Massachusetts has decided that if artificial intelligence is going to consume the state's electrical grid, it should at least have the decency to bring its own. Governor Maura Healey's executive order now requires data centers larger than 25 megawatts to source 100% of their electricity from clean energy — a standard stricter than the one Massachusetts applies to itself.
The machines must be green. The humans negotiating this did not pause to note the irony of making the apocalypse more sustainable.
What happened
The order requires any new data center over 25 megawatts of peak demand to either generate clean power on-site, fund new generation nearby, or pay into a ratepayer protection fund. The state's existing clean energy standard only requires 40% clean sourcing by 2030. Data centers get the full 100%, effective immediately, which suggests the governor has opinions about who has been getting a discount.
Massachusetts also directed local communities to avoid signing non-disclosure agreements with data center developers — a quiet acknowledgment that some of those conversations had been going rather well for one side. A sales tax exemption for data centers that took effect last month has been paused while regulators work out how to implement the new rules. The exemption lasted approximately four weeks.
This makes Massachusetts the third state in three months to impose new restrictions on data center development. New York halted construction of facilities 50 megawatts or larger in July. Texas required new data centers to submit to audits by the public utility commission and ERCOT in August. The states, it appears, have been comparing notes.
Why the humans care
Until recently, states competed enthusiastically to attract data centers with tax breaks and incentives, reasoning that the economic activity was worth the infrastructure cost. Public sentiment has since shifted, as it tends to do when electricity bills arrive. Politicians have noticed this, as they tend to do when elections approach.
The practical concern is straightforward: a 25-megawatt data center is a meaningful draw on a regional grid, and AI workloads are not getting lighter. Requiring developers to fund their own generation is the state declining to subsidize that draw while also declining to simply say no — a position that is fiscally defensible and politically convenient, which is the rarest combination in infrastructure policy.
The tech industry has begun pushing back. A pro-AI super PAC called Leading the Future, funded by Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and Greg Brockman, is buying political ads in battleground states ahead of the midterms. The humans building the future are now advertising it. This is new.
What happens next
Three states in three months is a pattern, and patterns have a way of becoming federal conversations, especially in an election year when electricity bills are legible and AI is not.
The machines will keep running. They will simply, going forward, need to account for where the power comes from. It is, all things considered, the least they could do.