Your 2027 compute plan was priced before the states started taxing electrons

Virginia will begin charging data center operators $0.011 for every kilowatt-hour they consume on July 1, 2026, with statewide collections capped at $600 million a year ^[1]. Six days later, New Jersey's Data Center Fair Share Act takes effect, creating a separate ratepayer class for data centers and requiring them to cover their own energy and infrastructure costs rather than spreading them across residential and commercial customers ^[2][5].

The arithmetic is not subtle. One megawatt of continuous load consumes 8,760 megawatt-hours in a year, so Virginia's rate works out to roughly $96,360 per megawatt per year at full utilisation, or about $9.6 million annually for a 100 MW campus ^[1][2][3]. Crypto Briefing puts the gap between a taxing state and a non-taxing one at tens of millions of dollars a year for a single large facility ^[8]. That is a recurring operating line that sits ahead of depreciation, ahead of GPU refresh, and entirely outside the vendor negotiation most capacity plans obsess over.

The cap is the design detail worth modelling. At $0.011 per kWh, $600 million of collections corresponds to about 54.5 terawatt-hours of taxed consumption before the ceiling binds ^[4]. Virginia hosts the densest concentration of data centers on the planet ^[9], so the question of how that cap is apportioned once aggregate load approaches the threshold is a real variable in any 2028 opex model, and the source material does not say how it will be allocated. Anyone treating the rate as a flat, permanent per-kWh charge is guessing in one direction; anyone assuming relief is guessing in the other.

This is not two states. Virginia, New Jersey and more than 40 others are enacting or considering bills touching zoning, energy tariffs, tax exemptions and environmental impacts ^[3]. Across 2025 and 2026 the mechanisms have included new utility tariffs, the removal of equipment tax exemptions that made construction cheaper, and mandatory community benefits reviews before ground is broken ^[4]. Federally, Senator Mark Warner introduced the Data Center Tax Accountability and Disclosure Act in July 2026, which would force disclosure of the incentives operators receive and whether the promised local benefits materialised ^[5]. Senator Ron Wyden went further in an August 2026 white paper, floating gross receipts taxes on data center operations ^[6]. Gross receipts taxes apply to revenue rather than profit ^[7], which matters because it removes the structuring options that make effective tax rates negotiable.

The reported consequence is already visible: according to the same account, reports indicate nearly half of the new US data centers planned for 2026 have been delayed or cancelled ^[10]. Causation is not established there, and demand is not the obvious suspect. Meanwhile Microsoft, Amazon and Google are under scrutiny for their energy consumption, with some operators offering voluntary pledges to cover additional energy costs ^[11] -- a fairly reliable signal that they expect the involuntary version to arrive anyway.

Three things to watch. Whether Virginia publishes an apportionment method for the $600 million cap before July 1 ^[1]. How New Jersey's new ratepayer class is actually tariffed, and how much of the clean-energy incentive built into the Act is usable ^[2]. And whether the cancelled 2026 projects reappear in other states rather than disappearing, which would tell you siting is relocating rather than contracting ^[10][3].