Virginia stopped signing secrecy deals for data centers
Edition of 2026-09-20
# AI For All ### Sunday, September 20, 2026
As of today, a data center developer building in Virginia must work with a state that will no longer promise to keep quiet about the project, and that has already declared part of its groundwater short for cooling.
The state that can no longer promise to keep quiet
Virginia hosts more data centers than anywhere else in the world. On Friday, Governor Abigail Spanberger signed Executive Order 22, and it took effect on her signature. Two provisions bite immediately. No agency under her authority may enter into, enforce or require a confidentiality agreement that hides material information about a proposed commercial data center development, its public incentives, its resource demands or its community impact. Existing agreements stand. Future ones would violate the order. Separately, the Eastern Virginia Groundwater Management Area is designated as a cooling water scarcity area.
The rest is a timetable. Within *120 days, the state must publish a toolkit that gives local governments the questions to ask about a project in their district. Within 180 days*, its environmental regulator must bring an accelerated plan for noise rules, findings on permitting and public disclosure, and a plan for the water scarcity rule. A tiered designation for responsible developments, modelled on the labels used for efficient buildings, will decide which developers get priority on state incentives. And a rapid response task force on artificial intelligence, co-led by three senior officials, will report to the Governor continuously until she ends it.
The honest reserve: most of this is process. A signed order stops no project, and the designation criteria that will really shape the market are due at the end of next year. What changed on Friday is the terms. In the largest data center market there is, the state has given up its ability to sign a secrecy deal over a project, and started writing the conditions the next one has to meet.
Read the order at the Governor of Virginia.
Weak signal
Documents unsealed this week in the New York Times case against OpenAI and Microsoft contain the two companies' own warnings about training data collection: a doom loop that would damage the web, the largest theft of labour in human history, a complete mockery of the idea of fair use. Microsoft says the language reflects one employee's personal view and not the company's position. No figure is published from this item, because its numbers are court dates and page counts rather than facts a reader can act on. It is in the Brief as a signal, not as a story, and it is worth reading for one reason: these are the words of the people who decided.
For the pipeline that is already in planning, the criteria will matter more than the deadlines.