Slate Money - What’s A.I. Doing to Our Energy Bills?

Slate News

Slate Podcasts

News Commentary, Politics, News

4.5 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 18 July 2026

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS

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Summary

This week: New York Gov. Kathy Hochul put a statewide moratorium on building A.I. data centers. Felix Salmon, Elizabeth Spiers, and Emily Peck discuss the decision and how the rush to build data centers is driving up energy costs. Then, the hosts explain how a new law–which removes an existing requirement for mobile-home construction–might help the affordable-housing crisis. And finally:what the hell is going on in the South Korean stock market?

In the Slate Plus episode: Banks are making bank.

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Podcast production by Jessamine Molli.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week.
0:17.1	I'm Felix Hammond of Bloomberg. I'm here with Emily Peckyaxios.
0:20.5	Hello.
0:22.9	And Elizabeth Spires is New York Times.
0:29.0	Hello. And we have news. It is not a slow summer week. It is all manner of stuff going on because there's a housing bill that got passed and we're going to talk about that. There is an executive
0:34.3	order by the governor of New York banning data centers, data center construction. We're going
0:40.1	to talk about that. There is a massive arbitrage in the price of SK Heinrich's shares, depending on
0:45.9	whether they're in New York or Seoul. We're going to talk about that. We have a slate plus segment on
0:51.6	bank hernings, which is actually weirdly also a Slate Plus segment on
0:56.4	Freedom Gas. So you should be a Slate Plus member to listen to that. It's a fun show. Stay
1:02.1	tuned. It's all coming up on Slate Money. So let's start with data centers because my home state governor, who's also both of your
1:23.4	home state governors, because we all three live in New York State, just signed a bill into law saying that no data centers can be built in New York State for the next year. Is that correct? Emily, you're looking skeptical.
1:37.3	Was it a bill? No, it's an executive order. Oh, sorry. My bad. She just signed an executive order. She didn't even need the New York State Assembly to do this.
1:45.8	She just unilaterally banned data center construction in New York State for the next year.
1:52.3	And this is one of the few things that a politician can do these days that is popular among both Democrats and Republicans.
1:58.8	It has bipartisan appeal because the electricity bill is too
2:04.0	damn high and we're all blaming data centers for the fact that our electricity bill has gone up
2:10.2	and therefore if we ban data centers, we can fight back at Sam o'women. I'm going to push back on you a little more there.
2:19.4	Okay.
2:19.6	First of all, it's a moratorium of up to one year while a regulatory framework is developed.
2:26.3	And this kind of stuff that they're looking to do is pretty reasonable.
2:29.7	You know, they want to assess the data center energy demand, water and use quality, air quality, and so on.
	...

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