New York has imposed the country's first statewide moratorium on new large-scale data center construction. Bills to freeze or restrict data center development have surfaced in statehouses from Maine to Georgia. For Chris Crosby, CEO of Compass Datacenters — a post he has held since 2011 — the legislative reflex is understandable but counterproductive.
'Communities feel taken advantage of, and they're pushing back,' Crosby writes in a Fortune op-ed published Wednesday. 'Frankly, some of that skepticism has been earned.' His concession is deliberate: he acknowledges that some developers treated public engagement as a box to check rather than a commitment to keep, and that elevated standards are now warranted.
But Crosby draws a hard line against moratoriums as a remedy. The infrastructure at stake is not optional, he argues. Data centers power banking, hospital records, emergency communications, cloud services, and AI. 'The question is not whether data centers will be built,' he writes. 'It's who communities can trust to build them.'
His proposed alternative is a uniform accountability framework applied to every developer equally. The standard he outlines is concrete: developers should pay for the substations and transmission infrastructure their projects require rather than passing those costs to ratepayers; they should be transparent about water use; and they should remain accountable long after construction ends. He draws on a commercial real estate analogy — 'Class A' — arguing the designation should cover not just the building's quality but the developer's relationship with the host community.
'Every data center developer that comes to town should sit for the same interview: five questions, drawn from the same standard we hold ourselves to,' Crosby writes. He does not enumerate the five questions explicitly, but frames them around infrastructure cost-sharing, water consumption, noise, setbacks, and long-term responsiveness.
Crosby's company has operated for 15 years under the principle, as he puts it, of building 'like you intend to live next door, not like you're clearing a permit.' He welcomes tougher scrutiny from mayors, governors, or the President — with one condition: 'Just measure every developer with the same yardstick.'
The CEO Times read: The moratorium impulse is a familiar pattern — regulators penalize an entire sector because a subset of participants behaved badly. The result is that capital-intensive, job-creating infrastructure gets frozen while the underlying problem, inconsistent developer accountability, goes unsolved. Crosby's argument is the market-rational one: set a high, transparent, uniform standard, enforce it rigorously, and let developers who cannot meet it self-select out. That approach protects communities, preserves investment, and expands the tax base. Blanket bans do none of those things. They simply export the data center — and the jobs and tax revenue it carries — to a jurisdiction willing to ask the right questions rather than no questions at all. Free enterprise does not require low standards. It requires clear ones.
