What the record shows, state by state

6. Findings

Every chain below is a dated sequence of money, action and result with a URL per link in the evidence files. A sequence is not causation. The only records in this study that establish intent are Entergy's ghost-written commission motions (WWNO, Aug 11, 2026) and Oncor's $31M in payments to a company co-founded by the Texas senator who wrote its bills (Texas Monthly, Oct 31, 2024). Everything else is reported as "took money, then acted," and should be written that way on the site.

6.1 Federal

Evidence file: evidence-federal.md (FEC API pulls dated 2026-10-14 with committee ids; lda.gov API tabulation; congress.gov, senate.gov, clerk.house.gov, Federal Register). Items re-checked against the primary record on 2026-10-14 are marked ✓.

Who paid. The federal money is of a different kind from the states': almost none of it is corporate PAC giving to members. It is super PAC money, routed through affiliates.

Two trackers put total AI-focused super PAC independent expenditure in the 2026 cycle at about $62M, roughly $27M on the "pro-innovation" side and $35M on the "pro-safety" side, with more than $30M of the underlying funds from undisclosed donors.

Who took it and what they did. Corporate PAC receipts below are FEC Schedule A rows on the member's principal committee, 2025–2026 cycle, updated on 2026-10-22 from the payer PACs' own reports in the database (fec_pac_outflows, through Aug 2026), which carry later cheques.

What happened (federal policy results, dated).

• Jan 21, 2025: Stargate announced at the White House.
• May 13, 2025: Commerce rescinded the Biden AI Diffusion rule.
• Jul 1, 2025: Senate struck the 10-year state-AI-law moratorium from H.R. 1, 99-1 ✓.
• Jul 4, 2025: One Big Beautiful Bill Act enacted (100% first-year expensing and Opportunity Zone provisions used by data centers).
• Jul 23, 2025: EO 14318, Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure (NEPA categorical exclusions, federal land, Commerce financing for >100 MW projects), with the AI Action Plan; DOE opened Idaho, Oak Ridge, Paducah and Savannah River to private AI campuses the next day.
• Oct 23, 2025: DOE Section 403 directive to FERC on large-load interconnection; Dec 18, 2025: FERC found PJM's co-location tariff unjust (EL25-49); Jun 18, 2026: six show-cause orders to the RTOs; no final rule.
• Dec 2025: second moratorium attempt omitted from the FY2026 NDAA; Dec 11, 2025: EO 14365, Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence (90 FR 58499 ✓) created the DOJ AI Litigation Task Force and BEAD funding conditions; Apr 24, 2026: DOJ intervened against Colorado's AI law alongside xAI; Jun 15, 2026: DOJ moved to dismiss the NAACP Clean Air Act suit over xAI's turbines on national-security grounds.
• Jan 15, 2026: EPA turbine rule with a conditional "nonroad engine" path for data center turbines; May 2026: EPA proposed letting construction begin before an air permit.
• Mar 4, 2026: the voluntary Ratepayer Protection Pledge signed by Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle and xAI; Sep 16, 2026: House codified it as a "consider" standard 417-3 ✓; Sep 30, 2026: Senate cloture failed 57-43 ✓.
• FERC, outside the Federal Register: Feb 20, 2025 show-cause order on co-location in PJM; Oct 23, 2025 DOE section 403 directive opening the large-load ANOPR (RM26-4-000); Dec 18, 2025 order finding PJM's tariff unjust and unreasonable for co-located load and directing new transmission services (193 FERC ¶ 61,217) ✓; Apr 16, 2026 order on compliance; Jun 18, 2026 six section 206 show-cause orders to every RTO/ISO (EL26-67 to EL26-72), with cost-recovery agreements and credit support meant to keep stranded-upgrade costs off other customers and explicit protection of existing negotiated deals ✓. The only LDA clients whose filings name the ANOPR docket are the American Public Power Association, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems; no hyperscaler filing names either docket (migration 165).
• No federal statute specific to data centers, AI preemption or ratepayer protection has been enacted as of Oct 14, 2026. Of 49 "data center"-titled bills in the 119th Congress, one passed one chamber.

