"This Is a Mistake" - "New York Just Hit the Brakes on the AI Revolution

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
What just happened with New York and data centers, and New York became the first state to come out, impose AI data center ban, and a lot of people are conflicted. And people are saying, wait a minute, am I about to support Hocal for the decision that they're making and where they're going with this? Kathy Hocal imposed a one-year moratorium on new data centers requiring at least 50 megawatts of power, making New York the first state with a state-wide ban. Hocal said hyperscale AI facilities threaten to exceed grid capacity and pass higher electricity costs to residents. New York's average residential power price has increased nearly 68% since 2019, whether that's tied to data centers or not. That's a different story. Data centers have faced grown opposition over their electricity and freshwater consumption with proposed projects, drawn protests in communities, including Lansing and East Fishkill.
Environmental groups and Democratic lawmakers praised the pause, arguing the New York need guarantees that data centers will not raise bills, pollute arrow water, weaken grid reliability. A June Sienna poll found 46% of New Yorkers considered a one-year moratorium beneficial compared to 21% who opposed it, support cross-party lines with Democratic backing it by 37%, points and Republicans by 13%.
14 state legislatures have introduced restrictions on state data centers, construction, but none has enacted a statewide moratorium. Democratic governors in Maine and Virginia have cautioned against similar bans. Tom, is this a good thing or a bad thing and why?

**Tom** (1:39)
This is a bad thing. And I don't understand what Kathy Hochul is talking about. I'm sure she's done some good things. I'll list them here.
Okay, that's the list. Now I'll go to this part of it.
I'm not trying to be funny, but I'm honestly saying, what has Kathy Hochul done for the people of New York in this? I'm going to make one simple comparison. Did the United States of America during the 2020 election was TikTok taking all of, you know what? Oh my gosh, they're taking data from our kids' phones and from us and on family cloud accounts, and TikTok is taking data back to China. Was that a big deal, Pat?
Yeah, TikTok is taking our data back to China. Okay, well, then let's not build data centers here. We'll just use the ones in China. Really? Are you insane? And so she's missing an opportunity here. And the opportunities when we talk about to come forward and to build the infrastructure for the state of New York and to simply do it this way. I brought it up before data centers. You have to build your own electrical infrastructure or contribute to the overbuild and retrofit of ours. Step one, you can put small nukes there. We'll go to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Department of Energy and we'll help you get next generation permits so you can put a small nuke there. And by the way, one condition, if there's a blizzard or something like that, you have to be available to switch your power from your nuke onto the grid so you could help citizens in time of the civil emergency.
Step one. Step two, we got to figure out, how do we get different kinds of cooling? How does the state of New York maybe give some credits to companies that right now, Pat, there are companies right now that are being hatched and venture funded trying to figure out advanced cooling solutions for data centers. You know why? Because if we can make this work and we could sell it to one, we could sell billions and billions and billions of dollars of next generation cooling and use less water. It's all out there. She's missing an opportunity to put the state of New York in a leadership position, but while she's trying to knee-jerk and saying, well, if your power is going up, there's an election coming up. No data centers. Data centers are bad.
Rather than coming back and saying, hey, we're going to put this on the ballot, we want you to vote for it. Data centers and state of New York will be required to build their own power and find alternative cooling within 36 months of launching. And by the way, the decibel rating on the outside of the data center can exceed this. Entrepreneurs, when given constraints, you know what they do? They invent solutions. That's what I think. I think this is a populous move, Pat. And if you're trying to chase more people out of the state, and you're trying, then you make errors on tax. But if you're trying to do things for people staying in the state, this is not the way to do it, especially when we were all freaked out about TikTok taking our data, and now we're going to say, no data center here, here, and here. The data is going to go somewhere, folks. It's going to end up in China.