What Virginia Is Spending, What Virginia Is Getting: The Commonwealth Data Center Reference
Tommy N. Turner · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
What Virginia Is Spending, What Virginia Is Getting (v5.2) is the comprehensive statewide reference on data center development in Virginia and the anchor volume for a series of county case studies. It carries forward the fiscal and ratepayer analysis of version 4.0 (March 2026) and the statewide inventory, policy record, and regional synthesis introduced in version 5.0 (June 2026), updated through July 25, 2026. The report finds that Virginia's data center sales and use tax exemption (Code of Virginia § 58.1-609.3(18)) cost the commonwealth $1,941,390,000 in forgone state revenue in FY2025, that the available but-for evidence — from JLARC's December 2024 study, a University of Georgia econometric model, and the broader incentives literature — consistently indicates a substantial share of Virginia's data center investment would occur without the exemption, and that data center load growth exposes residential ratepayers to infrastructure costs Dominion Energy's own filings project will roughly double monthly bills within a decade. Data centers already consume approximately 25 percent of Virginia's electricity, a figure published by the Electric Power Research Institute and corroborated by Dominion Energy Virginia's audited annual filings, which report data centers at 28 percent of Virginia Power's electricity sales in 2025. Version 5.1 recorded the resolution of the 2026 budget: on June 30, 2026 the Commonwealth preserved the sales tax exemption and enacted a first-in-the-nation tax on data center electricity consumption ($0.011 per kilowatt-hour, capped near $600 million a year, expiring June 30, 2028). Version 5.2 adds the second major state development of July 2026: DEQ's SJ 25 groundwater study, released six months past its statutory deadline, found the coastal plain aquifer system east of I-95 has virtually no capacity for new significant withdrawals — nine simulated hyperscale-scale withdrawals all failed permitting, with a best case of 360,000 gallons per day far from any development corridor and ceilings below 30,000 near the I-95 corridor. New Section 14A covers the study and its twelve legislative recommendations, including a proposed comprehensive-plan mandate that would write groundwater availability into local land-use law; the companion volume The Aquifer Says No (10.5281/zenodo.21556435) reads the study at length. The report assembles the complete state policy record — the exemption statute, the jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction equipment-tax rate landscape, the 2026 data center bills, the State Corporation Commission's new GS-5 large-load rate class, and the Dominion integrated resource planning dockets — plus a full facility inventory of 286 records, a register of canceled and rejected projects (including the Prince William Digital Gateway and Dulles Cloud South), the key-operator list, the state study library, and the companion county volumes. Version 5.3 (10 August 2026) is a correction release. It changes no finding and no figure. The 25 percent electricity-share figure, the North Dakota comparison, and the 2040 demand comparison have been re-attributed to their correct sources: EPRI, Dominion Energy Forms 10-K, and JLARC Figure 3-3 as a derived reading.