Virginia just ended automatic approval for big data centers.

Northern Virginia is not one data-center market among many. Loudoun and Prince William counties host the densest concentration of internet infrastructure anywhere, built up over two decades on a planning regime that let qualifying projects proceed by right — meaning that if a proposal met the zoning rules, it did not need a discretionary approval, a hearing, or anyone's permission.

On 18 September, Governor Spanberger signed Executive Order 22, which ends that for large projects. Anything drawing more than 25 megawatts now goes through public review and approval. State agencies and employees are barred from signing non-disclosure agreements about data-center projects. The order also directs that data centers carry a more equitable share of electricity costs, with the state's chief energy officer told to push for arrangements that protect households from paying for infrastructure built to serve them. A small executive task force was set up alongside it to look at AI risks including workforce displacement, privacy and cybersecurity. The governor's stated position was blunt: data centers cannot drive up energy costs for everyone else in Virginia.

Three changes, in order of how much they matter

The hearings change timelines. By-right approval is, in practice, a schedule. A developer can plan a build knowing roughly how long each stage takes. A public hearing is not only a delay; it is an uncertain delay, and uncertain delays are expensive to finance.

The NDA ban changes what the public can see. State employees discussing a project with a developer could previously be bound to confidentiality. That is how a county ends up approving a load it cannot describe. Removing the NDAs means the next few years of Virginia projects will be documented in public — which, selfishly, is good for a map built on public evidence.

The cost-allocation language changes the economics, eventually. It is the least concrete part of the order and probably the most consequential. Who pays for the transmission upgrades an AI campus requires — the campus, or everyone's monthly bill — is the question that decides whether the politics of data centers stay manageable. Virginia has now said out loud that the answer should shift toward the campus.

It is not a moratorium

Worth being exact, because the headlines blurred this: Virginia did not stop anything. Projects can proceed; they now proceed through a hearing. That is a different kind of event from the Texas permit pause three days later, even though both land in the same sector on the map and both point at the same thesis row.

The order is also an executive action, which means it can be revised by the next executive. The durable version is legislation, and the governor said she intends to work with the General Assembly to write these standards into state law in the 2027 session. Until that happens, this is a policy with a four-year shelf life at most.

Why both events land on the sector, not on companies

Equinix, Digital Realty, Vertiv and Eaton all appear on our map in the data-center layer, and all of them do business in Virginia. It would be easy — and wrong — to color those four companies red this week. We do not know from this order what any of them has under construction, what stage it is at, or whether a hearing changes anything for them. What we know is that the rules of the largest market changed.

So the sector carries the signal and the companies do not. If a company discloses a specific delay, that becomes its own dated event, with its own source.

The thing worth holding on to

The AI build-out has been described for two years as a capital story: who can raise the money, who can buy the chips. Two orders in one week from two very different states suggest the binding constraint is turning into a civic one. Not whether the money exists, but whether the people who live next to the substation agree.