to make it pretty difficult to simply undo its momentum, but now, communities can choose where they want to steer it next. New York State municipalities have the right to make their petitions heard to the town’s board should they be selected to have a data center built. Residents have the right to inquire what kind of plans the data centers have for their electricity and water. Residents have the right to inquire about any environmental risks they’ll have in the area, especially homes living close to data centers.
Featured image: Photo by Geoffrey Moffett on Unsplash
Edited by Abbigail Earl & James Sutton
