THE COMMONWEALTH THIS WEEK

August 23-August 29, 2026 | Virginia This Week

THE BIG PICTURE

This was the week Virginia's data center reckoning stopped being a series of local skirmishes and revealed itself as a coordinated, three-front campaign. The State Corporation Commission ordered Dominion to design a tariff assigning transmission costs directly to large-load customers. PJM asked federal regulators to make new data centers "bring their own power." The General Assembly advanced a $205 billion budget with a new data center tax. Loudoun Supervisor Juli Briskman announced a run for board chair on a platform of "stopping data centers." Fairfax formally adopted the Lake Fairfax Business Center plan amendment. Read separately, each of these is a zoning story or a rate case. Read together, they are the outline of a Commonwealth strategy: state law will dictate where and how these facilities can be built, the regulator will make them pay for their own wires, and localities will write the fine print on setbacks, noise, and water. The industry that made Northern Virginia the world's cloud capital is being asked, for the first time, to internalize the costs it externalized for a decade.

The second thread this week was enforcement — Virginia's institutions using settlements and court orders to reshape corporate and administrative behavior. Attorney General Jay Jones locked in $353 million from a nearly $17 billion multistate Meta settlement over youth-harm design features. EDVA reached a tentative deferred prosecution agreement with Chesapeake Regional Medical Center that includes a $12.8 million victim compensation fund. And U.S. District Judge John Gibney told the Commonwealth its felony-disenfranchisement machinery is still sweeping too broadly, potentially having blocked hundreds of thousands of voters from the August primary. Big tech, a health system, and the Department of Elections all got the same message from three different directions: the era of loose implementation is over.

The tension holding the week together is straightforward. Governor Abigail Spanberger's Executive Orders 19 and 20 — one on unified emergency readiness, one on protecting Medicaid and SNAP coverage against the federal OBBBA cuts — sketch an administration trying to build mitigation systems for a federal environment it cannot control. Everywhere you look this week, Virginia is trying to catch up to problems its own growth and Washington's volatility created. The instruments are unglamorous: tariffs, ordinances, workgroups, deferred prosecutions. The stakes are not.

THIS WEEK IN VIRGINIA

The three-layer squeeze on data centers finally takes shape

The SCC's order directing Dominion Energy to design a tariff that directly assigns new transmission costs to data centers and other large-load users — first reported August 5 and reinforced by Governor Spanberger's August 19 budget remarks — landed this week alongside a parallel move from grid operator PJM, which filed a proposal with federal regulators requiring new large-load customers to "bring their own power". The SCC's directive seeks a "symmetrical" method so that the grid build-outs required by hyperscale campuses do not get socialized onto residential ratepayers, a shift the Governor endorsed in her August budget address.

Layered on top: legislators advanced a $205 billion budget carrying a new data center tax, per Virginia Mercury, and Loudoun County supervisors voted 6–1 to direct staff to draft a "pause" option on new applications, with a staff report due September 15, after their attorney warned that a true Dillon Rule moratorium may be illegal. Prince William already voided the Digital Gateway rezoning and unanimously denied the 2,000-acre Dulles Cloud South project on July 9. Fairfax adopted the Lake Fairfax Business Center plan amendment on August 25, steering a mature Reston business park toward mixed-use redevelopment while explicitly addressing coexistence with existing data-center parcels.

The politics caught up on Monday. Loudoun Supervisor Juli Briskman announced a run for board chair with "stopping data centers" as her stated top priority — the clearest signal yet that the county that built Data Center Alley is now willing to make the industry the defining electoral issue.

What to watch: the pressure is already displacing south. Spotsylvania logged 21 data center permit filings in 2026 — 12 from AWS, with 7 from PowerHouse Data Centers and 2 from RCK Digital Crossroads, across three operators total, with AWS projecting $6 billion in investment over the next decade — and Southside jurisdictions are drafting Henry County-style ordinances that will make each new county a fresh underwriting exercise for developers. The real question by year-end is not whether Virginia is still open for data centers. It is what the industry will pay to stay.

Jones books $353 million from Meta as the AG's playbook comes into focus

Attorney General Jay Jones announced this week that Virginia will receive $353 million from a nearly $17 billion multistate settlement with Meta over alleged design features that harmed children and teens on Instagram and Facebook. The settlement follows Virginia's separate suit alleging violations of COPPA and the Virginia Consumer Protection Act, and it landed after a "critical" pretrial win in the Oakland proceedings where opening statements were delivered August 18.

