On Wednesday, the local conservative group Mountain Patriots published a 21-page document titled “Data Center Development: Issues & Solutions,” which outlines concerns its members have with the potential approval of new data centers in Frederick County and ways to address them.

Amazon Web Services is headed to the Warrenton Board of Zoning Appeals to see if the data center powerhouse still has a right to develop a 42-acre site along Blackwell Road. The site has sat dormant for two years since Amazon was granted a special use permit on Valentine’s Day 2023, as multiple legal challenges worked their way through Virginia courts.

The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) released a guidance memo in November proposing to expand the conditions under which certain facilities, including data centers, can use emergency backup diesel generators throughout the state. Environmentalists and residents who live near data centers are worried about the air pollution that could result if the state allows facilities to use diesel generators more often. If DEQ finalizes the guidance, it will take effect Jan. 3.

After three hours of public comment, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors rejected stricter zoning recommendations for electrical substations. The proposed rules, voted on unanimously by the Planning Commission in October, would have expanded the residential setback from 100 feet to 200 feet, meaning substations would have to be at least 200 feet from homes. However, Tuesday night's vote will keep the setback at 100 feet.

Data center reform was a pressing issue at a joint legislative meeting between the Prince William Board of County Supervisors, School Board and several members of the county’s delegation to the Virginia General Assembly, with state lawmakers stressing the urgency of mitigation measures for the tech hubs’ proliferation. State Sen. Danica Roem, D-30th District, was adamant the state legislature should take two major steps during its 2026 session: limiting the placement of data centers to exclusively industrial areas and removing the sales tax exemption for data centers.

A coalition of more than 230 environmental groups has demanded a national moratorium on new datacenters in the US, the latest salvo in a growing backlash to a booming artificial intelligence industry that has been blamed for escalating electricity bills and worsening the climate crisis.

States facing drought and dwindling groundwater supplies are seeking to pull back the curtain on water use at data centers, in a push for transparency that has scrambled traditional partisan alliances. Lawmakers from at least eight states this year introduced legislation to require data centers to report their water use, which supporters say is crucial to protecting consumers and managing a finite resource.

Meetings of the Doña Ana County Board of Commissioners in New Mexico are typically snoozy and sparsely attended, with a handful of spectators in a nondescript room seated on black plastic chairs. But not on Sept. 19, when the Commissioners held a meeting and public hearing on a proposed complex of data centers sprawling across 1,400 acres of desert scrublands.

With data centers flooding into Georgia, utility regulators face a big decision: Should they let Georgia Power Co. spend more than $15 billion to increase its electricity capacity by 50% over the next six years to serve computer complexes? Or could the utility overbuild and stick other ratepayers with the bill?

In the first of a new series of Town Hall meetings hosted by U.S. Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, Loudoun residents spoke about the health impacts, environmental effects and national security implications of data centers and proposed transmission lines. “You're seeing noise. You're seeing the impact on the environment, on water. You're seeing the impact on your utility bills,” Subramanyam said. “You're seeing the power infrastructure literally being built in your backyard."

Virginia lawmakers are considering legislation that would give utility companies authority to delay service to the state's largest power users, which could have ramifications for data center development in Northern Virginia.

Virginia utilities should be able to tap the brakes on new data centers and other big power users if they don’t have the power plants on hand to supply them, a General Assembly panel said. The Commission on Electric Utility Regulation is recommending a bill that would allow utilities to delay connecting customers needing more than 90 megawatts — enough to power 22,500 homes — if a delay is needed to avoid overloading the grid in a way that risks blackouts or brownouts.

Ahead of the 2026 General Assembly legislative session, Lieutenant Governor-elect Ghazala Hashmi joined environmental advocates from the National Resource Defense Council and Evergreen Collaborative in Richmond to share policy ideas they believe will put money back in consumers’ and electricity rate payers' pockets. “Policies must shift so that the cost is not on the everyday rate payers,” Hashmi said.

Stafford County officials wanted to revise their new data center ordinance so that the five projects approved before stricter regulations went into place in late October would be able to proceed under previous rules. Instead of saying the five projects would be allowed to continue with their "related" current and future development plans, the revision says those plans must be "directly attributable to the approved project."

