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New York holds the only statewide data centre pause a site plan must obey today
No state bans data centres, and New York's freeze, triggered at 1 MW of peak demand, is the only statewide one in force. Of the 15 states with named moratorium bills, six are already dead and two of the live ones end on someone else's timetable.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Mashable's tally, dated Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2026, finds no data centre bans in any of the 50 states, although some local municipalities and governments have imposed pauses of their own.
- New York passed AB 10141 and SB 9144 in June, enacting a one-year permit freeze plus strict energy efficiency standards on any data centre with peak demand of 1 megawatt or more.
- Legislation to ban or temporarily pause data centre construction has been introduced in 16 states so far, among them Delaware, Maine, South Dakota and South Carolina.
- Six of the measures itemised in the tally are already dead, five of them having failed in committee or at the end of session and one having been vetoed by the governor.
- The Trump administration has warned that "anti-innovation states" like New York lack the legal authority to enact some types of AI regulations.
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Why it matters
- constraint Outside New York there is no statewide rule to anchor a delay allowance to, so siting risk in the other 49 states has to be priced as the odds a bill moves, and every reviewer gets to argue the number.
- exposure A trigger set at 1 megawatt of peak demand puts enterprise rooms and single-hall colocation inside the same freeze as the campuses that drew the opposition.
- decision Two live bills would lift only when a third party finishes something. A capacity planner gets no restart month to put against those states, and the choice there is waiting or moving the load.
- precedent A veto over one missing project exemption tells the next developer where the leverage sits: the carve-out list, negotiated before the floor vote rather than after it.
Governor Kathy Hochul's July executive order stops at hyperscale development [5]. The 1 MW trigger in the June statute sits far lower, so the freeze written into New York law takes in enterprise rooms and single-hall colocation sites that nobody was picketing [3].
Mashable itemises measures in 15 states, one short of the 16 it counts as having introduced legislation [1]. Six are reported as failed or vetoed, New York's passed, and the remaining eight are described as introduced with no outcome yet [4]. Read the eight for their end condition. Six end on a calendar: Delaware's SB 353 in January 2027 [7], Michigan's HB 5594 and HB 5595 in April 2027 [11], Georgia's HB 1059 in December 2028 [8], Vermont's S 205 in 2030 [19], New Jersey's AB 5482 after six months [14], Pennsylvania's SB 1359 and HB 2533 after three years [16]. The Pennsylvania bills would also let municipalities prohibit data centres outright [16].
Two do not have a month in them. South Carolina's H 5526 would forbid local approval until the legislature adopts a "comprehensive oversight and approval process" [17]. Virginia's HB 1515 would hold final approval, permits and rezoning by local governments until grid interconnection requests are fulfilled [20].
Maine shows how one of these gets settled. LD 307 would have paused large-scale builds until November 2027 and had bipartisan support in both chambers, and Governor Janet Mills vetoed it because it did not exempt a specific project [9]. The bills that died did so in ordinary ways: Maryland's HB 120 failed in committee, Minnesota's HB 4888 and SB 4298 ran out of session, and New Hampshire's HB 1265, Oklahoma's SB 1488 and South Dakota's SB 232 all failed [10][12][13][15][18].
Mashable cites a New York Times/Sienna survey finding that 61 percent of Americans oppose new construction [2]. That figure bears on how many bills arrive next session. Which ones survive committee is a separate question, and Minnesota's would have lifted only when the Public Utility Commission delivered a report on data centre development in the state [12].
For each state where you hold land, two things sort the exposure. The first is whether the restriction is law or a bill; the second is whether it ends on a date or on work someone else has to finish. Law plus date is a delay you can budget, and today it is New York, one year. Bill plus date is a probability you discount against a committee calendar. Bill plus condition is a schedule that runs on someone else's work, and it currently holds South Carolina and Virginia [4].
What to watch
- Whether Delaware's SB 353 clears committee before January 2027, the date at which its own moratorium would expire.
- Whether the Trump administration acts on its authority warning in a way that tests New York's permit freeze in court.
- Whether any state copies Virginia's drafting and ties a pause to interconnection queues instead of a fixed end date.