Readiness. DC-1 to DC-3 landed on 2026-10-14 (migrations 208, 209 and 161, federal session; the first two ran live as 159 and 160 and were renumbered the same day). 1,325 principal campaign committees now carry FEC candidate ids, 406 person twins were merged, and the Blackburn Amdt. 2814 join returns hyperscaler-PAC money for 62 of 100 senators (it was 8 of 100): $908,850 from the five hyperscaler PACs' own filed Schedule B lines (2024 $446,850; 2026 $462,000), corporate PAC contributions (FEC Schedule B), run 2026-10-16 after migrations 203, 251 and 252. Earlier runs gave $1,007,200, $939,200, $836,350 and $880,350. The first two counted recipient-side copies of the same cheques. The later ones were taken before 203 let the PACs' own lines replace those copies, and before migrations 215, 216, 248, 251 and 252 linked more committees to their candidates. Every AI super PAC in the table above exists as an entity with its FEC id, and its 2026-cycle receipts and Schedule E reconcile to the FEC committee totals within 10% (Leading the Future $75,788,077 against $75,788,224; American Mission and Think Big exact; Jobs and Democracy PAC independent expenditures 2.0% under; Anthropic PBC PAC receipts 4.8% under because small-dollar gifts are unitemized; docs/reports/DC3-AI-SuperPAC-Reconciliation.md). Build American AI and Public First Action are 501(c)(4)s with no public donor filings, and Meta's 527s file IRS Form 8872 and Cal-Access, so none of them has FEC rows here. Meta's 527s and its California committee were loaded from those two sources on 2026-10-15, labelled as 527 nonfederal money (section 10, DC-3). The LDA figures carry the whole-filing label (DC-9).

Follow-up on 2026-10-15. Payer PACs' 2026-cycle giving reconciles to the FEC for all 14 PACs that have filed. The largest gap is Meta's at 4.0%, and NVIDIA's PAC has not filed yet (DC2-Payer-PAC-2026-Reconciliation.md). The 2024 Schedule B rows were rebuilt for 257 PACs that filed voided or uncashed checks. Each void now cancels its original instead of being stored as a second gift (FEC-ScheduleB-Void-Reingest-2024.md, with the Google and sweep repairs beside it). Migration 202 merged 156 PAC rows that duplicated a committee under a second key into 148 rows, among them Google, Microsoft, ENPAC, Constellation and Vistra. Incoming money for the merged families is unchanged and outgoing money fell by exactly the 13 duplicate rows removed ($29,750).

The 2024 cycle was then re-loaded in full for the 13 payer PACs that filed that year (DC2-Payer-PAC-2024-Reingest.md). Before, seven of them (Amazon, Dominion, Duke, Entergy, Southern, Constellation, NextEra) had no rows from their own filings, and their stored 2024 giving ran 37–75% under the FEC. Their own filed lines now reconcile for all 13, within 0.0–3.9%. The older rows built from recipients' reports had sat beside the new ones, so stored 2024 totals double-counted (Meta 130% over, NextEra 31.6%, Amazon 34.7%). Migration 203, applied on 2026-10-15, moved those 1,240 rows ($4,412,300) into a reversible archive table. Among them were gifts the legacy loader had attached to the wrong recipients by name, including embassies and foreign ministries registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). A re-run then stored the lines the duplicate rule had refused. Every stored 2024 giving row for the 13 PACs now comes from their own filings, and all 13 are within 4.0% of the FEC (DC2-Payer-PAC-2024-After-203.md).

6.2 Virginia

Evidence file: evidence-virginia.md (VPAP, LIS, SCC, county records; every row carries a URL). Virginia allows unlimited corporate contributions directly to candidates, so the money below is corporate direct giving as reported by the recipient committee unless marked otherwise.

