Five applications for hyperscale data centers are pending in St. Lawrence County, New York, and Governor Kathy Hochul says powering all of them would use up everything a single new nuclear reactor could generate.
Most governors are competing to land those projects. Hochul stopped taking them, with a one-year moratorium on the large ones, and the governor of Texas followed her lead.
"They have more money than God. They don't need tax breaks that hurt my small farmers and my small towns."
Hochul has run New York for five years, is an attorney by training, and brought Micron's memory-chip plant to Syracuse in what she calls the largest private-sector investment in American history. She is also on a ballot this year against an opponent who wants the data centers built.
I listened to the full interview so you can skip it. 51 minutes of audio, 19 minutes of reading.
Here are the 14 takeaways that matter.
👤 Guest: Kathy Hochul, governor of New York, who took over the office five years ago, is an attorney by training, and has imposed a one-year moratorium on new hyperscale data centers in the state
🎙️ Host: Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge and host of Decoder
📰 Published: 31 August 2026 on The Verge
🔴 YouTube | 🟣 Apple Podcasts | 🔗 Episode page | ⏱️ 51 min | ✅ Time saved: 32 min
Key Takeaways
New York's own social-media law asks more of the platforms than the Meta settlement does
Her evidence that the terms are reasonable is that Meta signed them voluntarily
The state cell-phone ban in schools is 11 months old and the schools like it
Between 75% and 80% of schools surveyed in May reported it positively
She had not considered that the money she sends police could carry surveillance conditions
Told about the Flock chief executive's own complaint, she called it new information and said she would look at it
Five data center applications in one upstate county would absorb a full new nuclear reactor
Thirty applications arrived at once, which is what triggered the moratorium
The moratorium is a negotiating tool for small towns, not a ban on building
She wants a part-time mayor across the table from a hyperscaler to have a template, and cites $143 million of community benefits in South Bend, Indiana
She ran the entire New York rulebook through AI and got thousands of cuts in a month
The first 50 include a $25 fee to take a dog hunting and a $25,000 bond to move a mobile home
The AI labs do not have a marketing problem, and she says the anxiety is about jobs
The people she is hearing from are in New York City, where no data center will ever be built
She told a generation to go into STEM and now says those are the jobs going first
Data centers have scrambled party lines faster than she thought possible
Greg Abbott followed New York on the moratorium; Republican voters in Florida organized against a data center candidate
She has run this play before, on cell towers in her own small town
She made the carriers pay for her outside consultant and post a bond to dismantle the towers later
1. The org chart on a legal pad
Patel opened with the two questions he puts to every guest: how the office is structured, and how decisions get made. Hochul described a governor at the top, a senior leadership team, a secretary to the governor she called the most powerful non-elected position in the state, and one official supervising 45 agencies.
She wrote the structure herself, by hand, in her first weeks in office. Asked whether she used a whiteboard or PowerPoint, she said: "Can I tell you something I'm embarrassed of, since you phrased it that way? I did it on a legal pad."
Five years on, she said she would do it differently: "I'd probably ask Claude or ChatGPT for some recommendations."
Her first week brought a hurricane and she did not know how to declare a disaster, because the head of emergency services had not been hired yet
She said she supplements the permanent staff with issue-specific bodies, naming a Future Works Commission set up to study which workers are most exposed to displacement by AI
Her decision framework is three steps. "Bring in all the information as quickly as possible, pressure-test it, and then go with my gut."
2. NY passed CA on tech jobs
Patel asked whether Mayor Zohran Mamdani's aggressive posture toward billionaires and tech companies — the city recently went after Amazon over its labor practices — has been effective, and whether it emboldens her to regulate harder.
Hochul declined the frame and went to the jobs numbers.
She said New York now leads the country in tech job creation. "I'm really proud that we now have been named the number-one job creator for tech jobs in the country, surpassing California, which has always dominated in this space."
"Five guys in an office right in this building could lead to 500 jobs in a couple of years."
On her own posture she drew a line between regulating and regulating for its own sake. "I don't just take a regulatory approach for the sake of doing it. I don't raise taxes for the sake of doing it."
Her description of the approach she does take: "It's a smart, strategic, more surgical approach to regulations."
Patel noted the observed result of the mayor's approach: the billionaires did not leave, the tech companies are hiring at a rate that beats San Francisco
3. Meta agreed to less than NY
Hochul listed the under-18 rules New York has put in place: no notifications between midnight and 6 a.m., a bar on addictive algorithms aimed at young people, privacy controls set restrictively by default rather than by a parent, age verification, and limits on minors' access to AI chatbots with disclaimers saying the chatbot is not a person.
Patel put the constitutional objection to her: as a law rather than a settlement, most of that would be a speech restriction, and nobody has litigated whether the teen-health case clears the First Amendment.
