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Analyst Earl Lum discusses why New York could provide the template for data-center legislation to come

Driving along the sunny shores of upstate New York’s Cayuga Lake, you can’t help but notice the multiple signs on the waterside. Hyperscalers aren’t welcome here.

That pattern is repeated across America and in much of the rest of the world, with many people protesting data center plans and building projects. Data Center Watch, a project from AI intelligence firm 10a Labs that tracks data center demonstrations around the U.S., reported that protestors “blocked or delayed at least 75 projects nationwide worth about $130 billion from January through March.”

Data Center Map lists more than 4,700 facilities already built and over a 1,000 more planned. 

So far, New York is the only state that has put a temporary state-wide ban on large data center projects, although the  National Conference of State Legislatures has said that 15 states in total are considering similar actions. On July 14, New York Governor Kathy Hochul issued a 1-year statewide moratorium targeting hyperscale data centers using 50 megawatts or more of power.

I have heard that hyperscalers including Amazon, Google and Oracle still plan to build smaller data centers in New York City. Indeed, Google has already built the face of its East Coast data center and carrier hotel at 111 8th Avenue.

Due to high local power costs and space constraints in NYC, however, Google houses its actual AI data centers and server farms in suburban and rural regional campuses rather than inside Manhattan. 

Further upstate, around the town of Ithaca and Lake Cayuga, TeraWulf secured a long-term lease in August 2025 to build a 400 megawatt capacity data center, dubbed Lake Hawkeye, on the site of a former coal-fired power plant. The publicly traded digital infrastructure company had said that this would go into service sometime in 2026 in the initial release.

Many local citizens were outraged by the large scale data center plan. Over 17,000 New York residents and 22,586 people in total have signed an online petition against the data center since June.

Many residents felt that Hochul’s executive order didn’t actually go far enough. As the profusion of signs that are still dotted around the lake last week showed reveals

Local reporting showed that residents had hoped the governor would instead sign legislation placing a one-year moratorium on New York data centers above 20 megawatts, rather than just issuing an executive order.

Certainly TeraWulf executives including CEO Paul B. Prager and chief operating officer Sean Farrell consider this a long-term project. "Lake Hawkeye is a multi-year development, and we're also evaluating on-site power which aligns directly with the Governor's priorities for new generation. A win-win for New York and WULF," Prager said last month.

Many opponents to the Lake Hawkeye data center view the New York ban as temporary hinderance on the advance of the data center on the lake. They worry that the project could drastically raise electricity costs in the area and might deplete the lake for the cooling of the data center.

TeraWulf claims it will not be using lake water for cooling. The company, however, reportedly applied for a renewal on their water withdrawal permit. 

As analyst Earl Lum, president of EJL Wireless, recently suggested, “You can’t put a data center up because you’re using up all our resources,” has already become a rallying call for those against the proliferation of data centers in American life.

That may seem a trifle NIMBY to those that aren’t impacted by data center buildouts ... yet. The fear of both residents and many politicians, however, is that a data center will use a vast amount of water and electricity without creating many jobs in the local region in return.

That is not even taking into account the health and noise concerns that arise from data centers. Data centers are becoming noisier as planners and builders are packing more compute power into them, and the facilities emit both low and high frequencies into the surrounding neighborhoods.

The health concerns are legion, particularly if you live within a mile of a facility, a situation that currently applies to around 4 million Americans.

You may be more at risk of suffering various ailments caused by air pollutants like nitrogen dioxide and other particulate matter. This can be anything from asthma and respiratory infections to Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD).

All of this is going to play into local and national politics as the midterm elections approach.

According to a recent Gallup survey, 70% of registered votes oppose building data centers in their local area. So, this is a bipartisan issue that could put a damper on the intense AI and massive data center hype that Silicon Valley and other tech bros are pushing.

“Is the data center market shifting and the U.S. doesn’t realize it, where you need edge data centers and not 1 gigawatt centers?” Lum asked.

Edge data centers could potentially address many of the concerns that protestors have about the large facilities. These facilities are smaller and generally placed closer to users to reduce lag, so their resource footprint scales down drastically.

At the moment, however, the focus in the industry is largely on the massive hyperscale sites, especially the ones built for cloud and AI.

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Nokia is closing up shop in China at a rapid pace. The company announced plans to cut most ‌of its workforce in mainland China and close sites in ​stages by the end of 2026,

This marks a sweeping retreat from the country after over four decades, as Nokia is feeling much more heat from domestic rivals, Huawei and ZTE. 

