Lawmakers in a minimum of 5 different states—Georgia, Maryland, Oklahoma, Vermont, and Virginia—have additionally launched payments this 12 months that may impose numerous types of momentary pauses on information heart 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, a minimum of 14 states had cities or counties which have paused information heart allowing and building, Tech Coverage Press reported.
There are some indicators that the info heart trade is starting to answer 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 Middle Coalition, an trade group, tells WIRED in an announcement that it “acknowledges the significance of continued efforts to raised educate and inform the general public in regards to the trade, via neighborhood 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 keeping with Data Center Map. However Georgia and Virginia are two of the nationwide hubs for information heart improvement and have discovered themselves on the heart 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 keeping with Knowledge Middle Dynamics, an trade information website.
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 heart “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 website assessments handed the legislature, nevertheless it was vetoed by then governor Glenn Youngkin. Newly elected governor Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat who talked about making information facilities “pay their very own approach” 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 go in states the place the trade has much less of a foothold than in Virginia. Nonetheless, he says, “it’s not a nasty thought.”
