Virginia, home of the world’s largest concentration of data centers, will consider more than 60 bills related to a wide range of data center-related issues during this year's legislative session, lasting from January 14 to March 14.

Chief among these proposals is HB1515, which is a proposal to institute a temporary moratorium that would stay in place until July 1, 2028, or until all existing interconnection requests are fulfilled.

Moratoriums are a common tool used by local authorities to stop data center development. Although no state currently imposes a state-wide moratorium on data centers, Virginia joins the likes of Michigan, Oklahoma, Georgia, and Maryland, all of whom are set to consider moratoria at some point this year.

Electricity has become a central preoccupation as politicians in Virginia and elsewhere acknowledge that spiking utility rates – sometimes linked to covering the cost of building electrical infrastructure for data centers – have become an affordability issue with significant political cachet.

More than twenty bills relating to the regulation of electric utilities and Virginia’s State Corporation Commission are set to be considered during the legislative session.

HB84, which is currently being considered by the legislative body’s lower house, would require regional transmission entities to issue an annual report to Virginia’s State Corporation Commission. The report would detail the voting record of the utility and justify how each vote benefited the “public interest.”

The legislature will also consider bills that would impose stricter planning restrictions. HB166 would remove an exemption from civil penalties for violations of local noise ordinances, and HB370 and HB496 would require data center companies to submit water consumption estimates when making planning applications.

Tax is another central issue. Bills SB393 and HB641 would require data center operators to pay an additional land conservation tax to be used for “various land protection and preservation purposes.” HB961 would limit tax exemptions for data centers, and HB897 would modify them.

Virginia missed out on more than $1.6 billion in tax revenues in fiscal year 2025 due to data center tax exemptions, according to the state’s 2025 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report.

It is unclear how many of these bills – many of which contain overlapping proposals – will be signed into law. At present, only two bills – HB84 and HB153 – have received approval from one legislative house. The rest are currently being considered by various committees, which have to approve the bill before it can return to either legislative house for deliberation.

Like most American states, Virginia has a bicameral legislative body. Called the General Assembly, it is composed of an upper house called the Senate and a lower house called the House of Delegates.

Both the Senate and the House of Delegates have to approve a bill before it can be passed into law.

These bills place Virginia at the legislative frontline of a genuinely popular backlash against data centers that has mobilized Democrats, Republicans, and independents at all levels.

Even President Donald Trump, who has championed a pro-data center and pro-AI stance since his inauguration, has taken steps to minimize the short-term economic impacts of the data center construction boom.

In early January, the Trump administration and a coalition of bipartisan governors “urged” PJM Interconnection, a utility that covers 13 states in the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest, to cut costs for consumers. The government stated that the utility should force data center developers to pay for any new power generation they require, “whether they show up and use the power or not.”

A few days prior to that, on January 13, President Trump said that he did not “want Americans to pay higher Electricity bills because of Data Centers,” saying that the administration was working with data center companies like Microsoft to ensure that households were not paying more for electricity.