New York Enacts First Statewide Moratorium on New Hyperscale Data Centers

New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed the nation’s first statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centers this week. Her office cited the massive amounts of water such facilities could require for cooling. The Atlantic reported that U.S.

Data centers used slightly more than 17 billion gallons of water for cooling in 2023. That volume equaled about half a million Americans’ annual collective use and remained less than a tenth of a percent of total U.S. farm water use that year.

A Meta data-center campus under construction in Lebanon, Indiana, could demand 8 million gallons of water per day at peak. City officials there stated that planned upgrades mean nothing to indicate the town will run out of water. In Newton County, Georgia, a local official stated the county just does not have the water for all proposed data centers and must race to improve water-recycling facilities.

Meta’s 2024 indirect water consumption reached 19 billion gallons, 23 times its direct water consumption, with most of that indirect use tied to data centers. A nine-gigawatt data-center facility under construction in Utah will require nearly as much power as New York City upon completion.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated a few months ago that the data-center water issue is totally fake, insane, and has no connection to reality.

Eric Masanet, a sustainability researcher at UC Santa Barbara, stated that researchers do not have the real ground-truth numbers on data-center water use. Shaolei Ren, an AI and sustainability researcher at UC Riverside, stated that data centers can use zero water but may require 10 to 65 percent more electricity.