The buildout now stops at a permit desk
Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order on 14 July creating the first statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centres in the United States. The Department of Environmental Conservation will not issue discretionary permits that were not already deemed complete, which means projects that had finished their paperwork survive and everything behind them waits.
The pause runs for up to a year while the Department of Public Service develops a Generic Environmental Impact Statement covering energy demand, water use and water quality, and air quality. Empire State Development has been told to publish a Community Investment Framework within 60 days to guide what local authorities can ask for in return. Hyperscale here means the class of facility that typically draws 50 megawatts or more.
Why it matters: for the next twelve months the binding constraint on new capacity in New York is not the chip supply and not the grid. It is a clerk deciding whether an application is complete. That is a different kind of scarcity from the one most capacity plans are built around, and it does not respond to money.
Dublin got here in 2021
None of this is new to anyone who has tried to build in Ireland. From 2021 the grid operator effectively stopped connecting new data centres in the greater Dublin area, because load in the region was pressing against the physical limits of the system and the regulator was unwilling to accept the resulting risk to supply.
That de facto moratorium held for four years. It ended on 12 December 2025, when the Commission for Regulation of Utilities published a policy that told operators exactly what they had to bring with them if they wanted a connection.
Yes, but: a freeze does not reduce the demand for compute. It reroutes it, or it reprices it. Ireland chose to reprice it, and the price is the interesting part.
The exit condition is the real story
Under the Irish policy a data centre seeking a grid connection must install on-site generation or battery storage capable of meeting its full electricity demand, must be able to supply power back to the national grid when the system needs it, and must cover at least 80 percent of its annual demand from new renewable projects, with annual reporting on renewables use and emissions. In plain terms, the building has to arrive with its own power plant and behave like a grid asset rather than a load.
The Dutch version arrived earlier and looks similar in spirit. Amsterdam adopted a siting policy in December 2020 that runs to 2030: growth capped at 670 MVA, a PUE below 1.2, sustainable electricity, and waste heat fed into the city's heating network. Haarlemmermeer next door allows 550 MVA to 2030 and makes no further space available after that.
The bottom line: a moratorium is not a stop, it is a repricing. Every condition attached to the reopening is a cost, and that cost lands in the rate card of whoever rents the rack. If you buy colocation or committed cloud capacity, you are the one who eventually pays for the on-site generation that the permit demanded.
What to ask before you sign for 2027
Ask whether the permit for the specific hall you are being sold is already in hand, or merely expected. Providers sell regions and campuses; regulators approve buildings. A signed contract for capacity in a hall that has not cleared its environmental permit is a forecast, not a supply.
Then ask two follow-ups. Does the quoted price already carry the cost of on-site generation and heat-reuse obligations, or will those appear at renewal once the local rule lands. And what happens if delivery slips by two quarters: who absorbs the cost of the bridge, you or them. Under the EU Energy Efficiency Directive, data centres above 500 kW already report their energy performance to a European database, so the operator can answer these questions precisely if it wants to.
There is a siting consequence too. When permits get hard in one place, projects go where permits are easy, and that changes where your data physically sits. If you have data-residency commitments to customers, stop accepting a region name as an answer and ask for the address.
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