Every data center, chip fab, and gigawatt-scale industrial project in New York shows up in one public document years before ground breaks: the NYISO interconnection queue. It’s the list of everyone formally asking to plug a large load into the state’s grid — and it’s published as a spreadsheet most people in the building trades have never opened.
So we opened it, cleaned it, and turned it into something you can actually use: the New York Data Center & Large-Load Pipeline Tracker — a free, automatically updated view of every active large-load request in the state, sorted by megawatts, with county, grid zone, developer, and study status for each.
What the queue says right now
At launch, the tracker shows 50 active New York projects requesting a combined 13.2 gigawatts of new load. For scale, that’s roughly a third of the state’s record summer peak demand — requested by facilities that mostly don’t exist yet. A few storylines jump out of the data:
- The North Country is the epicenter. St. Lawrence County hosts the two largest requests in the state — 1,935 MW and 860 MW — plus a cluster of former aluminum-plant sites around Massena being remarketed for compute, all chasing low-cost St. Lawrence River hydro.
- Micron’s Clay megafab anchors Central NY with more than 1 GW requested across two phases; first concrete was poured this month.
- The Hudson Valley has a sleeper: a 1,000 MW request in East Fishkill — filed in a town that just adopted a three-year data-center moratorium.
- Only a handful of projects are actually under construction. Most of the queue is still in studies, which is precisely what makes it a forecast rather than a news recap.
Who this is for
We built the tracker for the people who have to act on this pipeline early:
- Developers and site selectors comparing counties, zones, and how crowded the interconnection line already is.
- General contractors and owner’s reps watching where the next mega-projects are forming before RFPs circulate.
- Economic developers and brokers who need the authoritative number for what’s proposed in their county.
- Reporters and analysts covering the collision between this pipeline and Albany — the moratorium bill now on the Governor’s desk, and the PSC’s new proceeding on who pays for grid upgrades.
And, candidly, for ourselves: a project in this queue is one to four years away from bidding out its structured cabling, fiber backbone, security, and DAS/ERRCS scope. The queue is where Division 27/28 demand is visible earliest — reading it is how our network stays ahead of it.
How it stays current
The tracker re-checks NYISO’s official file every week and republishes whenever the source changes (NYISO typically refreshes it monthly). Status labels follow NYISO’s own legend, non-NY rows are excluded, and every figure traces back to the queue itself — methodology and attribution are on the page.
The pipeline is about to get more interesting, not less: a statewide moratorium bill awaits the Governor’s signature, the PSC is rewriting large-load cost rules, and NYISO itself is overhauling how big loads connect. The queue is where all of that will show up first — and now you can watch it.
Related: New York’s data center boom · The proposed NY data-center moratorium · Micron’s first concrete pour in Clay · Data center cabling services