A Governor Just Said No to Every Data Center in the State

Tuesday, September 9, in Nottingham, New Hampshire — population under 5,000 — voters walked into a special town election and passed a 12-month moratorium on data-center development, 1,335 to 143. That is not a close vote. It is closer to a consensus, in a town most of the country has never heard of, about a technology most of the country has never had to vote on (New Hampshire Public Radio).

Nottingham is not, by itself, the story. Over the same two weeks, county and town boards from Georgia to Iowa to Florida did roughly the same thing, for roughly the same reasons — a pattern this desk has tracked all year. What makes this stretch different is what happened one week earlier, in Concord.

The governor asked for the same thing, for the whole state

On September 2, at a meeting of New Hampshire's Executive Council, Governor Kelly Ayotte said she opposes "putting any data center in the state of New Hampshire" and announced she will put a multi-year, statewide data-center moratorium into her next budget proposal (New Hampshire Public Radio). Two weeks earlier, she had already previewed the position: "It does not make sense at all to site a data center in New Hampshire" (New Hampshire Public Radio, August 21).

That is a different instrument than anything New Hampshire's own towns have passed. A budget provision, not a zoning ordinance. Statewide, not one town or one county. And it comes from the state's chief executive — not a planning board reacting to a specific proposal in front of it, but a governor asking to foreclose the category statewide, before most of the state has one.

There is a real gap between "proposed" and "law." Ayotte's plan travels through the budget process, and by her own account wouldn't take effect before July 2027 at the earliest. She has also said a standalone executive order could move faster, but as of this writing none has been signed. Nothing about this is final. What's already true, and already unusual, is that a sitting governor put a blanket prohibition into the conversation as her own position, not as a response to legislators pushing her there.

Why now: a 350-megawatt project on a dead coal plant

The trigger was specific. A hyperscale data center — reported at roughly 350 megawatts — has been informally discussed for the site of Granite Shore Power's former Merrimack Station coal plant in Bow, New Hampshire. No formal application has been filed and no local approval process has begun. Ayotte opposed it anyway, and said her reasoning came from New England's grid operator, not from her own instinct: she said the head of ISO New England told her the region can support "maybe one" facility of that scale, and not one of massive size, before it moves electricity prices for everyone else on the grid (NHPR, August 21).

That detail is worth sitting with. Ayotte is a Republican governor of a state with no income tax, no sales tax, and a business-friendly reputation it has spent decades cultivating. The case she is making publicly is not environmental and not aesthetic. It is a grid economist's case: one large customer can raise the electricity bill for every other customer on the same regional grid, and an independent system operator said so on the record. That argument doesn't need a party affiliation to land, which is part of why it travels.

The wave underneath the headline

Adoptions as reported locally, each linked; county populations from the Census.

New Hampshire's governor didn't invent this pressure — she's responding to a version of it that's now landing in places with no history of fighting data centers. In Chatham County, Georgia, commissioners passed a 155-day moratorium on September 11 on facilities of 10 megawatts or larger, after public backlash over OpenAI's roughly $20 billion project one county over, in Effingham — a project Chatham officials say was negotiated with little public notice. One commissioner put it plainly: the county had no rule addressing "the relationship between residential and this mega, just commercial development" on electricity and water (The Current GA). In Levy County, Florida — no hyperscale project anywhere nearby, no OpenAI neighbor — commissioners passed a one-year moratorium on September 9 covering October 2026 through September 2027, simply to buy time to write rules before one arrives (WCJB).

The throughline: this no longer requires a project in front of the board. Increasingly, the moratorium is the rule, adopted pre-emptively, and the specific project comes later or not at all.

What this means if you're siting a project

The risk calculus most developers run — zoning board, planning commission, county commissioners — was already the wrong altitude for a project sized to draw regional grid attention. New Hampshire is the clearest case yet that a project large enough to show up in an ISO's own capacity conversation can become a governor's issue before it becomes a planning board's, with a state budget cycle, not a local hearing calendar, setting the timeline. That's a different diligence question: not "does the county have an ordinance," but "does this project's size put it inside the range a regional grid operator is already flagging to elected officials."

What this analysis does not tell you

This is a proposal, not a signed order or an enacted budget — New Hampshire's legislature and Ayotte's own final budget language could narrow it, delay it, or drop it entirely, and nothing here should be read as settled law. Ayotte is also on the ballot this cycle, having just come through a September 8 primary; how much of this holds after the election, or survives contact with budget negotiations, isn't something a September announcement can answer. No other governor has followed with a comparable statewide proposal as of this writing, so it isn't yet clear whether New Hampshire is a leading indicator or an outlier. And the county and town actions cited here as context are illustrative, not a count — this piece does not attempt to total how many jurisdictions have acted, only to show that the instrument is spreading and, in at least one state, has now reached the governor's own desk.