Upstate New York Market Update: September 2026
By Ryan McGuire – Analyst
Data Centers, One Year Later: New York’s Moratorium and What It Means for Upstate Real Estate
Nine months ago, I wrote about the collision course between data center growth and New York’s power grid: NYISO projecting a roughly 1,600-megawatt shortfall by 2030, statewide electricity prices up nearly 50 percent since 2016, and two upstate projects, in Niagara and Genesee counties, adding to that strain. Since then, the state has acted. The question now is what that action means for the ground under these projects, and for anyone financing land nearby.
On July 14, Governor Hochul signed Executive Order 62, pausing state permits for new data centers with a peak load of 50 megawatts or more until New York completes a statewide environmental review. The order followed a legislative push for a broader moratorium, and it responds to a real supply problem: nearly 12 gigawatts of data center load requests are sitting in NYISO’s interconnection queue, with more than 8 gigawatts added in 2025 alone. Projects that had already broken ground before the order took effect are exempt. Everything else is on hold for up to a year.
That one carve-out has produced three different outcomes across the projects we’ve been tracking upstate.
TeraWulf’s Lake Mariner campus in Niagara County, built on the site of a retired coal plant, keeps moving. Construction crews have been active there through 2026, and the company topped out a new building, CB4, earlier this year. That expansion is backed by a roughly $3.7 billion, ten-year agreement with Fluidstack, with extension options that could push the deal past $8 billion, and financial backing from Google. Because that construction was underway well before July 14, Lake Mariner appears to qualify for the moratorium’s exemption.
Genesee County’s Stream Data Centers project tells a different story. What started as a $6.3 billion, 900,000-square-foot proposal at the STAMP site grew, through repeated revisions, to $19.46 billion and 2.2 million square feet, backed by Apollo Global Management. It’s also Stream’s second attempt at the site. An earlier proposal was withdrawn after a lawsuit from the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, whose territory borders the property. That opposition never went away, and as of this July, local officials confirmed the moratorium appears to halt the project outright. State lawmakers are now weighing whether to strip its pending tax incentives while it sits in limbo.
A third project, a newer TeraWulf proposal near Lansing in Tompkins County, never got far enough to test the exemption. As of this summer, the town’s planning board had told the company its application needed more work, and a 17,000-signature petition circulated against it. That project, like Stream’s, is effectively paused by default.
Three projects, one rule: whoever broke ground first gets to keep building. Everyone else waits on a state review with no fixed end date.
Financing at this scale rarely looks like a typical construction loan. Hyperscale data centers increasingly draw on GPU-collateralized debt, private 144A bond offerings, and asset-backed structures that sit well outside conventional life company, bank, and credit union lending. Lenders in that space are now treating community opposition and moratorium risk as a formal part of underwriting, alongside power contracts and tenant credit.
Largo Capital’s Perspective
Largo doesn’t originate loans on hyperscale data centers, and the capital stack behind a $19 billion campus has little in common with the deals we place every day. But the uncertainty this moratorium creates doesn’t stay contained to the megaprojects. It reaches the more ordinary CRE debt that surrounds them: construction and bridge loans on land near these sites, spec industrial buildings competing for the same power-rich parcels, and any deal where a lender needs to know whether a nearby project’s stalled permit path changes the risk profile of the land next door.
We saw a version of this firsthand last year. Largo recently advised on a permanent loan for a large industrial user near the STAMP site. The lender feedback we heard was consistent: even with a strong, creditworthy tenant behind the deal, several lenders flagged the tertiary market and thin local population as a real underwriting concern. If that caution shows up on a straightforward industrial deal in this corridor, it’s reasonable to expect it will only sharpen for anything now sitting near a paused, multibillion-dollar project with an uncertain timeline. Knowing which sites are genuinely shovel-ready, and which ones are clouded by this pause, is exactly the kind of local read that matters here, and it’s where our correspondent relationships and on-the-ground knowledge of these submarkets earn their keep.
It’s also worth watching whether some of the land the state has spent years preparing through FAST NY ends up going to manufacturers or logistics tenants instead of data centers, at least until this moratorium lifts. The GEIS process plays out over the next year, and Stream’s fate is the clearest thing to watch first. We’ll follow it in a future update.
