The Briefing · Real · 14 July 2026
New York pauses permits for big data centres
On 14 July 2026 the Governor of New York signed Executive Order No. 62. It tells the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation to hold state permit applications for building or expanding data centres that consume, or can consume, 50 megawatts or more, where the application had not been deemed complete before the Order. The hold lasts until the Department of Public Service, which leads the review, submits its final generic environmental impact statement and findings. The Order gives the reason in numbers: as of May 2026 the state grid operator’s queue held nearly 12 gigawatts (12,000 megawatts) of data-centre load requests, more than 8 gigawatts of them entering in 2025 alone. Permits and approvals from local governments are not covered. The Legislature had passed a bill proposing a one-year pause and a 20 megawatt threshold; the Governor did not act on that bill and issued the Order instead.
This is the fact behind the novel’s Tarrow Point, which is promised for March, then June, then October.