The United States has by far the most data centers of any country in the world, but that growth will slow for least some time in New York state.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D) weighed in on one of the most controversial topics of the modern tech era this week, saying data centers create a high degree of uncertainty for her constituents.
'New York will lead the way.'
Hochul signed an executive order on Tuesday, making her position on the current status of data centers clear.
"As data center development threatens to hike up utility bills, deplete our natural resources, and create uncertainty for New Yorkers, it's my responsibility to take action and lead," the governor said, per Politico.
Hochul and New York will block the construction of any new large data centers for up to one year, which, as reported by Reuters, is classified as any data center using 50 megawatts or more of power.
The purpose is to allow New York state to create the framework surrounding environmental and energy regulation in relation to the data centers.
"New York will lead the way in creating the strongest standards in the nation for data center development, ensuring that when companies succeed because of New York, New Yorkers succeed too," Hochul added.
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At the same time, the state will develop a "community investment framework" that has the stated intention of helping local communities access "economic benefits" that mitigate "potential negative effects" of new data centers.
The framework would create an investment fund that data center developers would put money into to help pay for energy costs and public services. In addition, the data center developers would have to allow labor unions to weigh in on construction, local hiring, and workforce development.
Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, Hochul's Republican counterpart in the gubernatorial election, opposes the statewide moratorium. The Associated Press reported that Blakeman said local governments should be allowed to make deals with companies on their own accord if the projects promise sufficient economic benefits.
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New York has seen significant resistance to data centers in areas like Rockland County, where residents packed the town hall to the rafters in opposition to DataBank's Orangeburg Campus, which is about 25 miles north of Manhattan.
The United States leads the world in data centers, with over 4,400, according to Statista. The second-highest nation is the United Kingdom with over 550, then Germany with more than 520.
However, Cleanview reports there are only about 1,200 operating data centers in the United States, with another 1,700 planned, bringing the total of current and future sites to just under 3,000.
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Medicaid is federally funded and state-run, but the program’s beneficiaries often have the least say in who provides their care and what that care costs.
That’s a built-in flaw. States have every incentive to maximize federal matching funds while federal taxpayers bear much of the cost. The result pits state bureaucrats against Washington’s need to control Medicaid spending — and against taxpayers’ interest in stopping providers, insurers, and contractors from cashing in on weak oversight.
New York’s home-care scandal is not merely a contracting failure. It is a warning about Medicaid’s overall design.
That is why cosmetic Medicaid reforms so often produce more spending, more inefficiency, and more fraud.
Just look at New York.
Democrat Governor Kathy Hochul’s administration botched the reform of its roughly $11 billion Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program, a Medicaid-financed home-care benefit, so badly that federal prosecutors came knocking.
The U.S. Justice Department recently sued the New York State Department of Health and Public Partnerships LLC, the program’s sole fiscal intermediary since 2025. Prosecutors allege that New York’s CDPAP reform, supposedly designed to reduce waste in a billion-dollar program, instead created conditions for an ongoing Medicaid fraud scheme.
Personal care — nonmedical long-term care provided in the homes of elderly and disabled patients — is especially vulnerable to waste and abuse. The reason? It’s difficult to verify that caregivers worked the hours billed or provided the services claimed.
“The service is delivered by unlicensed caregivers in private residences, usually with no on-site supervision,” Bill Hammond of the Empire Center has explained. “The risk is heightened when the aide is a friend or family member of the patient, which is allowed under the popular and rapidly growing [CDPAP].”
New York’s numbers show the scale of the problem.
In 2021, the state employed 138 home-health and personal care aides per 1,000 residents age 65 or older — more than double the national average. New York City employed 236 aides per 1,000 older residents. By 2024, the statewide rate had climbed to 171 aides per 1,000 older residents.
Home care was supposed to reduce New Yorkers’ reliance on nursing homes. Yet the share of elderly New Yorkers living in nursing homes declined more slowly than in almost every other state, while New York’s per capita Medicaid spending on nursing homes remained the highest in the nation and more than double the U.S. average.
