Two large US East Coast data center markets repriced hyperscaler power on the same day. On June 30, 2026, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger signed the Commonwealth’s 2026 biennial budget (HB 30), imposing a Data Center Electricity Consumption Tax of $0.011 per kilowatt-hour effective July 1, capped at $600 million a year with pro-rata refunds above the cap, sunset June 30, 2028 (Williams Mullen legal update, July 1, 2026; mgrid.org, June 30, 2026). The same day, the New Jersey General Assembly passed bill A796, which lowers the threshold for a mandatory data center tariff from 100 to 50 megawatts, forces qualifying loads to take-or-pay for 85 percent of requested service over 10 years, and puts them at the front of the curtailment line ahead of residential customers. The bill sits on Governor Mikie Sherrill’s desk (mgrid.org, June 30, 2026, citing Utility Dive, NRDC, WHYY).

What’s happening

• The Virginia tax applies to every “data center operator” at $0.011 per kWh each month, collected by the electric utility and remitted directly to the State Corporation Commission for self-supplied electricity, including behind-the-meter generation (Williams Mullen, July 1, 2026).
• Facilities whose primary function is providing internet-access or communications service are exempt, which narrows the taxable base toward the AI and cloud-compute campuses driving Virginia’s load growth (Williams Mullen, July 1, 2026).
• At $0.011 per kWh, a 500 MW campus owes about $48 million a year and a 1 GW campus about $100 million, roughly a 10 percent adder to a typical data center’s effective electricity rate. First payment is due September 2026 (mgrid.org, June 30, 2026).
• New Jersey A796 requires any 50 MW-plus data center to post financial guarantees for an 85 percent take-or-pay floor over 10 years, and the Board of Public Utilities gets a mandate to set attributable-cost tariffs. NRDC called the breadth of the BPU mandate “first in the nation” (mgrid.org, June 30, 2026).
• Also on June 30, PJM stakeholders endorsed a $555 per megawatt-day data center backstop auction. One day later, Henrico County (Richmond area) told staff to cut power use as data centers drove a 25 percent local rate hike (mgrid.org, June 30 and July 1, 2026).

US angle

Virginia matters here more than any other state would. Loudoun County alone hosts roughly 4 gigawatts of installed data center IT capacity in 2025 with another 2 to 3 gigawatts in active development, and industry estimates put about 35 percent of global internet traffic through the Ashburn-Sterling corridor, which hosts AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Meta, Equinix, and Digital Realty at scale (LSARS Loudoun County data center directory, 2026; Data Center Dynamics analysis, 2026). The tax lands on the densest concentration of hyperscaler capacity on the planet.

The two mechanisms are different. Virginia taxes the electron: every kilowatt-hour a campus consumes pays. New Jersey taxes the reservation: any 50 MW-plus load must pay for 85 percent of what it asked for whether it draws it or not. Both close the same loophole. Virginia’s behind-the-meter clause defeats the arbitrage of on-site gas or solar generation used elsewhere to escape utility rates. New Jersey’s take-or-pay defeats the tactic of overstating load to reserve grid capacity. Ohio (AEP Ohio tariff, PUCO 2024) is the precedent both are copying and both are hardening.

Brazil angle

The state-cost pressure lands directly across the pitch Brazil’s Northeast has been making. On July 6, 2026, EPE (the federal energy-planning agency) released a study mapping up to 4 GW of new energy-intensive load in the Northeast, including data centers, green hydrogen, and industry, against a regional peak of about 16 GW. Between January and April 2026, roughly 79 percent of all electricity Brazil was forced to curtail happened in the Northeast, a large slug of already-built clean generation being thrown away for lack of transmission (Rio Times, July 6, 2026, citing EPE press briefing).

Brazil operates well under a single gigawatt of installed data centers today, but connection requests have surged past 26 gigawatts nationally. Investors are waiting on the Redata incentive law, which EPE has described as the trigger that decides where projects land. A regional development bank official was blunter at a Fortaleza conference: the constraint is the grid, not the cash (Rio Times, July 6, 2026). Virginia and New Jersey do not by themselves route a hyperscaler contract to Ceará. They do compress the margin on the incumbent alternative.

China angle

China runs the opposite mechanism. The Eastern Data Western Computing initiative moves new data center load into Ningxia, Inner Mongolia, Guizhou, and Sichuan, where distributed solar can settle as low as 0.19 yuan per kilowatt-hour against up to 0.43 yuan per kilowatt-hour in coastal load centers. New Chinese data centers are also required to source 80 percent of electricity from renewables, a higher obligation than most other energy-intensive industries face (Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, February 2026).

The read is not that Virginia is copying China. It is that both governments have concluded, from opposite directions, that at hyperscale power siting is not a free variable. Beijing steers by price and quota. Richmond and Trenton are trying to steer by tax and take-or-pay. Same underlying problem.

What it means

The tax is a marginal cost adder, not a business-model breaker. Absorbable at the campus level and small on the state budget scale ($600 million cap against a roughly $205 billion Virginia biennium). What is not absorbable is the signal: state-level power taxes on data centers are inside the Overton window on both sides of the Delaware River in the same 12 hours. The question over the next 18 months is which of Ohio, Georgia, Texas, Arizona, and Illinois copies it first.

What to watch

• Governor Mikie Sherrill’s signature or veto on A796 by mid-July. A signature turns the June 30 template into a two-state pattern (mgrid.org citing Assemblyman David Bailey Jr., June 30, 2026).
• The Virginia State Corporation Commission’s implementation guidance, due within 60 days of enactment (i.e. by late August 2026), which will clarify treatment of self-generated electricity, reporting, and refund mechanics (Williams Mullen, July 1, 2026).
• Redata law progress in Brasília and any EPE update on the Nordeste transmission pipeline. Publication of a Redata timeline is the switch that turns 26 GW of pending Brazilian data center requests into siting decisions (Rio Times, July 6, 2026, citing EPE president).