The dollar figure is the headline; the direction of travel is the story. Jones now has one of the largest single settlement pots in recent Virginia AG history to deploy against youth mental health and technology harms, precisely as UVA Health named a leading psychiatrist and addiction medicine specialist to chair its Department of Psychiatry and as VDOE convenes an Alternate Route to Licensure Workgroup for teacher supply. The infrastructure to spend the money on the problem the money was recovered for is being built in parallel.

Watch the disbursement schedule and the compliance timeline for Meta's design-side reforms — if either slips, the settlement risks becoming a revenue story rather than a child-safety story. Watch, too, whether next session's General Assembly writes any of these dollars into a durable budget line rather than one-time grants.

Gibney tells Virginia its voter rolls are still wrong

U.S. District Judge John Gibney ruled this week that Virginia officials are still applying the state's felony-disenfranchisement rules too broadly, and said that potentially hundreds of thousands of Virginians may have been blocked from casting ballots in the August primary. The judge pointed to guidance still living on the Department of Elections website and to what he called inadequate state-level compliance — an implementation failure, not just a legal theory.

The ruling puts the Attorney General, ELECT, and local registrars on a short clock heading into the fall election cycle. It also sits directly on top of a separate political fight over Virginia's 45-day early voting period and on Governor Spanberger's Executive Order 20, which directs DMAS and DSS to reduce administrative barriers and expand navigator staffing after federal OBBBA changes.

The connective tissue: Virginia's administrative state is being asked to absorb constitutional, federal, and demographic pressure through systems that were not designed for the churn. Whether it is a registrar's office, a Medicaid call center, or DEQ air permits, the same story is playing out — implementation is the new policy battleground.

EDVA reaches for a $12.8 million victim fund at Chesapeake Regional

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia reached a tentative deferred prosecution agreement with Chesapeake Regional Medical Center over conspiracy and health care fraud charges tied to allegedly unnecessary surgical procedures performed by OB-GYN Dr. Javaid Perwaiz. Under the deal, revealed August 19, the hospital must establish a $12.8 million victim compensation fund for patients whose records show Perwaiz-performed procedures, plus new compliance and oversight requirements.

This is one of Virginia's most significant health-care fraud resolutions in recent years, and it sits alongside the Meta settlement as a matched pair: EDVA and the AG's office using large-dollar resolutions and compliance obligations to reshape institutional behavior rather than seeking marquee convictions. For Coastal Virginia hospital systems, the deferred prosecution structure — hospital survives, victim fund is real, compliance regime is durable — is now the reference case.

Watch for whether the final agreement's oversight benchmarks include third-party monitors or utilization-review requirements. Those details will drive how much this changes surgical practice audits at other Virginia hospitals.

NOVA's federal economy runs hot and cold in the same week

Chantilly-based Amentum won a $974 million, 10-year contract to support NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton — maintenance, engineering, and technology work anchoring a long-term technical workforce. The Pentagon's Washington Headquarters Services awarded Herndon-based Applied Environmental Inc. up to $50 million in environmental and resiliency technical support work, and Centreville's Parsons picked up a $664.8 million multi-year IDIQ for technical and logistics support.

In the same window, General Dynamics Information Technology told Virginia officials that 174 Pentagon workers may face layoffs beginning August 8, on top of earlier notices in Falls Church and Arlington that bring the running total to as many as 410 affected workers. Arlington's commercial real estate and local tax base will feel the churn; so will Loudoun and Fairfax, which are already recalibrating land use around it.

Add the Arlington-heavy $1.05 billion valuation for data-center optimization startup Emerald AI after a $150 million Series A this week, and the picture sharpens: Northern Virginia's economy is not contracting, but it is rotating — from headcount-heavy federal services toward capital-heavy infrastructure software and specialized federal engineering. The workforce dislocations are real. So is the venture money betting on what comes next.

Two universities pivot toward the workforce Virginia actually needs

James Madison University rolled out The Madison Promise, a strategic roadmap through 2032 and beyond emphasizing student housing, employer partnerships, doctoral growth, and statewide economic impact. Coastal Virginia's Batten University (formerly Virginia Wesleyan) confirmed that Sentara College of Health Sciences became an operating division effective July 1, expanding nursing and health-sciences capacity in Hampton Roads.

