New York’s Data Center Moratorium Shows the Continuing Power of America’s Stagnationist Activist Groups | American Enterprise Institute
Are orbital data centers possible? We might have another data point to help answer that question after today’s scheduled SpaceX Starship launch. The newly public company is currently the only player with a viable path to building space-based infrastructure. And if you’re imagining a massive AI data center build-out in space, you’re also assuming lots of successful Starship launches to deploy a vast number of satellites—perhaps a dozen a day by decade’s end.
But even if this space-based scheme is technically and economically viable—and it very well might be—a need to resort to it would say something discouraging, even alarming, about America’s seriousness as a nation. Namely, that we are unable, as we have been for a half century, to sufficiently overcome the forces of Down Wing anti-progress and stagnation—NIMBYs, radical environmentalists, or simply ideological degrowthers—to solve big problems, such as the scarcity of clean energy (which relates direct to the current data center controversy) and housing.
It’s quite plausible New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s decision to effectively ban construction of large data centers for up to a year will give considerable encouragement to those wishing to replicate the action elsewhere, or even go beyond it. As noted in Heatmap News, the first-in-the-nation statewide moratorium failed to satisfy some New York City progressive activists who wanted the governor to go much further: “The New York City chapter of the Sunrise Movement and other left-wing organizations, for instance, posted an Instagram carousel that said: ‘The dream isn’t better data centers. The dream is no data centers at all.’”
Clearly the anti-data center movement is gaining ground, and that was true even before the New York permitting pause. As the bank JPMorgan explained in a note last month, “Data center buildout is shifting from an engineering-and-real-estate problem to a political-economy problem: who gets power, who pays for upgrades, and who tolerates the local impacts.”
Despite all the talk about the escalating power needs of AI infrastructure, it’s now obvious that AI optimists have been underpricing the social license issue. Specifically, how hard those aforementioned Down Wing forces will fight to keep their dominant position by exaggerating issues of electricity prices and water usage as their vectors. For these activists, the real issue is their dislike of techno-capitalism, as much as it is disdain for nuclear-powered AI data centers. Even if these data centers are all powered by small modular nuclear reactors and recycle all their water, the activist opposition will continue—perhaps even into orbit.
