Virginia's Spanberger Creates AI Task Force, Curbs Data Center Secrecy and Local Override

Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed an executive order on Tuesday creating a state AI task force and directing her administration to give local governments more leverage over data center construction, a move that could slow approvals in the county that hosts more server capacity than any other place on earth. Executive Order 22 also prohibits executive branch officials from signing nondisclosure agreements tied to data center projects, ending a practice critics say let developers negotiate tax breaks and power deals out of public view.

The order lands in a state whose data center footprint is hard to overstate. Loudoun County, just outside Washington, D.C., has drawn the nickname Data Center Alley and holds the largest concentration of hyperscale facilities in the world, with Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Equinix all operating campuses there. Neighboring Prince William County has become a second front, where residents have packed public hearings over noise, diesel backup generators and the transmission lines needed to feed the buildings.

Under the directive, state agencies must rework how they review and route data center applications so that local planning commissions and boards of supervisors carry more weight, rather than state-level incentives pushing projects through on a fast track. The practical effect is that county officials who have complained about being steamrolled by billion-dollar developers may gain a formal seat at the table, and timelines that once ran on developer schedules could stretch.

The nondisclosure ban is the sharpest break with the status quo. Virginia has courted the industry for years with sales-and-use tax exemptions on equipment and some of the cheapest industrial power in the country, and much of that bargaining happened behind confidentiality agreements that kept terms, water use and grid commitments away from the public record. Spanberger's order closes that channel for executive branch agencies, though it does not bind private negotiations between localities and companies.

The new AI task force, meanwhile, is charged with advising the governor on how the state should regulate and adopt artificial intelligence across agencies, a signal that Richmond intends to treat AI policy and data center policy as one problem rather than two. That framing matters because the same power grid and water supply that data centers strain are the infrastructure AI companies need to keep expanding. Virginia is effectively testing whether a state can welcome the industry without letting it write its own rules.

What happens next depends on how aggressively the Department of Environmental Quality and other agencies rewrite their review procedures, and whether the legislature backs the governor with statutory authority that survives a change in administration. The data center industry has not said publicly how it will respond, and the first test will be whether pending projects in Loudoun and Prince William face new hearings or new delays. The open question is whether slower approvals push developers toward other states or simply force them to negotiate in daylight.