A moratorium seems excessive when the requirements to make a majority of people happy are pretty clear.

The easy ones are:

1. Use energy and water independent of the municipal grid. 2. Don't build so close to homes that they hear the fans.

A lot of people are rightly concerned about water. That was a big problem with older evaporative cooling systems. But, the newer closed-loops systems being built now are much less worrying.

Water usage concerns can be addressed by doing what https://www.boxelderstratos.com/ did. That's an extremely controversial site because it's 40,000 acres. How could it be so huge? Because that's how much land they had to buy to be a net reduction in water table use compared to the previous owners. It's not a warehouse the size of San Francisco!

A lot of people are rightly concerned about their electricity bill. But, what I'm seeing is that new large datacenters are opting to generate energy on-site using huge amounts of natural gas. That's obviously also very bad because of CO2. But, it doesn't affect your electricity bill nearly as much.

Using the Stratos project as the example again, there's a lot of outrage about how it will "Use 9GW! That's more than double Utah grid capacity all by itself!" But, it's not on the grid. It's starting with 1.5GW of natural gas from a pre-existing pipeline. That's still hugely problematic. Just not in the way the ragebait implies. They claim they are going to build up a mix of gas and solar after launch. But, we'll see how that goes...

If there was regulation requiring them to build up with green energy, regulation with teeth, Stratos would not be nearly so controversial. The water is covered, the energy is off the grid, it's far from any residents, the only concern left is the tremendous amounts of CO2 to be produced. To be clear, Utah already has had several non-datacenter sites producing that much CO2 for a long time now. But, it's not great to add another one.

My point is that if New York put in place a list of reasonable requirements for building and actually enforced them, then a supermajority of residents would be OK with datacenter build-outs. Of course, a minority of folks are so enraged that they want to see all datacenters burned down. But, you can't please everyone.