Virginia ends by-right approval for big data centers
Virginia just made itself the hardest US state to build a data center in. Governor Abigail Spanberger signed Executive Order 22 alongside a "Data Center Accountability Framework" that ends by-right approval for any facility drawing more than 25 megawatts, pulls large data centers out of the state's fast-track permitting, bars executive-branch agencies from signing NDAs on projects, and ends site-development subsidies for the industry. In the state that hosts the world's densest concentration of data centers, that is a deliberate reversal of posture — and Spanberger framed it as a standard, not a slowdown: "If you don't want to meet these high standards, Virginia may not be the place for you."
The cost-shifting clauses are the real teeth. The framework orders utilities to allocate a larger share of transmission and generation costs to data centers and other large loads, including the costs of PJM Interconnection processes driven by their demand, and requires facilities to meet standards preventing sudden demand swings from destabilizing the grid. It caps behind-the-meter natural gas generation, expedites noise regulation, directs a review of backup-diesel cumulative impacts, requires existing and future sites to move to cleaner backup power, and sets water-use standards with agency enforcement behind them. "Virginia families and small businesses should not foot the bill for the data center industry," Spanberger said at a Friday press conference in Richmond.
The AI part is a task force, not a rule — and that is the tell. EO 22 creates a state AI Task Force on workforce displacement, data privacy, and cybersecurity, with Spanberger citing federal failure to act on those risks. A day earlier, California's Gavin Newsom ordered a kill switch and onsite auditors for frontier models. The two biggest AI states are now legislating on parallel tracks: California on how models behave, Virginia on where and how they get built. Our coverage of Pennsylvania voters forcing data centers onto the ballot showed where this pressure lands at the polls.
Disney appointed its first-ever chief technology officer — and took him from a chatbot startup. Karandeep Anand, most recently CEO of Character.AI, joins the conglomerate that runs theme parks, film studios and a streaming service but had somehow never had a CTO. The direction is unmistakable: Disney already assembled a character-AI unit with the team behind Sora before its OpenAI partnership fell apart, and it previously fired cease-and-desist letters at Character.AI over copyright. Hiring the person who ran that company is a statement about which side of the character-licensing fight Disney intends to own — and, given Anand's AI pedigree, about how much of its IP it plans to animate with it.
What to watch: whether a developer with an already-permitted site challenges EO 22, and whether Virginia's new task force produces rules or just a report.
Should a state with the world's data center capital be allowed to effectively cap the industry — or is Virginia just the first to price the externalities in? Tell us in the comments.
