Loudoun County's Board of Supervisors voted 7-1-1 on 16 September to direct staff to draft a 12-month pause on new rezoning and special-exception applications for data centres and substations1. Rezoning changes what a piece of land may be used for; a special exception is a permit granted only after a public hearing. The pause is only a draft, and the Board votes on adopting it in October.
Loudoun, in Northern Virginia, holds 233 data centres, the densest cluster anywhere. The draft would run from 15 September and leaves already-permitted work, grid-reliability substations and applications close to their statutory deadlines outside it. About 35.7m sq ft of approved but unbuilt data-centre space is unaffected.
The county rejected a moratorium in March 2025 and kept approving rezonings case by case. Board Chair Phyllis Randall framed this pause as a bridge to the county's Phase 2 standards, due for adoption in December. On the draft's terms, the approved backlog keeps building through the year, so the halt governs which new sites join it rather than the construction already under way.