Her answer was that New York already goes further than Meta agreed to go. She said the state has laws that are more restrictive than some of what Meta signed up to, so the settlement did not win concessions the legislature had not already taken.
She rejected the First Amendment framing outright. "The First Amendment is when the government says that we're limiting your speech. Not having notifications that keep you awake all night when you're a 13-year-old is not restricting your First Amendment right to free speech."
Her analogy for the business model was tobacco: "It's almost like cigarette smoking. The earlier you get them, the longer you're going to keep them hooked."
Asked whether the settlement won her concessions a law could not, she treated Meta's signature as the proof. "The proof is the fact that Meta agreed to this in a settlement."
Patel's objection to that: "Meta's looking out for its corporate interest. I'm looking out for my interests as a citizen."
4. The phone ban is working
New York banned cell phones in schools statewide, and Hochul says the results came back positive. "The survey results from just this past May show anywhere from 75% to 80% of the schools surveyed have been overwhelmingly positive."
The ban took effect the previous September, and she described the behavior change as children playing cards, chess and bingo at lunch and trading baseball cards
She spent about a year on round tables around the state first, and recounted what students told her about the cost of missing a notification — exclusion from plans, comments on their clothes, a photograph circulated around the school
A sixth grader's line is what decided her. She quoted the student as saying: "You've got to save us from ourselves. We can't put these down. We'll be ostracized."
Her framing of the trade-off is delay rather than prohibition: they can get hooked on a device later in life, and the question she asked was why rob them of childhood now
5. Age checks vs anonymity
Patel pressed the consequence that has nothing to do with children: universal age verification means an adult has to show identification to use ordinary websites.
His objection, in full: "I won't be able to use the internet without constantly identifying myself to prove my age."
Hochul did not have an answer and said so. "I'm sure there's a path forward that doesn't require you to do this constantly. I'm not aware that you'd have to do it every single time you participate, every time you go to a site."
"I'm not going to say something without knowing that answer, but it's an interesting point you raise."
She anchored her credibility on what she has brought into the state rather than on the legal argument. "Even Micron, the largest private-sector investment in American history."
"50,000 jobs are happening up in Syracuse because I went after them aggressively." The plant opens in two years and will make memory chips
Her account of why parents want the rules: one mother told her that her husband leaves work at three every afternoon to make sure their bullied son does not kill himself
6. Ghost guns are not speech
New York bars 3D-printed gun parts, and The Verge had reported that week that Cody Wilson — who printed the first 3D-printed gun — released a tool that strips the identifying hashes from gun files so a printer's scanner will not recognize them. Patel called it what it is: "That’s a cat and mouse game. That is a technological arms race."
Hochul's response was that she will keep coming back. "You can tell Cody I will get ahead of him next."
"If we miss the first time, I'll do it the second time and I'll do it the third time because I'm not going to allow this to happen."
On the underlying conduct: "Yeah, it's bad. It sucks. It's wrong."
Patel's technical point is that enforcement has to happen inside the printer, which is a rule about what a machine may render. He raised an open-source e-reader shaped like a gun that people built to see whether it would trip the detector
Hochul said she would assemble outside expertise rather than rely on state staff, because the typical government employee is not proficient in the area
She framed it as a use restriction, not a device ban. She said 3D printers are fine and the illegal thing is an unregistered, unchecked firearm, adding: "This is not the wild west. This is New York. We're going to do it right."
Her claim for the existing regime: "Lowest gun homicide deaths in America."
7. Flock: no state contract
Patel read her the Flock chief executive's own admission — made to The Verge among others — that he was wrong to assume state and local regulation would supply the civil-liberties controls, and that police over-searching the database and tracking ex-girlfriends is a known pattern.
Hochul's first move was to reject the premise that New York deploys the cameras. "The state is not rolling these out. I give money for all kinds of technology. The localities are the ones that decide how they want that spent. I do not have a contract with Flock. That is a mischaracterization."
She said the money goes mainly to police overtime and computers in police vehicles
She drew a distinction between a license plate reader and a Flock camera, objecting to the automatic transmission of data without a person in the loop
Asked directly whether she could attach conditions to that money, she said yes and treated it as a new idea. "That's new information to me, that we should be having restrictions on and how they're using it."
What she said she would ask of Flock's chief executive is a human review step. "It has to be reviewed with human eyes to make a decision on whether or not this has to be forwarded to another law enforcement agency, the FBI or someone's wanted list."
"I don't want Big Brother. I don't want unfettered surveillance of Americans that makes them anxious."
8. Data centers cross parties
Patel's argument is that surveillance and data centers are both scrambling party lines. Hochul agreed and said she welcomes it, describing round tables where she cannot tell Democrats from Republicans because everyone is asking the same questions about noise, disruption and utility bills.
