Fairfax County voted 8-2 on Tuesday 12 May for new data-centre regulations explicitly designed to avoid a repeat of the Loudoun and Prince William fights1. The package was drafted as a pre-emptive measure: define setbacks, noise and substation siting up front rather than wait for litigation to set the rules. Coming in the same week that Prince William abandoned the Digital Gateway appeal, the vote signals Northern Virginia's planning culture is now shifting from green-light defence to procedural front-loading.
In Seattle, Sabey Data Centers withdrew its 68 MW City Light request for its Tukwila campus rather than wait out the 365-day freeze the city's committees vote on Wednesday 20 May; one further unnamed company also pulled out2. Equinix and Prologis remain in the City Light queue with a combined 249 MW across three facilities, the load that will sit on the committee desk next week. Sabey's exit is the more telling marker: the operator chose to release the request and search elsewhere rather than carry the deposit and the carrying cost of a year-plus delay.
The parallel matters because it reads as the same operator calculus expressed in two registers. Where the regulatory layer has the votes to write rules ahead of demand, it is doing so (Fairfax). Where the regulatory layer has the votes to halt connection requests outright, operators are exiting (Seattle). The two patterns set the template for how the rest of the moratorium calendar is likely to land in Denver, Minneapolis and Normal: regulation as the friendly outcome, withdrawal as the unfriendly one. Both raise the cost of a 2026 US siting decision without producing a single enacted ban.
