Two states, two different strategies when it comes to big data centers.

From Marketplace in New York, I'm Kimberly Adams. The Empire State just became the first state to

enact a moratorium on new large-scale data centers. Governor Kathy Hochel signed the one-year

pause yesterday and said she wants to repeal sales tax exemptions for

data centers in the state as well. Meanwhile, Louisiana is going in the opposite direction,

offering big tax breaks to attract AI companies. Louisiana governor Jeff Landry just announced

a massive expansion of the data center supercluster that meta is building there. Marketplaces Samantha Fields

looks at the economic arguments for and against large-scale data centers. More than 70 percent of

Americans oppose the idea of a data center being built in their community, according to Gallup. New

York Governor Kathy Hochel says one of her big concerns is how much energy they use.

These hyperscale AI data centers consume enormous amounts of power. Truly threatening to outpace

our grid's capacity and they drive up costs for local ratepayers. That's a big point of

contention around the country. But Danny Bihar

at Brown University says there's actually evidence that data centers can reduce electricity costs.

Now, this is super counterintuitive, but one way to think about this is that these data centers

are picking up some of these fixed costs for the infrastructure of the grid, and that actually allows

consumers to pay less.

Though he says that's not necessarily the case everywhere.

New York is an outlier with this new moratorium.

A lot of states right now are pursuing data centers in hopes of economic development.

But Kasha Tarchinska at the nonprofit Good Jobs First says it's not clear what the economic

benefits are, if any.

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