On Monday, Bethlehem, New York-based company Plug Power announced that it would be selling land at an industrial park in Western New York to Stream Data Centers.
Then on Tuesday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order imposing an up-to-one-year moratorium on largescale data centers.
The $142 million deal will still move forward, Plug announced on Monday, but the final deadline to close the deal has been moved back to March 31, 2027 due to regulatory issues.
In a video message posted Monday, Plug Power CEO Jose Luis Crespo said he supports regulations that protect the electrical grid and taxpayers, but he came out against the moratorium.
“This isn’t an abstract policy to us. This is home,” Crespo said. “We believe New York can achieve those goals without slowing projects already underway that bring investment and jobs to the communities. To be clear, the New York transaction has not stopped. Stream has already committed more than $21 million to this deal. Now there is more ahead.”
Plug Power expects the deal to bring in more than $80 million in near-term liquidity. The company posted nearly $1.7 billion in losses last year.
Crespo added that his company and Stream are exploring how Plug’s hydrogen power can power data centers, which he called “a potential new avenue for the relationship” between the two businesses.
Plug Power and Stream are also expected to close on an up to $76.5 million deal for land in Texas at the end of the month.
Neither company responded to a request for comment.
Hochul’s executive order has received tepid support from anti-data center activists in the Capital Region, who had called on the governor to sign a more comprehensive one-year moratorium passed by the State Legislature.
No Kings Collective Albany, which has been pushing for data center regulation in the City of Albany, called the order “both a step in the right direction and wildly insufficient” and has demanded that Hochul sign the Legislature’s moratorium into law.
"It’s really just politicians being politicians,” No Kings Collective Albany Co-Facilitator Bryan Paz-Hernandez said in an interview. “They’re going with the executive order because it will upset fewer actors, if you will.”
As previously reported by the New York Public News Network, members of the governor’s team have said that Hochul wanted to act quickly while she reviews the legislature’s moratorium bill.
Editor's note: An earlier version of the headline for this article indicated that Plug Power's sale of land to Stream had already gone through. The sale is still being finalized, and the headline has been updated to reflect this.
