End the Moratorium: Why data centres are the Trojan horse for climate infrastructure.

Up to 90% of AI compute costs are spent on inference rather than training (Clarifai, 2025), and 75% of AI workloads are expected to be inference workloads by 2030 (Brookfield, Building the Backbone of AI, 2025). Almost everything being built and fought over is still a training campus: centralised, thirsty, and sized well past the point where the system starts pushing back. New York's moratorium pauses state permits for sites drawing 20MW or more (Executive Order No. 62, 14 July 2026). Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory puts the median wait from interconnection request to agreement at around 30 months for projects above 20MW, compared with 15 months for those below it (Queued Up: 2026 Edition). Both the permit and the plug now say the same number. Here's the part nobody's arguing about. The technology sector already accounts for more than 68% of US renewable procurement deals (Deloitte, 2024), which makes data centres the largest anchor offtaker clean power has ever had. Nearly all the electricity a data centre draws comes back out as heat, and most of it gets thrown away. Hyperscale sites vent below 40°C, which is useless to anybody. Modular inference sites run 50 to 70°C, hot enough to heat the building next door (Sciences Po PSIA, 2025). Built smaller and closer, the same asset becomes anchor demand for renewables, a buyer for green steel and low-carbon cement, a flexible load the grid can lean on, and a heat source for the neighbourhood. That's the Trojan horse, and it needs binding community benefit agreements signed before the permit rather than promised after it (Good Jobs First, 2025). Join us to dissect the argument. A curated aperitivo with Opna cocktails, a panel with a data centre operator and renewable infrastructure guests, and a room built for the people who rarely share a table: operators and developers, equipment makers and capital, plus the grid and policy voices who set the rules. 5.30pm to 9.00pm, Tuesday 22 September.