What Virginia Is Spending, What Virginia Is Getting (v5.2) is the comprehensive statewide reference on data center development in Virginia and the anchor volume for a series of county case studies.

Virginia hosts the largest concentration of data centers in the world, and between roughly 2018 and 2026 the industry moved out of its Northern Virginia core into more than two dozen counties and independent cities.

On a Tuesday night in late May 2026, the Hanover County board voted four to three to turn away a 900-megawatt data center, walking away from the largest taxable investment ever offered it, and on water.

Of 49 refusals, withdrawals, pauses and tightened rules tested, the census can place a named organisation, dated, before the decision in 14; in 27 it can place no one. Of 129 entries on the opposition, reform and litigation side, 30 state a founding date, so the record supports no growth curve. Thirteen of 58 localities market themselves to data centers on their own economic development pages, and nine of those are places whose boards refused, paused or tightened.

Of the 75 adopted local noise instruments in this volume's census, 67 carry no tonal provision and 65 no low-frequency provision, so most cannot register the low, steady hum people living beside data centers describe. The volume follows the choices about the measuring instrument that produced that gap, made in public, at stated prices, for stated reasons, in Loudoun, Prince William and Chesapeake.

146 resources that map, track or inventory data centers, nationally and in depth for Virginia, Georgia and Tennessee, each graded from recommended to avoid for research. No resource is a census: trackers that publish state counts disagree by wide margins, change between editions without notes, and mix buildings, campuses, projects and permits as their unit of record. The gap no map fills statewide is the local zoning decision, ordinance or moratorium behind each site.

A September 2026 trade association report sorts more than 3,200 U.S. counties into four groups by how many data centers each contains, and runs its comparisons of housing, employment and electricity outcomes across those groups. The counts reproduce exactly from the cited source in four checks; the arithmetic is correct. The findings here are narrower and prior — what a county-level count built from the IM3 Open-Source Data Center Atlas can actually support.

Thirteen electric distribution cooperatives serve Virginia — the figure most often cited is eleven. Data-center load is arriving on several of them. This reference walks identity and jurisdiction, wholesale supply (nine of thirteen through Old Dominion Electric Cooperative), the seven-case affiliate sequence in which one cooperative was twice refused authority to serve hyperscale load through an unregulated affiliate, and the four large-load rate schedule cases side by side against the investor-owned regime that preceded them.

Virginia's generation-siting statute reaches two of the four routes now serving data centers, applies its full test to one, and does not reach the other two at all. Built on 108 primary documents, each hashed. Evidence snapshot 24 August 2026.

Virginia's data centers consume roughly a quarter of the Commonwealth's electricity, and PJM attributes a ten-gigawatt increase in forecast Dominion-zone load by 2029 primarily to them.

FERC certificates interstate gas capacity on a precedent agreement, declines to weigh what the gas is for, and treats a shipper's decision to subscribe as beyond the scope of its review — a matter for state regulators. Virginia's SCC approved a 944-megawatt gas plant without writing down what the fuel costs or what capacity factor was assumed. The question no forum wrote down.

Documents the June 30, 2025 Google–CFS power purchase agreement and Eni's September 22, 2025 offtake for the 400-megawatt ARC fusion plant in Chesterfield County — the Fall Line Fusion Power Station. Not a technology profile; examines the commercial instruments themselves and the equity stakes both buyers hold in the developer.

A data center that buys treated water from a public utility is, in Virginia and Tennessee by express clause and in Georgia by definition, not a person who withdraws water. Reads the reporting forms each state prescribes, field by field, and asks where on them a delivery to such a facility would be recorded. There is no field built to take it.

Virginia regulates groundwater by asking three categorical questions and never asking how much. Data centers answer all three in the way that exempts them. 89.9% of Virginia's 286 inventoried data-center facilities sit outside every declared groundwater management area, and the boundary is Interstate 95.

DEQ said it in the SJ 25 study: the strip of Coastal Plain sediment west of Interstate 95 "is disregarded, and I-95 is treated as the approximate western edge of the VCP aquifer system." Virginia drew its regulatory boundary at the same road and regulates as though it were real.

Virginia's coastal aquifer is capacity-bound; its river system is drought-stressed. The Commonwealth is solving a problem in one by adding to the other, and the data-center buildout is arriving before that trade has been priced.

In July 2026 the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality published its study of the groundwater supply east of Interstate 95, ordered by the 2024 General Assembly under Senate Joint Resolution No.

Georgia's 100,000-gallon-per-day groundwater permit trigger runs per person and turns on a quantity that, before a permit issues, exists only as the withdrawer's declaration. A measurement-coincident threshold — the regime regulates what it can already see. Sixteen data-center Development of Regional Impact filings were made between January 6 and July 22, 2026.

On March 18, 2025, the Loudoun Board of Supervisors voted 7–2 to require a special exception before a data center could be built in the districts where the use had been permitted by right. The reform never reached the Route 28 corridor, where commercial and industrial zoning is frozen by state statute until 2037. A point-geometry join puts 51 percent of Loudoun's built data-center square footage inside that district — a constraint the county publishes on its own website and that went unmentioned across fourteen months of rewriting the ordinance.

The largest data-center proposal in American history was filed at the Supreme Court of Virginia three hours before deadline, then withdrawn on July 2, 2026. No court ever reached its merits. Documents how the county got there: the sitting supervisor who signed a contract to sell his own land to one of the developers ten days before joining the application, the board chair with a disclosed six-figure position in the parent company of the other developer, and the primary that reset the board.

