Data Center Moratoriums

As of mid-July 2026, the national picture continues to favor targeted ratepayer- and resource-protection measures over broad statewide moratoriums — but the moratorium idea gained its most significant foothold yet. New York's legislature passed the first-in-the-nation statewide measure, the Responsible Data Center Development Act (S10642/A11560), on June 4, imposing a one-year moratorium on new permits for large (20 MW+) data centers plus separate rate classes and impact studies; as of July 10 Governor Hochul had not signed or vetoed it and said she remains undecided. On the ratepayer front, New Jersey enacted its Data Center Fair Share Act (signed July 7), requiring 50 MW+ facilities to commit to paying at least 85% of projected power costs for a decade, and Virginia ended a months-long budget standoff on June 30 by retaining its data center sales tax exemption while adding a first-of-its-kind $0.011/kWh energy consumption tax (capped at $600M/year). Arizona (June 13) and Illinois (effective July 1) both paused their data center tax incentives, and New Hampshire moved the other direction, enacting an 'off-grid electricity providers' law that eases self-supplied power for data centers. Several high-profile restriction efforts stalled or reversed. Ohio's proposed constitutional amendment to ban data centers over 25 MW failed to qualify for the 2026 ballot, gathering only about 70,000 of the 413,488 signatures required by the July 1 deadline; backers plan to try again in 2027. Michigan legislators reintroduced statewide moratorium bills (HB 5594-5596 and SB 1018-1020) in June alongside a Senate Democratic regulatory package, but none has been enacted and Governor Whitmer continues to call a moratorium 'an automatic non-starter.' Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and South Carolina closed their sessions without passing their data center bills. Local government remained the most active and fastest-moving front. New one-year (or longer) pauses took effect in Seattle (June 9), Spokane (June 23), Broomfield, Colorado (an 18-month pause, July 7), Prince George's County, Maryland (a two-year hyperscale pause, July 7), and Sarasota County, Florida (a hyperscale pause, early July), while Reno extended its moratorium into 2027, Minneapolis gave final approval on June 25, and Jackson County and Springfield, Missouri, McMinnville, Tennessee, Flint, Michigan, Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota, Dodge County, Wisconsin, and four Alabama cities (Leeds, Homewood, Cullman, Fort Payne) all adopted new pauses. Maine communities kept pace as Scarborough, Brunswick, and Warren enacted moratoria after the state override effort failed. Not every measure held: developers filed suit to overturn moratoria in Eagan, Minnesota and Hill County, Texas, and a Pulaski County, Arkansas measure remained unresolved after an earlier vote-count failure. Construction continued to outpace policy, and the pace of mega-project announcements accelerated. Missouri landed two of the year's largest commitments in adjacent Montgomery County sites — a $15 billion Google campus near New Florence and a separate $10 billion Amazon campus — while Microsoft unveiled a roughly 2 GW campus near Pecos, Texas (co-located with a Chevron-built gas plant under a ~$9 billion power deal), broke ground on a 489-acre campus in La Porte, Indiana, and completed its first Fairwater datacenter in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin ahead of schedule. xAI confirmed an 810,000-square-foot warehouse retrofit in Southaven, Mississippi as part of a $20 billion state pledge, even as the U.S. Department of Justice moved on June 15 to intervene and dismiss the NAACP's Clean Air Act suit over the gas turbines powering its Memphis Colossus 2 site on national-security grounds — a case still unresolved. Meta's $27 billion Hyperion build in Louisiana drew fresh scrutiny after Entergy sought a ~$1.8 billion gas-plant purchase largely attributable to the project, prompting Governor Landry to sign a June 25 executive order shielding utility customers. The overall trajectory points toward incremental ratepayer regulation, a widening wave of local pauses, and mounting utility-cost and environmental litigation — even as frontier AI construction sets new records.