Virginia’s Governor Signs an Executive Order to Rein In Data Centers and Launch an AI Task Force

Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger signed Executive Order 22 on Friday at a news conference in Richmond, rolling out what her office calls a “Data Center Accountability Framework” and creating a new state AI Task Force. The order bans Virginia’s executive branch from signing non-disclosure agreements with data center developers, directs the state’s environmental regulator to study noise, water, and backup-generator impacts within 180 days, and lays the groundwork for a far bigger fight over data center zoning that will not be settled until the General Assembly meets in 2027.

“In the years before I took office, data centers came to Virginia and the Commonwealth did not have a clear or coordinated plan to address their impacts on Virginians: their electric bills, their water, their land, their air, or their quality of life,” Spanberger said, according to a release from her office republished in full by WDBJ7. “That changes today.”

What Executive Order 22 Actually Does Today

Stripped of the framing, the order itself is narrower than its “most comprehensive and aggressive data center accountability effort in the country” billing suggests. According to Virginia Business, most of what Spanberger announced Friday will need to pass the General Assembly before it takes effect, and the majority of the framework’s provisions will only apply to future projects rather than the data centers already operating or already approved across the state.

What the order does put into motion immediately is narrower and mostly procedural. It bars executive branch agencies, departments, boards, commissions, authorities, and employees under the governor’s supervision from entering non-disclosure agreements tied to future data center projects, a restriction that does not extend to local governments or to NDAs already signed. It also directs the Department of Environmental Quality to deliver findings within 180 days on an accelerated timeline for noise protections, an analysis (conducted with the state health and energy departments) of diesel and other backup-generator fuel use, criteria for identifying “cooling water scarcity areas,” and site guidance for future data center development that limits impacts on energy, water, land, and infrastructure.

The Bigger Ask Waits for the Legislature

The headline-grabbing piece, ending “by-right” approval, the zoning shortcut that has let developers build data centers on office-zoned land without a rezoning hearing or public vote, is not something an executive order can do on its own. Virginia Business reports that Executive Order 22 directs the administration to propose legislation for the 2027 General Assembly session that would eliminate by-right approval statewide and require local approval for any data center drawing more than 25 megawatts of power. Until lawmakers act, the practice Spanberger is campaigning against stays legal.

The rest of the framework reads the same way: a list of goals the administration wants written into law rather than commitments already in force. Those goals include ending state subsidies for data centers in Virginia’s site development programs, removing large future projects from the state’s fast-track permitting process, requiring utilities to shift a larger share of transmission and generation costs onto data centers and other big electricity users, requiring stronger upfront financial commitments from developers to discourage speculative land-banking, and capping how much electricity data centers can generate on-site from natural gas.

Spanberger was direct about the order’s limits at Friday’s news conference. “This is not a temporary fix,” she said, per Virginia Business. “We are not scrambling to figure out what to do tomorrow. We are creating a new way forward for how this industry does business in the economy. And make no mistake about it: These standards are high. And moving forward, it’s pretty simple. If you don’t want to meet these high standards, Virginia may not be the place for you.”

An AI Task Force With a Broad Mandate

Executive Order 22 also creates a new state AI Task Force, to be led by the state’s chief transformation officer, counsel to the governor, and the secretary of administration. It is not Virginia’s first: former Governor Glenn Youngkin stood up an AI Task Force of outside experts under his own Executive Order 30 in January 2024, an advisory body focused on responsible adoption rather than the risk-mitigation mandate Spanberger’s version carries. Its brief covers workforce displacement, data privacy, and cybersecurity risk, and it is charged with engaging technology companies directly to “address the risks, mitigations and people-first design requirements” of AI systems deployed in the state, according to the governor’s office language quoted by WDBJ7.

Spanberger framed the task force as a hedge against federal inaction rather than a substitute for it. “We simply aren’t sure the federal government is going to act on this, though it is my hope that they will move forward with new progress as soon as possible,” she said, per Virginia Business.

A Fight That Started Months Before Friday

Friday’s order did not arrive in a vacuum. In late June, Spanberger and House negotiators struck a compromise with Senate Democrats on a data center power-usage tax that Virginia Business reported would raise $600 million a year over the next two years, after senators pushed unsuccessfully for a full repeal of a separate sales-and-use tax exemption for data centers, one that costs the state more than $1 billion a year in lost revenue, per Virginia Business, and that the state’s own tax department has put at $1.9 billion in aggregate 2025 benefits.

That history shaped Friday’s reaction on both sides. The Senate Democratic Caucus called the order a welcome recognition of “the significance of establishing appropriate policies to govern its growth and impact on our commonwealth,” per Virginia Business, while Senate President Pro Tempore Louise Lucas, who led the push for a full repeal of the exemption and called Spanberger the “data center diva” in a social media quip this summer, was blunter: “The governor is finally feeling the heat but still ignoring the fire,” Lucas said in a statement. “Her proposal does not end the $2 billion in sales tax exemptions provided to data centers.”

The industry’s own trade group struck a more conciliatory note while pushing back on the underlying premise. Nicole Riley, director of Virginia government affairs for the Data Center Coalition, said in a statement that the group shares “Gov. Spanberger’s goals of ensuring that Virginia can compete for the significant economic opportunities presented by responsible data center development while protecting the interests of residents, communities and ratepayers.” Riley added that Virginia’s electric rates sit below the national average and that, citing the state’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, data center water usage amounts to about 0.5 percent of statewide withdrawals.

Environmental advocates who have pushed for tougher action were less satisfied. Piedmont Environment Council president Chris Miller told The Verge that the order “largely addresses standards on new data centers and does not deal with what’s already built and in the pipeline, along with the ongoing impacts piling up in communities now.” That gap matters in Virginia specifically: Loudoun County alone hosts roughly 250 data centers built under the same by-right zoning classification Spanberger is now trying to unwind statewide, a two-decade buildout sxz.io covered in depth in early September.

Virginia Isn’t Alone, and the Federal Government Is Moving the Other Way

Spanberger’s order landed the same day California Governor Gavin Newsom signed his own executive order convening experts on AI safety, and it follows earlier executive actions by New York Governor Kathy Hochul and Texas Governor Greg Abbott aimed at slowing data center growth in their states, The Verge reported. Virginia’s move also arrives two weeks after Thailand’s government froze 166 pending data center projects nationwide and three weeks after the UK’s Green Party pushed to strip data centers of automatic critical-infrastructure status in Parliament, both moves sxz.io has tracked as part of the same pattern.

The state-level pushback also cuts against the direction federal policy has taken. A group of former EPA officials warned earlier this month that a wave of federal environmental rollbacks tied to the AI data center buildout could raise pollution-related deaths nationally, even as the Trump administration has pursued a deregulatory approach to data center permitting. Virginia’s own framework does not go as far as a moratorium, the option some of its localities have already chosen. What it does is put the state on record, formally, that the terms data center developers have operated under for two decades are no longer the terms Richmond intends to offer going forward, with the details still to be negotiated once the General Assembly convenes for its 2027 session.