In Massena, a northern New York town built around heavy industry and inexpensive hydroelectric power, the arrival of data center developers has opened an unusually stark debate about the community’s future.
Some residents see an opportunity to replace industries and jobs that disappeared over decades. Former Massena public works superintendent Hassan Fayad told WWNY that the community has struggled economically for years. “We’ve been depressed for many years now,” he said, arguing that a data center could provide a needed “kickstart.”
Others have appeared at town meetings carrying signs reading, “You can’t drink data,” while raising concerns about water, noise, electricity demand and pollution. Former Massena Mayor James Hidy, who supports keeping the door open to development, acknowledged the division. “Not everybody is going to agree,” he told WWNY, urging residents to “listen to both sides.”
The debate is being repeated across New York.
A September 2026 tally by energy-infrastructure tracker Cleanview identifies 28 planned data center projects in New York representing about 9,740 megawatts, or 9.74 gigawatts, of potential new electrical demand. If all of that capacity were operating continuously, it would consume roughly 85 terawatt-hours of electricity per year.
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By comparison, the average New York residential customer used about 571 kilowatt-hours per month in 2024, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. At that rate, 9.74 GW could theoretically supply the annual electricity needs of about 12.4 million New York homes — roughly 1.7 times the number of residential electric customers in the entire state. The comparison is illustrative because data centers do not necessarily operate at their maximum rated capacity every hour of the year. Cleanview currently identifies only 264 MW of operating data-center capacity in New York under its methodology, meaning the proposed pipeline is almost 37 times larger than the operating fleet it tracks.
State figures cast an even wider net. New York officials said in July that nearly 12 GW of data-center load requests had entered the New York Independent System Operator’s interconnection queue, with more than 8 GW arriving in 2025 alone. The surge prompted Gov. Kathy Hochul to impose what Reuters described as the nation’s first statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centers, temporarily stopping certain state environmental permits for facilities of 50 MW or more.
“The bottom line is progress shouldn’t arrive with a higher utility bill, depleted water supply or noise pollution,” Hochul said when announcing the policy, according to the governor’s official transcript.
The question now facing New York is not simply whether AI infrastructure will be built. It is how much of the enormous proposed pipeline is real, where its electricity will come from, and what communities will receive—or give up—in return.
Communities find themselves at the center of the AI buildout
The projects stretch from Long Island and the Hudson Valley to the Canadian border, but many of the largest proposals are concentrated in rural and post-industrial areas of upstate and western New York.
Massena alone had attracted about 10 data center proposals by May, according to WWNY. The most advanced at the time was an expansion proposed by North Country Colocation Services near the former Alcoa East plant, involving roughly 1.5 million square feet and about 635 MW of power.
Patrick Kelly, CEO of the St. Lawrence County Industrial Development Agency, cautioned against treating every proposal as inevitable. “It’s potential or prospective activity,” he said, adding that it did not necessarily mean the projects would go forward.
Farther south, residents of East Fishkill discovered that developer Treetop Companies had placed a proposed 1-GW data center in the state’s grid queue even though no formal data center application had been filed with the town. The project would sit near homes, a daycare and a house of worship.
“What would be the impact on those in such close proximity?” longtime resident Fran Caracappa told the Times Union. The backlash eventually helped lead East Fishkill to adopt a three-year local moratorium on large data centers.
Brookhaven on Long Island adopted an 18-month moratorium of its own. Sonja Urrico, who lives behind a potential data center site in Yaphank, told News 12, “I’m really terrified. And we really need our leaders to take action.”
On Cayuga Lake, residents are fighting TeraWulf’s proposed Lake Hawkeye campus at the site of a former coal-fired power plant in Lansing. The project could ultimately support about 400 MW of gross capacity.
Resident Harold Mills told Spectrum News that his primary local concern is noise. Tompkins County resident Asja Moynihan separately told WBNG, “I feel really strongly that we should not have this data center being built in our community.”
Supporters see another side to the same site. Tompkins County legislator Mike Sigler noted that the former power plant already has major electrical infrastructure. “That’s the big deal,” he told Spectrum. “You have all this infrastructure here already.”