The clearest evidence she offered was a Republican governor copying her. Greg Abbott followed New York's lead on a moratorium covering only hyperscale facilities, not university or hospital data centers
Patel added a second data point: The Verge had reported on Florida voters who organized the Stop the Steal rally saying they would not back Byron Donalds because he is running on data centers
Asked the rude version — that this is just an election year — she said no and pointed at her own side of the ballot. Her opponent embraces data centers, and so does the president, whom Patel quoted calling them money printing machines
"They're the ones on the wrong side of history on this one."
9. 5 data centers, 1 reactor
The moratorium came from volume, not from politics. "We were recently bombarded with 30 applications." That was the moment she asked how much power would be left for everyone else
The arithmetic she ran on one county is the number that decided it. In St. Lawrence County, five applications are pending, and she said the power they would draw is the equivalent of everything one nuclear reactor would generate
"All the work to get one nuclear reactor would be consumed by five data centers in one of my 62 counties."
She is building more nuclear capacity in parallel, with the stated aims of lowering the cost of power and never running short
Her test for whether this is electoral: "If this had come up to me five years ago, I would have done it five years ago."
10. A better deal for towns
Hochul said the point of the year is to arm communities that want the buildings, through what she calls a community investments framework.
The problem she is solving is an asymmetric negotiation. A small-town, possibly part-time mayor with a small economic development staff is sitting across from a hyperscaler, and she said it is not going well
She has been collecting what other towns extracted. "I know that in South Bend, Indiana, the community received $143 million of benefits." Elsewhere she found bonuses for teachers, road money and energy infrastructure
On the subsidies she is blunt. "Why are there tax breaks in the state of New York for a data center?" followed by: "They have more money than God. They don't need tax breaks that hurt my small farmers and my small towns."
She noted the buildings are not going to New York City but to rural, generally Republican areas
Her challenge to the industry is to apply its own product to its own footprint. She said they should ask AI how to build something that uses less energy and less space, and go vertical if that is what it takes — and if vertical costs more, pay more
Patel's reply, on the labs already trying to go up: "They're trying to go vertical. They're trying to go all the way up to space." Hochul: "Maybe the whole thing should go up to space."
Patel raised the obsolescence problem — a seven-mile campus left behind when the technology moves to small modular reactors or somewhere else entirely
11. AI cut the rulebook
Asked what she would want from the hyperscalers, Hochul first put her own record on the table.
She ran every rule, regulation, policy, board and commission in New York State through AI. "I have harnessed AI in the state of New York, in state government in a way no other governor has."
She does not run it herself: asked whether it is her alone with Claude, she said she has smarter people than her who do it
The output was thousands of recommendations in a month. "And in literally a month, I had a list of thousands of recommendations, what would have taken five to 10 years for humans to do."
The first 50 are already announced. "I announced the first 50 already: we saved over a million and a half hours for New York businesses and individuals when it comes to filling out redundant forms."
Her examples of what came out: "There was a $25 fee to take your dog hunting with you." A $25,000 bond to move a mobile home on a highway. A rule requiring special permission for a pregnant woman to work after midnight. Provisions for sending information by telegraph and telegram
Her message to the data center companies was that their communications are the weak point. "Your public relations are dreadful by the way." She added that they arrive like big bullies and think they can run over a small community, though she allowed they are getting smarter and starting to offer community benefits
12. The jobs going are women's
Patel said he thinks the AI labs are wrong about their own predicament: "I don't think they have a marketing problem. They have an attitude problem." A billion people have used ChatGPT and everyone sees AI overviews in Google, so the capabilities are known.
Hochul agreed the benefits are understood, giving the example of photographing a child's bite and asking Claude whether it is a tick or a mosquito.
Her diagnosis is that the buildings are standing in for something else. "The data centers, the hyperscalers, have become the physical manifestation of people's anxiety about the future."
She said her own career advice has aged badly. She spent years telling young people to study science, math, coding and computer science because the jobs would always be there — "Guess what? Those are the jobs that are going first."
On the layoffs she was unusually direct about who they are for. "Don't make a big show about laying off 10,000 people in your company and literally tell them it's because of AI." She said displaced workers have sat in her office and been told AI was the reason
"That was more of a shareholders' play to show your shareholders you're streamlining and saving money, but that's a lot of people's lives you just ruined."
The figure she is being given puts the losses on one group. She said she is told that "81% of the jobs likely to be displaced are held by women", and listed administrative staff, legal secretaries, legal assistants and new lawyers
What she wants from the industry is a curriculum: which skills, which courses, what the state education department should be teaching
13. Loudoun's buyer's remorse
Patel asked the sharpest question of the interview. A decade of attempts to regulate technology directly has failed — there is no federal privacy law, and the First Amendment blocked most social-media regulation. Land use is the one tool that does work. Is stopping data centers the wrong instrument for a problem that is really about labor and employment?
