Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger signed a $0.011 per kilowatt-hour consumption tax on data-centre electricity into law on 30 June, a day before it took effect on 1 July.1 It is the first US charge levied on the power a computing campus actually draws, and it reaches every source: utility supply, competitive retail from third-party suppliers in deregulated markets, and behind-the-meter self-generation, the private gas and battery power that never touches the public grid.
The signature settled a months-long fight over method. The state legislature had passed the tax on 22 June, but Senate negotiators were still pushing a rival $35-45 per kilowatt charge on backup generators, the "Lucas fee", to break a budget deadlock. Signing the consumption model killed that alternative. Virginia's State Corporation Commission, the utility regulator, will collect monthly, with the first payment due in September.
Rob Gramlich of the energy consultancy Grid Strategies puts the effective rate rise near 10%. A 500-megawatt (MW) campus will owe about $48m a year, a full gigawatt campus close to $100m.2 Operators pass most of that through to their cloud customers. The mechanism matters more than the rate: a per-kilowatt capacity fee taxes installed hardware, which reads in court as a regulatory taking, while a tax on electricity drawn is an ordinary excise. Virginia picked the litigation-proof instrument, and that is what other states will copy or reject.
