Virginia begins taxing data-center electricity at $0.011/kWh from July 1 as AirTrunk commits $21 billion to a 3 GW campus in Maharashtra — the buildout meets its first real tax and keeps going
Virginia lawmakers approved a consumption tax of $0.011 per kilowatt-hour on all electricity consumed by data centers, effective 1 July 2026. In the same month Blackstone-backed AirTrunk committed $21 billion to a 3 GW campus in Maharashtra and Meta leased its first AI data center in India. Cost pressure in one jurisdiction, acceleration in another.
The Virginia tax is the first serious attempt to make data-center power consumption carry a jurisdiction-specific cost, and Virginia matters because of how much capacity already sits there. A per-kilowatt-hour levy is a direct operating-cost line, not a one-off — it changes siting maths permanently rather than deterring a single project.
The simultaneous Indian commitments say where the pressure valve is. AirTrunk's 3 GW and Meta's Reliance lease are not responses to Virginia specifically, but they illustrate that capacity has somewhere to go. Set against the PJM event, the picture is one of load that is both increasingly expensive to host and increasingly consequential when it fails.
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