Both moves point in the same direction: universities pairing with health systems to produce more clinical workers, and openly repositioning themselves as workforce and economic-development engines. That is the direct counterpart to Spanberger's Executive Order 20 on coverage continuity and to UVA Health's psychiatry leadership shift — a health system that cannot recruit cannot execute on any of it.

Meanwhile, the Virginia Department of Education is convening an Alternate Route to Licensure Workgroup, with applications closing this week, aimed at expanding entry into teaching. The through-line for the fall session: teacher supply, clinical workforce, and youth mental health are being treated as one budget conversation, not three.

WHAT TO WATCH

• September 15, Loudoun County: Staff report due on the "pause" option for new data center applications. If the Board of Supervisors adopts a workable pause structure that survives Dillon Rule scrutiny, more than 20 pending projects lose by-right footing and neighboring counties get a template — a follow-on to the 6–1 August direction to draft options.
• Next 60–90 days, SCC Case PUR-2026-00056: Dominion must file the specific tariff and policy changes the SCC ordered on transmission cost assignment. The filed language will set the concrete rules for future large-load interconnections and directly shape 2027 project economics across NOVA and Spotsylvania.
• September 22, Fairfax County Mason District Land Use Committee: Recommendation expected on the Alexandria-opposed substation tied to a data center, ahead of Planning Commission review. First real test of whether adjacent jurisdictions get standing weight in Fairfax data-center-related infrastructure votes.
• Fall 2026, Fairfax Planning Commission: Lake Fairfax rezoning RZ-2025-HM-00002 heads to review in late September with Board action expected in October, following the plan amendment adopted August 25. If approved, roughly 49 acres shift from industrial to planned residential mixed-use — the first Reston-area test of the new "coexistence" framework.
• Fall election calendar, ELECT/AG: Implementation response to Judge Gibney's felony-disenfranchisement ruling. If ELECT does not revise its posted guidance and registrar training before early voting, expect follow-on litigation — and a live campaign issue in every competitive race.

EARLY SIGNALS

• Henry County's ordinance is now the Southside template. Adopted this week, the Henry County Data Center (D-C) district requires closed-loop cooling only, 1,000-foot setbacks from non-industrial property, a 50 dBA operational noise cap, third-party water and electrical impact studies, and decommissioning financial assurance reviewed every three years. Rural counties chasing tax base without NOVA-scale conflict now have a tested blueprint. Watch for copycat drafts along transmission corridors in the Piedmont and Shenandoah Valley within 60–90 days.
• Virginia's July 1 zoning changes are already binding — even where local ordinances haven't caught up. SB 94/HB 153, SB 553, HB 507, and HB 323 took effect this summer, imposing site-assessment, water-reporting, and Tier IV generator requirements on high-load facilities. Sophisticated applicants and opponents are beginning to weaponize state law in local fights where county codes still lag. Expect the first "state law versus local ordinance" showdown at a board meeting this fall.
• PJM's "bring your own power" filing is the federal echo of the SCC's tariff order. Read alongside each other, PJM's proposal and Virginia's transmission cost-shift are converging on the same premise: hyperscale build-out will not be socialized. Within weeks, that will change how developers pencil out new campuses across the mid-Atlantic — and how counties negotiate proffers.
• The Loudoun School Board's Supreme Court posture on Dominion powerlines. The board is laying groundwork for a potential high-court fight over transmission lines near school properties. If the case advances, transmission routing joins zoning and rates as a third front in Virginia's data-center litigation map.

COMMONWEALTH LIFE / WORTH DOING

• Charlottesville, August 29: UVA's sold-out Week 0 opener against NC State at 61,500-seat Scott Stadium is the first ACC conference game of the 2026 college football season and a nationally televised ESPN broadcast. Expect a significant lodging-and-restaurant lift for Charlottesville heading into the fall calendar.
• Richmond, weekend of August 28–29: The 69th Annual Festival of the Arts at Dogwood Dell winds down with City Dance Theater on August 28 and a "Weekend Plans" musical finale August 29, extending a run that included the 19th Annual Latin Jazz Festival on August 22.
• Coastal Virginia: The Batten University–Sentara integration begins its first full academic term as an operating division — a structural change in Hampton Roads' clinical training pipeline that will filter into hiring numbers by winter.

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