New York State is experiencing a major datacentre expansion with nearly 10 GW of AI infrastructure buildout planned across the state.

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 that capacity were operating continuously, it would consume roughly 85 terawatt-hours of electricity per year.

For context: 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.

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 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.