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Over the decade leading up to 2025, hundreds of fiscal intermediaries emerged to process payroll for CDPAP lay caregivers and perform other administrative duties. These intermediaries eagerly tapped loosely supervised Medicaid dollars.
Many aggressively advertised the opportunity to become a CDPAP caregiver and get paid by Medicaid to care for a family member — eventually at the same legally mandated minimum pay as professionally trained home-care aides.
That helped fuel what Hammond described as “seemingly bottomless and unchecked demand for a costly Medicaid benefit, which has been rising almost 10 times faster than the growth of the state’s elderly population.”
In 2024, New York passed legislation consolidating CDPAP management under a single statewide contractor. The state awarded that role to PPL.
By then, CDPAP relied on nearly 600 intermediary firms, and enrollment had exploded from roughly 12,000 to more than 250,000 between 2015 and 2023.
By shrinking the bureaucracy, New York lawmakers claimed they would restrain CDPAP’s soaring costs. Once again, they promised greater accountability and hundreds of millions of dollars in savings.
They did not deliver.
According to the Justice Department, the procurement process for “one of the most lucrative contracts for administering a Medicaid program in the nation” was compromised from the beginning. Prosecutors allege that “PPL was preselected as the winner through a sham bid process.”
The transition from hundreds of intermediaries to PPL was also disorderly. An unrealistic timeline, evident to both PPL and the Department of Health, disrupted patient care.
Most important, prosecutors allege that “PPL and New York, without explanation, have disregarded key limits the contract imposed on the revenues and profits PPL was entitled to.” Those limits were “central to the goal of saving hundreds of millions of dollars through the CDPAP transition.”
PPL allegedly “siphoned millions of dollars of Medicaid funding,” with the state Department of Health complicit in the ongoing scheme.
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PPL can be replaced. But another company eager to rent-seek will inevitably take its place unless the incentive structure changes.
As long as federal taxpayers contribute anywhere from $1 to $9 for every $1 New York contributes to fund Medicaid for New Yorkers, state administrations and health officials will remain too complacent about the misuse of taxpayer money.
Any money recovered from this alleged scheme would be dwarfed by Medicaid’s broader improper spending crisis, which may have exceeded $1 trillion over the past decade.
New York’s home-care scandal is not merely a contracting failure. It is a warning about Medicaid’s overall design.
The program rewards states for spending more, obscures responsibility for waste, and leaves taxpayers chasing fraud after the money is gone. Overhauling Medicaid to restore accountability is long overdue.
If a driver is so dangerous that the government needs to electronically control his car, why is he still allowed to drive?
That's the question New York lawmakers don't seem interested in answering.
Today the threshold is 16 violations. Tomorrow it could be 10.
Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) recently signed legislation requiring certain repeat speeding offenders to install GPS-based speed-limiting technology in their vehicles. Under the new law, drivers who rack up 16 or more speed-camera violations within a year can be ordered to install an Intelligent Speed Limiter that prevents their vehicle from exceeding posted speed limits. Drivers who refuse can ultimately lose their vehicle registration.
At first glance, the proposal sounds reasonable. Most Americans agree that chronic reckless drivers should face serious consequences. But the real question is not whether dangerous drivers deserve punishment. The real question is why someone with 16 speeding violations still has driving privileges in the first place.
New York already has speeding laws. It already has fines, insurance penalties, license points, court appearances, and suspension mechanisms. If a driver has accumulated enough violations to be considered such a serious threat that the state now wants to electronically control their vehicle, then why weren't existing laws sufficient to remove that driver from the road?
That question goes directly to the heart of the issue. Rather than addressing the apparent failure of existing enforcement systems, lawmakers have chosen to create an entirely new layer of technology, surveillance, and government oversight. Instead of asking why repeat offenders remain licensed, they're asking the public to accept the idea that government should have a greater role in controlling privately owned vehicles.
That's a significant shift, and it deserves far more scrutiny than it has received.