[After] more than three decades, [Bobby Orrock] had become one of the most senior members of the Virginia House of Delegates. Still, when his time was up last month, Orrock wasn’t prepared. The more complicated explanation [for his loss] is the influx of new residents, many of them suburbanites migrating south from the Washington area down the Interstate 95 corridor in search of more affordable housing. In the last 30 years, Spotsylvania County’s population nearly tripled from 57,000 to 140,000.

As America’s largest electricity market was deliberating over how to reform the interconnection of data centers, its independent market monitor threw a regulatory grenade into the mix. Just before the Thanksgiving holiday, the monitor filed a complaint with federal regulators saying that PJM Interconnection, which spans from Washington, D.C. to Ohio, should simply stop connecting new large data centers that it doesn’t have the capacity to serve reliably.

Data centers that haven’t been built yet are driving up electricity prices and could leave consumers on the hook for expensive power infrastructure if demand projections are wrong. The race to build facilities that provide artificial intelligence has fueled a boom in data centers that train and run large language models, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. The boom has upended a utility industry that grew used to 20 years of no increase in electricity demand. But now, some investors and energy market analysts are questioning whether the AI race has turned into a bubble, one that would prove expensive to unravel as new transmission lines and power plants are built to support those data centers.

The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality has proposed a major change that would allow data centers to run polluting Tier II backup diesel generators during planned outage events, such as during construction projects and grid maintenance. The potential change poses health dangers that are immense and, because of the prevailing winds in Northern Virginia, would stretch across the nation’s capital and reach as far as Baltimore.

The areas surrounding northern Virginia are increasingly attuned to and activated about data center effects. Well-established networks closely track regional development and can turn people out in the near-thousands to attend local meetings. Yet this is not necessarily a given for communities that are new to the fight.

The regional electric grid that covers Virginia should stop plugging in data centers until it has enough high-voltage lines and power plants to meet their city-sized demands for electricity, the grid’s own watchdog says. It is asking the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to tell grid operator PJM Interconnection that it needs to line up power supplies before letting data centers tie into the 13-state grid, which stretches from New Jersey south to North Carolina and west to Illinois.

The state’s data center boom is now the subtext to increasingly intense politicking over longtime Virginia issues — climate change, electricity rates and the powers of local governments.

Virginia lawmakers are grappling with how to address the proliferation of data centers across the Commonwealth, along with the energy challenges and environmental concerns that come with the spread. As the data center capital of the world, Virginia faces a number of issues that members of the General Assembly are once again hoping to address in January. President of the Piedmont Environmental Council, Chris Miller says that, while more and more Virginians are becoming aware of data centers and their risks, there’s still a lack of awareness and even a lack of transparency about what the extent of those impacts are - not only on individual communities, but throughout the Commonwealth as a whole.

The former Washington Commanders training facility in Herndon, barely a block away from Fairfax County's new Western High School, will be redeveloped as a pair of data centers. An affiliate of Starwood Capital Group has filed site plans and an initial air permit application for the “Word of Grace Data Center," so named for the Word of Grace Christian Church, which sold the property for $25 million in 2023.

Dominion Energy customers will see higher monthly bills in 2026 after state regulators approved a partial rate increase. During the State Corporation Commission’s (SCC) biennial regulatory review of Dominion’s rates, commissioners signed off on an increase that will raise the average residential bill by $11.24 per month in 2026, followed by an additional $2.36 increase in 2027. The SCC also approved [the creation of] a new rate class for high-energy users. “Those are both huge steps,” said Christopher Miller, president of the Piedmont Environmental Council. “Unfortunately, it’s only 60% of the problem and the other 40%, because of the enormous costs that are [involved,] could still fall on the average Virginia resident.”

Data center developers are already drawing a lot of power. And with developers lining up still more projects, pressure is surging on a state grid that already must import power from places where it costs more. Dominion Energy chief executive Bob Blue told Wall Street analysts earlier this year that demand for electricity in Virginia “is accelerating in orders of magnitude, driven by, one, the number of data centers requesting to be connected onto our system; two, the size of each facility; and three, the acceleration of each facility's ramp schedule to reach full capacity."