Trump's Truth Social post on Tuesday afternoon had the shape of a jobs alarm. Data centers, he wrote, are 'One of the biggest Driving Forces in the Future for Jobs,' and 'Governor Kathy Hochul, for political reasons, has terminated all Data Centers being built, or to be built, in New York State' [1]. What Hochul actually signed, the day before, was narrower on every count.
On July 14, Hochul signed an executive order creating what her office called the nation's first statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centers - a temporary pause, of up to one year, on new facilities of 50 megawatts or larger, while regulators write environmental and energy standards [2][3]. The order pauses discretionary state permits for those projects; it does not cancel them, and it says the pause 'will be lifted' once the review is done [2].
The claim is wrong in three directions. A pause of up to a year is not a termination. A threshold of 50 megawatts and up covers new hyperscale projects - roughly a dozen potentially affected - not 'all Data Centers.' The order reaches only new construction: nothing already operating or being built is touched [3]. New York, as it happens, has very few data centers to begin with, so there is almost nothing there to 'terminate' [3].
The gap matters because the post turns a one-year permitting pause on a dozen giant projects into a governor killing an industry, and its jobs, out of spite [1]. What the order is - a time-limited environmental review of the largest, most power-hungry facilities, in a state that has barely any - carries none of that charge, which may be why the post described something else [2][3]. Hochul paused new hyperscale permits. She did not terminate all data centers, because there was never an 'all' to terminate [1][3].
