Santa Fe County, New Mexico voted unanimously on 2 July for an 18-month moratorium that captures any data centre above 1 MW, the lowest threshold this topic has tracked.1 Commissioners had proposed 100 MW and cut it during debate. At one megawatt the freeze catches even a single modest server hall, well below the multi-hundred-megawatt hyperscale campuses that most US freezes target. Seattle's year-long ban, by contrast, was written around big-city load.
Groundwater, not grid cost, drove the vote. Commissioners cited regional water supply and the acequia, the communal irrigation channels that have shared scarce water across northern New Mexico since Spanish colonial rule. That is a different register from the Virginia and Texas fights over who pays for power. Here the objection is that a hyperscale campus and a centuries-old water commons cannot draw from the same shallow aquifer.
Santa Fe drew the bar low enough to matter. A high trigger exempts everything a mid-sized operator or edge provider might build; a one-megawatt trigger exempts almost nothing. The county has effectively closed the door on the whole category rather than the largest offenders within it, and it has done so on water-rights grounds that a wetter jurisdiction could not borrow. Whether other arid counties copy the number will show if this is a local defence or a template.