That tension—between reusing old industrial infrastructure and imposing a new industrial-scale burden on nearby residents—is becoming one of the defining features of New York’s data center expansion.
Where will nearly 10 gigawatts of power come from?
There is no single answer because data centers connected to New York’s bulk electric system draw power from the grid rather than from one identifiable generating plant.
New York also has two very different electrical regions.
According to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, roughly 90 percent of electricity produced upstate comes from zero-emission sources, particularly hydroelectric and nuclear generation. Downstate, by contrast, more than 90 percent of electricity production is fossil-fuel based. The U.S. Energy Information Administration identifies natural gas as New York’s largest statewide electricity source.
That helps explain developers’ interest in western and northern New York.
The New York Power Authority’s St. Lawrence-Franklin D. Roosevelt Power Project in Massena has a nameplate capacity of 1,088 MW, while the Niagara Power Project in Lewiston is rated at 3,100 MW. NYPA also makes specific blocks of low-cost hydropower available for economic-development projects, including power from both facilities.
Yet the scale of the proposed data centers shows the limits of relying on existing hydroelectric power alone. The largest project tracked by Cleanview, the proposed St. Lawrence Infrastructure Data Center, is seeking 2,795 MW—more than two-and-a-half times the nameplate capacity of the St. Lawrence-FDR hydroelectric plant if the full requested load were eventually developed.
Existing AI infrastructure is already consuming large quantities of grid power. TeraWulf’s Lake Mariner campus in western New York receives electricity from NYISO’s Zone A grid and has a 90-MW allocation through the New York Power Authority. TeraWulf reported in August that 102 MW of critical IT capacity was already generating revenue there and another 336 MW was under construction.
The state therefore plans to make power availability a condition of future development. Hochul said New York will require large data centers to either provide additional energy themselves or pay more for access to the grid.
That policy is meant to address a central concern: even if a data center is located near hydroelectric or nuclear generation, adding hundreds of megawatts of around-the-clock demand can require new transmission, substations and generation elsewhere on the system.
Most of the proposed projects will not necessarily be built
The nearly 10-GW figure should not be interpreted as 10 GW of inevitable construction.
There is currently no reliable official forecast saying that a specific number of New York’s 28 tracked planned facilities will reach completion.
The distinction between projects requesting power and projects that actually get built is enormous. A May filing by the New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium, citing NYISO’s 2026 planning data, noted that roughly 12.6 GW of large-load projects were in the interconnection queue, while NYISO’s baseline forecast assumed large loads would contribute only about 2.9 GW to winter peak demand by 2040-41. Those large loads include semiconductor manufacturing and other industrial projects as well as data centers.
The filing said the gap reflects the “natural attrition of the development process”—projects can lose financing, customers, land, permits or access to adequate transmission before construction begins.
The New York pipeline already illustrates the difference.
TeraWulf’s Lake Mariner expansion is physically under construction. In Niagara Falls, Blockfusion signed a 15-year anchor lease with AI cloud provider CoreWeave this month, turning that project from a speculative proposal into a development with a named customer.
Others are far less certain. East Fishkill’s 1-GW proposal had not reached the formal local application stage before the town imposed its moratorium. Tonawanda’s proposed 300-MW Riverview Innovation & Technology Campus paused its local review while awaiting information from NYISO and National Grid. TeraWulf says Lake Hawkeye is not currently expected to begin operating until around 2029, subject to permitting and development.
Even in Massena, where officials are actively courting investment, Kelly has stressed that having 10 proposals does not mean 10 data centers will materialize.
The practical outcome is likely to be a much smaller number of projects than the raw queue suggests, but there is not yet enough evidence to put a defensible facility count on it.
Water, noise and pollution become local questions
Environmental impacts vary considerably depending on how a data center is designed.
Cooling is one example. Traditional evaporative systems can consume substantial quantities of water, while closed-loop or air-cooled systems can dramatically reduce direct withdrawals. That means statewide numbers can obscure what residents will experience at an individual site.