The legislation relies on Intelligent Speed Assistance technology, commonly referred to as ISA. The system uses GPS data and digital mapping to determine the posted speed limit on a roadway and can prevent a vehicle from exceeding that speed. Unlike traditional enforcement, where a driver is punished after breaking the law, this technology is designed to intervene before the driver can make the decision.
The automotive industry is already moving toward an unprecedented level of connectivity. Modern vehicles collect enormous amounts of information. They receive over-the-air software updates, communicate with manufacturers, monitor driving behavior, and increasingly operate as rolling computers. Consumers have already watched vehicle ownership evolve into something that looks increasingly like a subscription service, with features activated remotely and software determining how products function.
Now government is entering the equation with technology designed to control how a vehicle operates.
That should concern anyone who values personal privacy and consumer rights.
Supporters insist the law applies only to a small group of repeat offenders. That's true today. The problem is that government programs rarely remain confined to their original scope. Nearly every major regulatory program begins with a narrowly defined target. Politicians identify a group that few people are willing to defend, implement a new policy, and assure the public that the measure will be limited. Once the infrastructure exists, however, expanding it becomes significantly easier than creating it.
Today the threshold is 16 violations. Tomorrow it could be 10. Later it could be expanded to fleet vehicles, commercial operators, or other categories of drivers. Once the principle is accepted, the debate shifts from whether government should have this authority to how broadly it should be applied.
The practical questions surrounding this law are equally troubling. GPS technology is useful, but it is not infallible. Speed-limit databases are not always current. Construction zones change. Temporary restrictions appear. Road conditions evolve faster than mapping systems can update.
What happens when the speed-limit database is wrong? What happens when a roadway has recently changed and the system hasn't been updated? What happens when a driver needs rapid acceleration to avoid an accident?
These are not hypothetical concerns. They are the types of real-world situations automotive engineers consider every day. Yet lawmakers frequently discuss speed-limiting technology as though vehicles operate in a controlled environment where every situation can be anticipated by software. The reality is far more complicated.
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Then there is the issue of fairness.
One of the most overlooked aspects of this legislation is its reliance on camera enforcement. Traditional traffic stops identify the driver. Automated camera systems identify the vehicle. Those are not the same thing. Families share cars. Businesses operate fleets. Vehicles are borrowed, rented, and loaned every day. Yet policymakers continue to build enforcement systems around the vehicle itself rather than the individual behind the wheel.
That distinction matters because accountability should be directed at the person responsible for the behavior, not simply the machine involved.
There is also a financial component that deserves attention. Installation costs for these systems can run into the thousands of dollars, with additional fees for monitoring, maintenance, administration, and compliance. Government officials often frame these costs as penalties for offenders, but every new regulatory program creates opportunities for vendors, contractors, software providers, installers, and administrators.
Whenever government mandates a new technology, there is almost always an industry waiting to benefit from it.
New York is hardly alone in pursuing this approach. Washington State has adopted its own Intelligent Speed Assistance requirements for certain offenders. Virginia and Washington, D.C., have moved in a similar direction, while Illinois lawmakers have advanced proposals involving mandatory speed-limiting technology. What once appeared to be an isolated experiment is rapidly becoming a national trend.
As more states adopt similar programs, lawmakers should answer a basic question: Why create a technological workaround instead of enforcing the penalties already available under existing law?
The answer may be uncomfortable. Suspending licenses removes the driver from the system. Technological monitoring keeps the driver in the system while creating new layers of oversight and control. One approach focuses on accountability. The other focuses on management.
Those are fundamentally different philosophies.
New York's "super speeder" law is being sold as a narrowly targeted safety measure. Maybe that's how it begins. The larger concern is where it ends. Once government gains the authority to electronically regulate how privately owned vehicles operate, future expansions become much easier to justify.
The most important question isn't whether a driver with 16 violations deserves punishment. It's whether Americans are comfortable creating the technological infrastructure that allows government to control how a privately owned vehicle operates.
Today, lawmakers call it a solution for super speeders. Tomorrow, it could become something much broader.
Trump understands the key to a strong economy is cheap, abundant energy — and that wind farms are not cheap, nor do they create much energy.
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