October 1, 2026
GOV. MAURA HEALEY stood at the dais of the state House of Representatives and pledged to go big on artificial intelligence. And she explicitly acknowledged the energy costs that could come with that.
“AI is where the internet was 30 years ago, and it’s going to change everything,” she said. “States will either help steer AI’s impact, or they will struggle to keep pace.”
A recently signed climate law would speed the permitting and siting process for clean energy, Healey said. “We are building new homes, labs, data centers, and manufacturing plants,” she said. “We need this power, and we’re going to go get it.”
It was mid-January 2025, still on the early end of what would become a surging bipartisan backlash against the core infrastructure supporting the AI boom — data centers. Donald Trump would return to office just days later, almost immediately signing the first of a series of executive orders aimed at rolling back the clock on green energy projects like solar and wind.
This week on The Codcast, CommonWealth Beacon reporters Jennifer Smith and Jordan Wolman look at how the Healey administration is trying to juggle the governor’s AI enthusiasm with an energy landscape hitting residents squarely in the pocketbook.
“It makes sense that she’s clearly now trying to thread this needle, trying to sort of have it both ways,” Wolman said. The pitch, he noted, is: “Yes, we can have the competitive, innovative AI economy that the governor wants, while keeping in mind that we don’t want to further exacerbate our energy system [issues].”
Halfway through her first term, Healey was mostly enthusiastic about AI and publicly mild on data centers. In an economic development bill the summer before, the governor touted $100 million for a new AI Hub. But the 2024 bill also included a 20-year sales and use tax exemption for qualified data centers, so “these two things were very much in the worldview at the time,” Smith noted.
There was little attention paid to the tax exemption for about two years, until it went into effect in May 2026 and slammed into a Healey order pausing the exemption less than two months later. Meanwhile, lawsuits roiled around proposed data centers in areas like Lowell. Holyoke became the first Bay State community to vote in a ban on new data centers, even as residents are generally supportive of the longstanding eco-conscious data center there that supports computing from the AI Hub and local universities researchers.
As she announced a new executive order last week, subjecting proposed data center projects to local approval and new green energy regulations before developers can get state permits, Healey was pushed on the tax exemption about-face.
“The sales tax exemption was not my idea,” she said. “You’d have to ask the Legislature why they included it in the economic development bill package. I signed the economic development bill package, but I did not include that sales tax exemption in there.”
The governor’s office declined to elaborate on Healey’s stance at the time she signed the bill, simply referring CommonWealth Beacon back to the comment from Tuesday’s press conference.
“As I’ve seen things, I just didn’t think that it was right for that sales tax exemption to apply in the midst of what we’re dealing with right now,” she said at the event, “which is a lot of concern across communities in Massachusetts in this country about the impact that data centers are having or could have.”
State Sen. Michael Moore, a Democrat representing areas in and around Worcester, filed and then withdrew an amendment to the 2026 economic development bill that would have imposed a one-year moratorium on new data centers in the state.
Moore supported the 2024 bill that included the tax credit, but now, as he’s seen the data center issue play out, he says he feels like the state needs to adapt. He’s not a fan of the governor taking shots at lawmakers on a bill she signed, he told CommonWealth Beacon. “I haven’t heard her say that ‘When the tax credit issue came up, I did not oppose it,’” he said.
But Moore feels vindicated by Healey’s executive order on data centers after Senate leadership blocked his push for more scrutiny of these facilities. Moore said the new rules would help ensure that if a community is weighing the energy, water, sound, and aesthetic tradeoffs that may come with a data center, it “has all the facts — the true facts — on making that decision.”
On Monday morning, Healey put out a statement calling for federal oversight on AI regulation, as leading industry developers openly fret about how rapidly the technology is evolving. She reminded reporters at the recent press conference that “every time you ask a question [of an AI tool], know that you’re consuming energy.”
Thousands of Massachusetts executive branch employees are using a state ChatGPT-partnered AI assistant across every secretariat, a headlong embrace of the AI revolution that just seven months ago both Healey and Moore were touting.
On the episode, Smith and Wolman discuss the data center backlashes (2:00), the intertwined AI and energy question (9:30), and the labor angle into artificial intelligence and data center politics (29:00).
Courtesy of Commonwealth Beacon
