Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey has ordered that any data center drawing more than 25 MW at peak supply its own electricity and show that the power meets the state's clean energy requirements. Her office later clarified how strict that is: 100% of a data center's demand must be covered by clean generation. The state's existing clean energy standard asks the industry at large for at least 40% by 2030. Healey also suspended applications for the data center sales tax exemption, a benefit that took effect one month ago. Massachusetts is the third state in three months to put conditions on data center construction.
Healey's stated preference is that operators generate the power on site. Where that is not possible, the order leaves developers two routes: finance the construction of new generating capacity nearby, or pay into a fund that protects electricity ratepayers.
The order also instructs municipalities to "avoid signing nondisclosure agreements." That clause is easy to skim past and may matter more than the megawatt threshold. It is not a rule about power at all. It is a rule about who in a town learns what a developer is asking for, and when.
The gap between 40% and 100% is where the substance sits. Massachusetts already runs a clean energy standard that ratchets upward year by year, with wind, solar and hydro among the approved sources, and 40% is where it lands in 2030 for everyone else. Data centers are being asked to arrive at 100% now, on their own balance sheet. That is not the state decarbonizing a new industry at the pace it decarbonizes the rest. It is the state declining to let a new industry share the grid's transition at all.
The frozen tax break is the blunter signal. The exemption had been in force for a month. Pausing intake so regulators can write restrictions means the incentive and the backlash arrived in the same year, and the backlash won.
The pattern across states is now visible. In August, Texas Governor Greg Abbott said all new data centers in the state would have to clear reviews by the public utility commission and by the grid operator ERCOT. In July, New York's governor halted construction of new data centers of 50 MW and above.
A few years ago the competition among states was to hand these projects incentives for choosing one address over another. The competition now is to be seen setting terms. Neither posture is really about electricity: the first was economic development theater, the second is a response to residents who have noticed what a campus does to their bills and their skyline, and to politicians who need to show they noticed too. The order Healey signed does both at once — it tightens the rules and it retracts a subsidy that was already law.
What the announcement does not say is how any of this gets tested. There is no stated mechanism for verifying that a campus is genuinely self-supplied, no named auditor for the clean attribute of that power, and nothing about projects already through permitting when the order landed. A 100% requirement is only as strong as the accounting behind it, and the accounting is the part still to be written.
The industry has started to answer the pressure politically rather than technically. Leading the Future, a pro-AI political committee funded by Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and Greg Brockman, is buying ad spots aimed at voters in swing states ahead of the midterms.
Three states have now set three different tests: a regulatory review in Texas, 50 MW in New York, 25 MW in Massachusetts. A developer picking a site is choosing between numbers that change at every state line, and Massachusetts has set the lowest one yet.