AINEWS
Executive Order 22 also pushes facilities toward renewable backup power and tells utilities to shift more grid costs onto the largest datacenter operators, in the world's most datacenter dense state.
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed Executive Order 22 on Friday and pulled three levers at once on the datacenter industry: kill the non-disclosure agreements that have wrapped commercial deals, end state subsidies for new builds, and pull any facility above 25 megawatts out of the state's fast-track permitting pipeline. In the world's most datacenter-dense state, the political bill for leaving those doors open finally came due.
The order, reported locally by WSLS 10 Roanoke and confirmed by Reuters via U.S. News & World Report, also pushes new and existing facilities toward renewable backup power rather than natural gas or diesel, and tells Virginia utilities to shift a larger share of transmission and generation costs onto hyperscalers and other large-load customers. That last piece is the ratepayer lever. It decides whether residential electric bills continue to absorb the grid buildout that datacenters have forced onto the state. The order also creates a state AI Task Force to coordinate policy across agencies, the first time Virginia has set that body up at the gubernatorial level.
Spanberger presented the package as a direct response to organized local opposition. "Community members are demanding action," she said at the signing, per WSLS, and the order's language lists electric bills, water, land, air, and quality of life as the issues it intends to address. Loudoun and Prince William counties, the two jurisdictions that anchor "Data Center Alley" along the I-95 corridor, have been the loudest voices. Local opposition in those counties has organized around water draw, diesel-generator noise, transmission-line routing, and the simple fact that residents watch their electric rates climb while server farms get fast-tracked through state review. The Register has called the shift a political reckoning for the buildout.
The three levers aren't redundant. The NDA ban attacks the secrecy that has let deals get signed before neighbors know what is coming. The subsidy cut attacks the public-money side of the equation, removing the cheap incentives that have helped developers underprice the political cost of new builds. The 25-megawatt threshold and the fast-track removal attack the approval process itself, forcing large projects to clear local review. Any one of those would be a fight. Pulling all three at once is what it takes to defuse the local pressure that has been exporting itself to Richmond.
The order is also a partial settlement, not a final one. Several framework pieces, including the utility cost-allocation rule, will need approval from the Virginia General Assembly in 2027 before they take full effect. Spanberger's team is using executive authority to land what it can now, and the legislature will get the rest. The industry's response is likely to focus on the 2027 session, where the datacenter lobby has historically been effective.
Virginia isn't acting alone. The order lands the same week that governors in New York, Texas, and Pennsylvania have all moved on the same pressure points, from moratoriums to siting reforms, and Los Angeles County has moved toward a temporary ban on mega-data-centers. Northern Virginia still hosts the largest concentration of datacenter capacity in the world, so a rule change there reshapes the operating environment for the largest hyperscalers and sets the precedent other datacenter-hosting states will weigh.
What the order doesn't do is stop the buildout. It doesn't cap total megawatts, raise datacenter-specific taxes, or impose a moratorium. It conditions growth on visibility, on cost-allocation fairness, and on environmental performance. The next test is whether the 2027 General Assembly holds the line on the pieces Spanberger has punted to it, and whether local jurisdictions use the new 25-megawatt approval threshold to slow or stop projects they oppose.