In August, the company cut 1,600 jobs as it shuttered an R&D center in Hangzhou. Nokia had 7,200 workers in total on the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan at the end of 2025. 

The South China Morning Post said that most Nokia positions on the mainland will face elimination in stages. Nokia plans to keep only basic after-sales services in China after the shutdown.

Nokia’s business in China has been worsening for some time. Its 2018 annual revenues for the greater China region were around $2.55 billion. By 2025, sales had fallen by 58% to approximately $1.06 billion.

Nokia’s CEO Justin Hotard said that he wanted a response to Chinese vendors like Huawei and ZTE in Europe in September 2025.  He criticized such “high-risk vendors” and questioned why they were free to operate in parts of Europe.

Huawei and ZTE are continuing to compete fiercely in their domestic market. But both Nokia and Ericsson currently have a market share of under 3% in China.

America-forward?

Nokia generates 31% of its global revenue from North America, or around $6.6 billion in net sales. Ericsson’s sales in the region represent a greater share of its total nut. This is due to deals like AT&T’s dropping of Nokia’s RAN in favor of Ericsson.

There are rumors about Nokia moving closer to the Trump administration, with the president’s investment boss, Ben Black, recently making a visit to Finland and said to have dropped in on Nokia.

In June 2026, Trump himself mentioned a $30 million semiconductor testing expansion in Pennsylvania. This is only part of Nokia’s American push.

Much of this is tied up with Nokia’s AI and optical work. The company produces broadband hardware, optical chips and more in the U.S. In November 2025, the company announced a multi-year plan to invest $4 billion in R&D and manufacturing for what CEO refers to as “an AI supercycle.”

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It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that Chinese vendors and operators are way ahead of their Western counterparts in providing 5G wireless networks that serve the needs of robots.

Case in point, the 5G-Advanced network that China Unicom and Huawei provided for this week’s 2nd World Humanoid Robot Games at the Beijing National Speed Skating Oval.

A total of 1,301 competitions across 51 events will see 2,056 humanoid robots from 666 teams from around the world take part in 51 events at the games. These include real-time dancing, table tennis and kick-boxing for the robots, as well as newly added industrial events.

This needs a network that can handle 1 millisecond latency and can support improved uplink, so that robots can stream massive amounts of high-resolution video and sensor data back to the cloud. If the network couldn’t handle this, the robot line dancing would be very, very jittery and the automaton kick-boxing would look more like frozen yoga poses!

To meet these requirements, Huawei said in a release today, that the companies deployed a 100 MHz outdoor network, complemented by a 300 MHz indoor network to support real-time robot telemetry and precise signaling exchange. A 5G network slice combined with carrier isolation keeps end-to-end latency within 30 milliseconds, helping to ensure the precision of multi-robot coordination, obstacle avoidance, and fine-motion control.

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“The 2nd World Humanoid Robot Games have provided a compelling real-world validation of the 5G-A 100 MHz GigaUplink network based on 3.5 GHz 2CC + 2.1 GHz SUL (supplementary uplink) for embodied AI scenarios,” said David Li, president of Huawei’s wireless TDD product line in the release.

“Looking ahead, Huawei will continue to work with China Unicom Beijing to strengthen uplink capabilities and advance spectrum coordination, building multidimensional network capabilities with tiered and differentiated service assurance for multimodal device-to-cloud transmission.”

So, in China at least, 5G-Advanced is shaping up as the network which will actually enable humanoid robots. In the rest of the world, this upgrade to 5G-Advanced and, particularly, enhanced uplink could take a little while. 

This is largely because the Chinese operators moved far sooner to real 5G Standalone (5G SA) networks versus the majority of Western operators, apart from T-Mobile US. Some Western companies are still running their 5G radios on a 4G core. 

Ookla analyst Mike Dano recently noted in his  recent RootMetric’s report that Verizon is moving in that direction in the U.S.

Dano said that Verizon is continuing with its 5G SA deployment nationwide, which enabled the operator to start to use four-channel carrier aggregation across many urban areas. 

“Verizon led the industry in the use of two-carrier aggregation for upload connections, deploying that particular feature across more than half of its C-band samples in metro areas,” the analyst wrote. “A focus on uplink capacity is noteworthy as AI services grow in prominence.”

Robots, as well as AI, will require a similar boost in uplink capacity in order to get bots to operate correctly.