St Lawrence Data and Agricultural Center data center, Massena, New York

ZeroC Data Centers, whose majority owner is Petawatt Holdings, has prepared an industrial site at 417 County Route 42 in Massena, St. Lawrence County, New York, for a future data center. The company won approval in February 2025 for a roughly $30 million substation on the site, but no data center itself has been approved, and the 300 megawatt grid connection the substation was meant to protect was later withdrawn.

Petawatt's plan is to prepare the land and then sell or lease it, not build the data center itself. "They are not going to be the ones building and running the data center. What they're doing is simply doing the site prep so it's ready to pass on to a developer," the company's architect, Brooks Washburn, told the St. Lawrence County Planning Board in January 2025. The site already held two cryptocurrency mining containers, and county planning director Jason Pfotenhauer noted the town's industrial zone did not list crypto mining, utilities or substations as permitted uses, sending the question to the town's Zoning Board of Appeals.

When the Massena Town Planning Board took up the site plan on February 20, 2025, members pressed the company on what the substation was for; board member David Grant said it seemed strange to spend $30 million with no idea what the substation would connect to. Asked the difference between a data center and a crypto mining center, the Petawatt representative answered that "a crypto mining operation is a data center," though he offered to sign an agreement guaranteeing no cryptocurrency mining if the project were approved, and the board approved the substation 4-0.

The Petawatt case pushed Massena to draft a local law allowing data centers in industrial zones, since they were not a permitted use before, and by May 2026 ten data center proposals were under review in the Massena area. The furthest along is a separate proposal, North Country Colocation Services, for three buildings totaling close to 1.5 million square feet next to the former Alcoa East plant, needing about 635 megawatts.

On September 16, 2026, the Massena Town Board voted 3-2 against a six-month moratorium on new data centers after more than an hour of divided public comment, clearing the way for North Country Colocation Services' project to keep moving. "We presently do not know the long-term social, environmental, and political risks of allowing hyperscale data centers into our communities," said Marina Johnson Zafiris of Akwesasne, who led the push for a pause; Fire Chief Tom Millar argued the other side, "we gotta get jobs here, so the fire department, the rescue squad, can flourish again."

New York State has its own moratorium on new data centers statewide, from July 14, 2026 to July 14, 2027, which covers this site along with the rest of the state. For now, only the substation at 417 County Route 42 is approved; no developer has taken over the site to build a data center there, and the grid request tied to it has lapsed.