New York enacts first US statewide AI data-centre moratorium — one-year hyperscale permit pause
Governor Hochul signed an executive order making New York the first US state to pause permitting of new hyperscale data centres (over 50MW) for up to a year, while the Department of Environmental Conservation prepares a cumulative environmental impact assessment. A companion legislative track directs the Public Service Commission to create a separate utility rate class so AI operators pay the full cost of their own grid upgrades rather than passing them to residential ratepayers. The practical signal for anyone deploying at scale: AI compute is now a siting, energy and utility-regulation problem, not just a data-protection one — capacity, permitting timelines and power cost are becoming board-level risks in the jurisdictions hosting the infrastructure. Watch for copycat measures; the article notes a federal AI Data Center Moratorium Act is also in draft.
Source: TechStory
Nigeria forms Joint Technical Coordination Committee to build unified digital/AI framework
Minister Bosun Tijani confirmed Nigeria will hold new digital-platform and AI rules in abeyance until a single harmonised framework exists, and has stood up a Joint Technical Coordination Committee drawing on the NCC, NITDA and NDPC to draft it. This is the constructive follow-through on the early-July postponement rather than a fresh delay — the three agencies whose overlapping mandates created the uncertainty are now being forced to speak with one voice under the Minister. For organisations with Nigerian operations or users, the takeaway is that the regime is being rebuilt to be coherent (and therefore more enforceable) rather than abandoned; the sensible move is to keep governance documentation current so you are ready when the unified rules land, rather than treating the pause as a reprieve.
Source: Broadcast Media Africa
CJEU C-199/24 (Legal Newsdesk Sweden): 'journalistic purposes' GDPR carve-out read narrowly
The CJEU (Fifth Chamber) ruled on 9 July that publishing public criminal-conviction records online for a fee, without editing, adaptation, editorial policy or journalistic ethical standards, is not processing for 'journalistic purposes' under Article 85(2) GDPR — so the derogations from the GDPR's core chapters do not apply. The Court also held Member States cannot use Article 85(1) to extend those exemptions beyond journalistic/academic/artistic/literary expression, nor strip data subjects of the Chapter VIII remedies (complaint, judicial remedy, compensation). Directly relevant to AI dataset and web-scraping practice: a provider hoping to shelter a scraped corpus behind a 'journalism' or 'freedom of expression' framing now has to show genuine editorial selection, verification and professional standards — merely making public-record data searchable at scale will not qualify.
Unsure which of these developments applies to your AI systems?
Begin in writing →This briefing is general information, not legal advice, and does not create an advisor–client relationship. Summaries are original; follow source links for the full record. Adesanya AI Advisory — Abdulwahab B. Adesanya, LL.M in Intellectual Property & IT Law (UCD).