At the proposed $19.46 billion Stream Data Centers campus at STAMP in Genesee County, residents have questioned everything from water infrastructure to wildlife and noise.
At a public hearing, Liz Tinelli said local opposition was overwhelming. “The residents of this county … are overwhelmingly against this project,” she told officials, according to Spectrum News.
Nearby resident Amy Perry Brock told the Investigative Post that she did not believe the community needed another massive AI facility. “This area is perfect the way it is,” she said.
Stream disputes many of the environmental concerns. The company says its current design uses closed-loop air cooling, requiring roughly the water use of a small commercial office building, and says it has redesigned the project to eliminate routine diesel backup generation. It projects more than 1,000 construction jobs and at least 120 permanent positions.
In Lansing, TeraWulf has likewise said Lake Hawkeye will not use Cayuga Lake water for data-center cooling and will have a low noise profile. Residents nevertheless remain concerned about noise transmission, runoff and the site’s industrial legacy, including nearby coal-ash areas.
And in Tonawanda, where a $2 billion AI data center has been proposed for the former Tonawanda Coke industrial site, former town engineer Jim Jones said redevelopment should be considered in the context of generations of industrial use along the Niagara River.
“We want to come back from that as healthy as we can,” Jones told WKBW.
The environmental outcome therefore cannot yet be reduced to a single statewide estimate. New York’s current moratorium specifically directs the state to prepare a Generic Environmental Impact Statement examining electricity demand, water use and water quality, air pollution and other effects before its new framework is finalized.
There is also a climate tradeoff. Locating data centers near New York’s upstate hydroelectric and nuclear resources can give them a considerably cleaner electricity mix than projects in heavily fossil-fueled regions. But New York’s executive order acknowledges that adding massive new electrical loads will require additional supply and could complicate the state’s clean-energy goals if that new generation does not remain low-carbon.
New York is big, but other states are building even faster
New York’s proposed data-center buildout is enormous compared with its existing industry, but it remains smaller than several of the country’s most aggressive data-center markets.
Using the same Cleanview methodology, Texas has about 97.9 GW of planned capacity, Virginia 34.8 GW, Ohio 25.1 GW, Pennsylvania 17.9 GW and Arizona 12.8 GW, compared with New York’s 9.74 GW.
Virginia remains the country’s most developed traditional data-center market, with Cleanview tracking more than 17 GW already operating, compared with 264 MW under the same methodology in New York. Texas, meanwhile, has accumulated such an enormous queue of proposed data centers and other large power users that state officials this month halted new state-issued data-center permits while examining grid impacts, according to Reuters.
Virginia also tightened its data-center policies this month, including additional transparency and environmental measures.
New York is therefore not alone in confronting the consequences of AI infrastructure. What makes the state unusual is the speed with which an industry that previously had a comparatively modest physical footprint has begun seeking gigawatts of electricity across communities that, in many cases, have never hosted anything resembling a hyperscale computing campus.
Jobs and tax revenue remain part of the equation
For places that lost factories and industrial employers, the debate is not simply environmental.
Stream says its Genesee County project would produce more than 1,000 construction jobs at peak and more than 120 long-term positions. North Country Colocation has said its Massena expansion could create roughly 200 permanent jobs and make it one of the town’s largest taxpayers.
Those promises matter in communities such as Massena.
According to WWNY, after decades of industrial decline, the town board this month rejected a proposed six-month local moratorium on data centers by a 3-2 vote. More than 20 people spoke beforehand, with residents split between those worried about natural resources and those worried that another economic opportunity could disappear.
Former Mayor Hidy said the decision ultimately belongs with residents after they understand both the benefits and the risks.
“Be civil enough to listen to both sides,” he said.
That may ultimately determine the shape of New York’s data-center boom more than the 9.74-GW headline number.
Some projects already have customers, financing and buildings going up. Others exist largely as electrical requests and development concepts. Over the next year, New York will decide how much power developers must provide, how much infrastructure they must pay for, what environmental standards they must meet and what host communities should receive in exchange.
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