Virginia Just Made Every AI Data Center Ask Permission

Governor Abigail Spanberger signed Executive Order 22 on Friday, September 18, the first action under a new Data Center Accountability Framework. The order does four things: it eliminates by-right approval for any data center drawing more than 25 megawatts, bans state agencies from entering into or requiring non-disclosure agreements on data center projects, directs agencies to expedite noise regulations and draft new standards covering emissions, water use and energy costs, and stands up Virginia's first AI task force.

Spanberger called it the most comprehensive and aggressive data center accountability effort in the country. On the record, she was blunter about what preceded it: in the years before she took office, data centers came to Virginia and the Commonwealth "did not have a clear or coordinated plan to address their impacts on Virginians."

Virginia hosts more data centers than any other jurisdiction on the planet. That is the entire weight of this order.

25 megawatts is the number

Everything else in EO 22 is framing. The threshold is the policy.

A by-right approval means a developer who satisfies the zoning code gets to build. No hearing, no discretionary vote, no political exposure. It is the single most valuable thing a jurisdiction can offer a capital-intensive project, because it converts a multi-year political question into a permitting checklist.

Twenty-five megawatts does not catch a data center. It catches a building. A single modern AI training hall runs well past that on its own, and the campuses being announced in 2026 are quoted in hundreds of megawatts to low gigawatts. There is no plausible AI-era project in Virginia that lands under the line.

So the effect is not a tightening at the margin. It is a category switch: every AI-scale project in the world's largest data center market just moved from as-of-right land use to discretionary local approval, where a county board votes, neighbors testify, and the timeline is measured in election cycles rather than construction schedules.

The NDA ban is the sleeper provision

It reads like a transparency footnote. It is closer to a change in negotiating position.

Large campuses have routinely been sited under confidentiality — the jurisdiction knows a "Project [codename]" wants land, power and a tax package, and often does not know whose name is on it until well into the process, sometimes not until after approval. That asymmetry is not incidental to the deal. It is load-bearing. A county negotiating against an anonymous counterparty cannot benchmark the package, cannot organize opposition, and cannot credibly threaten to walk.

Banning state agencies from signing those agreements does not by itself unmask every project, but it removes the state as a party to the secrecy and makes it considerably harder to keep a name out of the room. Counties that have been handed a sealed envelope for a decade will be handed a company instead.

What the order pointedly does not do

There is no moratorium. New data centers remain legal, welcome, and courted. The order regulates how they arrive, not whether.

The tax exemptions survive. Virginia's sales-and-use tax exemption on data center equipment is the actual subsidy — the reason the industry concentrated in Loudoun and Prince William in the first place — and EO 22 leaves it untouched. An executive order cannot rewrite the tax code; that fight belongs to the General Assembly, and it has not started.

Most of it is a directive to write rules. Emissions, water, energy-cost standards: those are instructions to agencies to produce regulations, which is a process with a comment period, an industry response, and a timeline. The 25 MW threshold and the NDA ban are self-executing. The environmental half is a promissory note.

This is the state-level half of a federal move

The order arrives roughly a day after the US House passed the Ratepayer Protection Act 417–3 — a margin that does not happen on contested policy. Two chambers of two different governments, one week, same premise: the cost of serving hyperscale load should not be socialized onto residential ratepayers, and the siting of that load should not be invisible.

The politics here have stopped being partisan and started being local. Data centers are no longer an abstraction about the digital economy; they are a line item on a power bill and a hum across a property line. That is the kind of issue that produces 417–3.

What to watch

Whether capital reprices Virginia or just routes around it. Ohio, Indiana, Texas and the Southeast have been absorbing overflow for two years already. A discretionary-approval regime in Northern Virginia accelerates that, but Virginia's advantage was never only cheap land — it is fiber density, latency to the East Coast, and an interconnect corridor that took thirty years to build. Those do not relocate.

The first county vote under the new regime. The order changes who decides; it does not tell them how to decide. A board that approves a 500 MW campus in the first six months sets a very different precedent than one that rejects it.

Whether the General Assembly goes after the exemption. That is the move that would actually change the economics. The executive order is the opening position, and Spanberger has effectively told the legislature where she thinks the conversation goes next.

How fast the NDA ban surfaces names. Within a year, the public record should show who has been buying Virginia land through shell entities. That list is the story nobody has been able to write.