Henrico County, Virginia spent two decades recruiting the data center industry and eighteen months learning to govern it.

On the night of May 27, 2026, the Hanover County Board of Supervisors refused Tract's Mountain Road Technology Park: 427 acres, 900 megawatts, and the most contested land-use decision the county had…

Chesterfield built its data-center strategy on a single number: the equipment tax rate set at $0.24/$100 in April 2019 — a deliberate undercut of Henrico's $0.40 and the lowest in Virginia. Google assembled roughly 1,640 acres, Chirisa committed $2 billion, and Commonwealth Fusion Systems selected Battery Brooke for the world's first grid-scale commercial fusion plant. The rate is locked for thirty years.

In April 2025 Pittsylvania County refused to rezone 763 acres for a private gas plant and data centers. Nine months later the same board made data centers by right on 3,500 acres at the Berry Hill megasite, in a district whose text says the county's own data-center standard does not apply there. Within eight weeks the regional industrial authority had approved a sale contract defining the buyer's project as no less than 3,300 megawatts with onsite gas generation. Noise: 52 dBA offered by the refused applicant, 77 dBA adopted, and that only beside residential zoning.

Every other report in this series documents a Virginia county deciding on promises.

On June 24, 2025, Botetourt County announced that Google had bought 312.55 acres of the county's flagship business park at Greenfield for $14,055,406.37, plus $4 million for county initiatives.

Culpeper County holds one of the largest accumulations of data center entitlements in Virginia's diffusion ring: roughly 12 to 13 million square feet built or approved across eight campuses, and…

Louisa County, Virginia invented the instrument that the rest of central Virginia is now copying, and then walked away from its central feature before the first imitator finished drafting.

Every county documented in this series so far decided data centers project by project.

In the spring of 2026, two governments whose chambers sit blocks apart in the same small town regulated the same industry in the same season, with different instruments, on different timelines, and…

Since 2022, the five jurisdictions surrounding the Rappahannock River fall line (Spotsylvania, Stafford, Caroline, and King George counties, and the independent City of Fredericksburg) have approved…

Georgia built the second-largest data center market in the United States without ever deciding to.

Tennessee entered the data center era without deciding to, and built one of the densest hyperscale concentrations in the South with the thinnest governing apparatus this series has documented.

On the same day in July 2025, Georgia Power filed two applications with the Georgia Public Service Commission seeking certification of capacity summing to 9,885 megawatts — 7,999 from the 2029–2031 All-Source RFP and 1,886 from a supplemental portfolio. Both were granted in full. The certified cost is sealed for both classes; every cost cell in the two tables is redacted. What differs between the two classes is the fuel.

Asked who reviews the Tennessee Valley Authority's decision to contract for firm interstate gas capacity for two new power plants, FERC answered in two orders and one sentence: state commission oversight is not a prerequisite for section 7 approval, and "Congress has oversight power over federal agencies, including TVA, and we find this sufficiently analogous to state commission oversight." The certificates covered the same 400-mile route inside sixty days.

TVA builds transmission lines across seven states and files no siting case for any of them. The GAO reported this to Congress in 1982 and proposed statutory fixes; none were enacted. What TVA chooses to publish is the public record — this volume measures it.

Companion to The Whole Record: What the Tennessee Valley Authority Publishes When Nothing Requires It — concept DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21996375, version 1.0 published 26 August 2026 at 10.5281/zenodo.21996376.

Rebuilds and extends the eight-year panel of Where the Electricians Went into a sixteen-year panel opening in 2010. Inside-electrical-construction union membership in hyperscale data center metros grew faster than employment across the same period. Reports the widened window and the effect on the central estimate's significance.

Union density is published for metropolitan areas and, within them, for private construction. It is not published annually for a single trade inside a metropolitan area, and the surveys that would support that measurement do not carry the resolution. This paper builds the missing series from federal LM-2, LM-3 and LM-4 filings for a single trade — inside electrical construction — 2010 to 2025.

Published employment figures for data-center construction come from the industry or from unions testifying on projects. This paper builds an independent series from federal LM-2 filings and IBEW jurisdiction maps: an eight-year panel of inside electrical construction membership for 89 metropolitan locals. Median treated local grew 33.7 percent between 2018 and 2025 against 13.2 percent elsewhere — a 25.8-percentage-point regression difference, randomization p below 0.001.

Institutions govern through what they write down, and across water and gas regulation, county zoning, municipal finance, and the citations generative search displays, the decisive fact is reliably the one nobody had a field for. Three kinds of failure, one question asked of each: who was assigned to ask how much.

The register behind Who Showed Up: A Census of the Organizations Around Data Center Siting in Virginia, 2014 to 2026 .

A point-in-time capture of publicly published transmission line siting geographic data, retrieved 15 August 2026 by anonymous query against public ArcGIS REST endpoints.

The data apparatus for Built for Someone Else: Generation, Load, and the Exception in Virginia (Virginia Data Center Series — Analytical Volumes, Version 1.0), concept DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22096613.

Tennessee, carried as a declared gap in every deposited version until now, is closed.

Version 1.1, September 26, 2026.

Version 1.0, 20 September 2026.

Version 3.0 incorporates three months of portfolio work since v2.1 (March 22, 2026) and a full June 2026 re-verification of every entry.