Hochul refused the either-or and said stopping construction is not the goal. "But stopping the data centers is not my objective here. It is to make sure that they do it right for the communities that want it."
The outcomes she wants companies to reach on their own: less space than they asked for, no noise, better shielding
Her evidence is family, not policy. "I'm one of six kids; four of my siblings landed in Loudoun County many years ago when it was all farmland." The data centers are now in the backyards of their homes
The deal soured on a delay, which is the part she wants New York to avoid. Early on the tax base looked like a gift; then the abatements ran out. "Now they're starting to see their utility bills and property taxes go up."
She said there is buyer's remorse among her siblings and many others in what was the test-case community
14. The cell tower precedent
Hochul closed on a fight she had as a local official, and treats it as the template.
Every carrier wanted its own freestanding tower and told her co-location was impossible. She asked whether they could share one tower, or sit on a water tower or a tall building, and was told no each time
She wrote the toughest cell tower law in the state and made the industry fund the expertise used against it. "So I passed the toughest law regulating cell towers in the entire state in my small town, and I forced them to pay me for the ability."
She also required a bond to cover dismantling the towers later, even 50 years out
The outcome was the thing she had been told could not be done. They co-located, and they went on top of water towers
The lesson she draws is that the cheapest option for the company is not the public interest. "We didn't say no to cell phones. We said yes to cell phones. We say yes to AI, but in a way that the companies have to be challenged by the government to do it better because their own profit motives will let them do whatever's cheapest and fastest for them."
Bonus Insights
The Bethlehem Steel closure is the experience underneath her whole position on AI. Her father, grandfather and uncles all worked at the plant near Buffalo, and her parents lived in a trailer park beside it
"In 1982, they picked up and left town. No one thought about the workers, the 20,000 workers in my town that now just lost their livelihoods."
She volunteered that she saved the Buffalo Bills: "We saved the Bills. That's all you need to know. They're not in another state." Patel, a Packers fan, offered another hour on it and on the NFL's antitrust exemption
Her election read is that the data center issue arrived faster than anyone modeled. She said congressional and gubernatorial races in other states are now running on it and that she could not have foreseen it six months ago
"I believe that Democrats will take back the House and the Senate and position themselves to take back the White House, but we have to do it in a smart way that shows that we are attuned to the anxieties of Americans."
She said she would rather talk about trade wars with Canada as well, and Patel left the NFL antitrust question for another episode
Hochul's bottom line is that she is not trying to stop the AI build-out but to make the industry negotiate: "We can do more to shape that, make sure that people understand that's in one sense a necessary evil, but that evil doesn't have to be as evil as it is. Make it less evil, and people will adapt and adjust and understand this."
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Meta and Instagram (The settlement with dozens of states is the news the interview opens on; Hochul says New York's own statutes already ask for more than Meta agreed to)
Flock Safety (The automated camera network whose chief executive told The Verge that regulators failed to supply the civil-liberties controls he assumed they would; Hochul says the state has no contract with the company)
Micron (The memory-chip plant she brought to Syracuse, which she calls the largest private-sector investment in American history and says will open in two years)
Claude and ChatGPT (What she says she would use to draft an org chart today, and what she uses as the consumer example of AI that people already understand)
Amazon (The company New York City recently went after over labor practices — the example Patel used to ask whether the city's posture emboldens the state)
Google (Patel's evidence that AI capability is already widely known rather than under-marketed: AI overviews are in front of everybody all day)
Glock (Her example of the conversion problem — a legally registered pistol and a Lego-sized piece of plastic that turns it into an automatic weapon)
Buffalo Bills (She raised keeping the team in Buffalo twice, unprompted, as a credential)
Books & Resources Mentioned
The Verge on Meta's settlement with 47 states and the list of controls Meta agreed to (The two pieces Patel used to frame the First Amendment objection)
The Verge on New York's SAFE for Kids Act (The state law Hochul says is more restrictive than what Meta signed)
The Verge on Cody Wilson and 3D-printed gun hashes (The story published that week on the tool built to defeat New York's detection requirement, which its author calls Hochulization)
The Verge's interview with Flock's chief executive (Where he says he was wrong to assume the regulatory process would protect civil liberties — the quote Patel put to her)
The Verge on Republican organizers opposing a Florida data center (Patel's evidence for the realignment: Stop the Steal organizers in Hernando County refusing to back Byron Donalds over data centers)
The Texas Tribune on Greg Abbott's data center audit (The Texas move Hochul says followed New York's lead on hyperscale facilities)
If this was worth your time, send it to someone closer to the industry than you are.
Get the latest market chatter as it happens: