"We just want them to tell us what's happening"

Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger has ordered the state to ban nondisclosure agreements on data center projects, expedite noise regulations. Require local review of backup generators — moves framed as empowering communities to say no. What's actually happening is Virginia is beginning to do what North Carolina did a decade ago. Is treat transparency and local control as virtues while accidentally handing all of it to the largest operators alive.

The logic sounds right. Data centers are loud, they consume massive amounts of water and power, they fragment land use. Developers were signing communities into silence with NDAs. Opening those agreements up feels like democracy. It is, in form. In practice, it creates a cost structure.

When North Carolina started requiring community input and regulatory review around tech campus development in the early 2010s, the smallest and mid-sized operators — the ones who might have built in unexpected places, served regional needs, operated on margin. Couldn't absorb the legal and compliance overhead. The approval timeline stretched. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft could wait. They had capital. They had legal teams already running. A regional player with three facilities and a fifteen-person compliance department could not. Those operators folded or sold. Consolidation followed.

Virginia is not different. Spanberger's executive order is well-intentioned and will almost certainly achieve the opposite of what it claims to achieve. The noise requirements, the backup-generation reviews, the transparency mandates. All reasonable on their face. Will cost money to navigate. The hyperscalers will pay it the way you pay your electric bill. Smaller Virginia operators, the ones who might have competed on agility or regional knowledge, will look at the regulatory burden and decide the market isn't worth entering or staying in. What looks like distributed power often becomes the opposite.

What looks like distributed power often becomes the opposite.

This is not a story about data centers. It's a story about what happens when you regulate without understanding the cost structure underneath. When you make things harder to do without asking who gets hurt by difficulty, you don't spread power, you concentrate it. The companies that can afford to be slowed down are the ones that end up running everything.