Compass Datacenters halted its search for two sites in Greensville County and Emporia, Virginia, and Finance Secretary Mark Sickles told the Senate Finance Committee the projects were lost to tax uncertainty alone, before a single planning application was filed.1 Virginia's state budget has been stalled since early March over whether to end the data-centre tax exemption eight years early. Senate Finance chair Louise Lucas wants it gone by 2026; the House wants it extended to 2035. For Southside counties that means jobs averaging $100,000 a year walked away from places where the median household earns $56,759.
The Virginia Court of Appeals voided Prince William's Digital Gateway rezoning earlier in the spring, and Compass withdrew there too; the county then dropped its appeal, extinguishing a 2,000-acre plan. Those fights bit at the planning stage. The Compass exit this time happened before any application existed, which shows the constraint moving upstream of permitting entirely.
Virginia built its cluster on a 2035 abatement commitment. Unwinding it retroactively makes the state legally unreliable for anything committed from 2026 on, and it puts the forward pipeline of the world's most concentrated data-centre market at risk through fiscal policy rather than zoning refusal.
