Lawmakers in no less than 5 different states—Georgia, Maryland, Oklahoma, Vermont, and Virginia—have additionally launched payments this 12 months that may impose varied types of short-term pauses on information middle improvement. Whereas Georgia, Vermont, and Virginia’s efforts are being led by Democrats, Oklahoma and Maryland’s payments have been largely sponsored by Republicans. These payments mirror a number of moratoriums which have already handed regionally: On the finish of December, no less than 14 states had cities or counties which have paused information middle allowing and development, Tech Coverage Press reported.
There are some indicators that the information middle trade is starting to reply to the backlash. Final month, Microsoft, with a lift from the White Home, rolled out a set of commitments to be a “good neighbor” in communities the place it builds information facilities. In response to questions on how the trade is responding to the slew of state-level laws, Dan Diorio, the vp of state coverage on the Knowledge Heart Coalition, an trade group, tells WIRED in an announcement that it “acknowledges the significance of continued efforts to higher educate and inform the general public concerning the trade, by group engagement and stakeholder schooling, which incorporates factual details about the trade’s accountable utilization of water and our dedication to paying for the power we use.”
Among the states with moratorium payments have comparatively few information facilities: Vermont has simply two, in line with Data Center Map. However Georgia and Virginia are two of the nationwide hubs for information middle improvement and have discovered themselves on the middle of a lot of the resistance, in each public response to information facilities and legislative pushback. Greater than 60 data-center-related payments have already been proposed within the Virginia legislature this 12 months, in line with Knowledge Heart Dynamics, an trade information web site.
Josh Thomas is a state delegate in Virginia who has been on the forefront of main the legislative cost to place limits on the growth of knowledge facilities. Throughout his first legislative session, in 2024, the caucus of self-identified information middle “reformers” in each the Home and Senate was simply three politicians. That quantity grew to eight in 2025, “and now, it’s 12 or 13,” he says, with many extra politicians keen to vote on reform payments. His fellow lawmakers, he says, now “perceive that we have to negotiate the place these items go.”
Final 12 months, a proposal launched by Thomas that may have required information facilities to carry out extra in-depth environmental-, noise-, and community-impact web site assessments handed the legislature, but it surely was vetoed by then governor Glenn Youngkin. Newly elected governor Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat who talked about making information facilities “pay their very own method” on the marketing campaign path, appears more likely to rethink this 12 months’s model of the invoice, which has already passed the Home.
“I’m rather more optimistic that [Spanberger] will signal,” Thomas says.
Thomas, who was not concerned in shaping the moratorium within the Virginia Home, thinks {that a} moratorium on information facilities is more likely to move in states the place the trade has much less of a foothold than in Virginia. Nonetheless, he says, “it’s not a nasty thought.”
