Four states acted on data centers in six days. Two of them used the same template.

Start with the calendar, because the calendar is the story. On 18 September, Virginia ended automatic approval for large data centers. On 21 September, Texas environmental regulators stopped issuing a class of permits and the Governor of California signed seven data center bills at once. On 23 September, the Governor of Maryland signed an executive order creating a state review body for any data center drawing 25 megawatts or more. Four states, six days. If you have been reading the AI story as a story about chips and models, this is the fortnight the other half of it got loud.

Take California first, because the headlines and the statute are not saying the same thing. The package has four parts. Operators must report. Developers must disclose projected water demand, its source, and their efficiency measures before a local government approves the project. Three bills deal with how the cost of serving a very large electrical load gets split up. And SB 887 removes the categorical environmental-review shortcut most private projects had been eligible for.

The third part is the one that matters. Building a data center means upgrading the grid around it — transmission, distribution, sometimes generation. Somebody pays for that, and historically a good deal of it ended up spread across everyone's electricity bill, which is why data centers have become a local political problem in a way that chip factories have not. SB 886 and SB 1168 are attempts to flip that default so the operator carries more of the cost its own load creates.

Here we have to argue with ourselves, because the statute is thinner than the coverage suggests. SB 1168 directs the California Public Utilities Commission to assess opportunities for rate structures under which data centers bear a reasonable share of transmission and distribution costs. Assess opportunities for. Not create. There is no megawatt threshold in the package, no dollar threshold, no reporting frequency, no enforcement procedure and no deadline for the commission to finish. Every number that would tell an operator what this costs is still to be written.

So is it nothing? No, and the reason generalises. What changed is the default. Before, an operator arriving in California argued from a starting position where cost-spreading was normal and a categorical exemption was available. Now the starting position is the other way round, and the rulemaking is a fight about how much rather than about whether. Defaults are quietly the most powerful thing a legislature hands out.

Maryland is the more interesting one, though, and for a reason almost nobody covered. Its order has the operative number California's package lacks: 25 megawatts of peak demand, applied immediately, triggered not only when a developer asks the state for something but also on a referral from a state agency, the utilities commission, or the county the project would sit in. Projects get a public determination — aligned, conditionally aligned, or not aligned — and a not-aligned label costs a developer state incentives, grants, loans and letters of support.

And 25 megawatts is exactly the threshold Virginia used five days earlier. So is the ban on state agencies signing non-disclosure agreements with data center developers. Two neighbouring states, five days apart, reaching for the same two provisions. That is a template circulating between governors' offices, which is a different and more durable thing than four states reacting to their own local politics. It is also the part of this story most likely to repeat.

Now the counter-argument, which is strong enough that we will not bury it. None of these states is where the buildout mainly is. The enormous interconnection queues are in Texas, Virginia, Georgia and Ohio. Rules that make California and Maryland slower and more expensive may move capacity rather than stop it. The megawatts do not disappear; they relocate. That is a real cost to those states and close to no cost to the AI economy as a whole.

There is also a version where these make building easier. SB 887 does not only remove an exemption — it creates a fast judicial-review lane for projects that pay their grid-interconnection costs, use recycled water efficiently and meet clean-energy standards. That is a deal, openly offered. And Maryland's order explicitly cannot authorise an agency to deny, delay or condition a permit on any ground not already authorised by law. It creates no enforceable right. It stops no project. What actually kills data center projects in America right now is not environmental review, it is the local politics that follows a resident opening an electricity bill, and a rule that says the operator pays is cheap project insurance.

What we cannot tell you is the cost. Not one project has been stopped, delayed or repriced by any of the four. We do not know what megawatt threshold California's commission will land on, and that single number will matter more to the economics than all seven of its bills put together.

So the map does something modest, at the sector level only. Energy and the grid turns yellow. Data centers and physical infrastructure was already red from Virginia and Texas and stays red; California and Maryland add to that record without changing the color. No company changed color and no relationship did, because a rule applying to everyone building in a state tells you nothing specific about any one company's exposure. We would have to invent that, and inventing it is precisely what this map exists not to do.