Who paid. Dominion Energy, not a data center company, is the dominant payer. VPAP's gross figure for 2023 through mid-October 2026 is $72.1M, but $38.4M of that is Dominion's transfer into its own committee; net giving to candidates and committees is about $33.8M (2023 $10.7M, 2024 $5.2M, 2025 $13.6M, 2026 to date $4.3M, by VPAP's year filter; the ingested rows, dated by cheque, give 2025 $13.74M and 2026 $4.15M, one $100,000 landing in a different year, with the same four-year total). The data center industry's own Virginia money is an order of magnitude smaller: the Data Center Coalition PAC raised $640K since 2024 (STACK $250K, CloudHQ $175K, Vantage $100K, Amazon $75K) and gave $405K; Amazon gave $1.31M corporate-direct 2023–2026, $500,000 of it to the four caucus committees ($100,000 each, in $25,000 cheques) and one $100,000 cheque to the governor's inaugural; Google $610,000 2023–2026 (VPAP donor page re-read 2026-10-14, replacing the $150K 2026-only view in the evidence file); CloudHQ $435,500; Vantage $192,250. Meta gives in Virginia as "Facebook/Meta" (VPAP donor 168908): $33,640 corporate direct in 2023–2026, twelve cheques, eleven of them $1,000 to $7,500 to legislators in 2025 (Scott $7,500, Kilgore $5,000; Lucas, Surovell, Torian, McDougle, Peake, Bloxom, McNamara and Morefield $2,500 each; Seibold $1,000). Microsoft gave nothing in the period under either its corporate record or its Stakeholders Voluntary PAC (both re-read on VPAP 2026-10-15). QTS, Compass, Equinix and Digital Realty show no corporate giving under their own names; the developers' money surfaces instead through landowners and executives in the Prince William County races. The counterweight is Clean Virginia (Michael Bills), which funds only candidates who refuse Dominion money and gave $1.2M to Spanberger.

Verified directly against VPAP on 2026-10-14: Dominion to Speaker Don Scott's campaign and leadership PAC, $3,110,308 itemized all-time, of which $2,885,409 falls in 2023–2026 (three $200K checks on 10/10, 10/14 and 11/21/2025); Dominion's 2025 page ($28.09M gross, $14.45M self-transfer, Miyares $1.42M, Taylor $775K, Scott $500K, Locke $500K, Surovell $500K, Herring $425K, King $325K).

Who took it and what they did (the crosswalk). Dominion and industry columns are corporate or committee direct giving reported by the recipient (VPAP), 2023 through mid-October 2026, checked against the ingested rows on 2026-10-15. "Industry" means the data center payers: Amazon, Google, the Data Center Coalition PAC, CloudHQ, Vantage and STACK. Leadership committees are counted with their legislator, as VPAP associates them.

The subcommittee that tabled HB 155: Dominion money does not explain the vote. House Labor and Commerce Subcommittee #3 laid HB 155 (an SCC certificate for any new load over 25 MW) on the table 9-0 on Feb 10, 2026. Its three Republicans took Dominion money in the period: Kilgore $695,000 to his campaign (plus $327,500 to his leadership PAC), Tony Wilt $192,500, Wren Williams $155,000. Its six Democrats took none: Rip Sullivan (chair), Irene Shin, Michael Feggans, Nadarius Clark, Bonita Anthony and May Nivar. Five of the six are funded by Clean Virginia, the anti-Dominion counterweight: Feggans $512,469, Clark $414,001, Anthony $48,500, Sullivan $28,500, Nivar $25,000. The data center industry's own money to the nine is small, from $21,500 (Kilgore) to $0 (Nivar). Dominion's lobbyist and the Data Center Coalition testified against the bill. A reader should not be told that the 9-0 vote followed Dominion cheques; for six of the nine it did not.

What happened.

• The sales-and-use tax exemption (JLARC: $928M forgone in FY23; ~$1.6–1.9B/yr now) survived 2025 and 2026 intact through 2035. The Senate's repeal was traded for a temporary $0.011/kWh consumption tax capped at $600M/yr through June 2028 (budget passed June 22, 2026; Senate 36-4).
• 2025: of at least 33 data center bills, the only one with teeth that reached the governor (HB 1601 site assessment) was vetoed; SB 960 (cost allocation) died in conference; HB 2578 was tabled in subcommittee.
• 2026: HB 153/SB 94 re-passed the site assessment (its sponsor called it "the bare minimum") and HB 507 (Tier 4 generators) was enacted; HB 155/SB 619 (SCC certificate for new >25 MW load) was tabled 9-0; HB 503 (no cost recovery from other ratepayers) was continued to 2027.
• The SCC, not the legislature, made the two largest decisions, in two separate orders on Nov 25, 2025. In Dominion's biennial review (Case PUR-2025-00058) it approved base-rate increases of $565.7M for 2026 and $209.9M for 2027 against the $822M and $345M requested, set the return on equity at 9.8% (10.4% asked), and created the GS-5 rate class for customers of 25 MW or more, effective Jan 1, 2027, billed at no less than 85% of contracted distribution and transmission demand and 60% of generation demand; that order is under appeal. Amazon Data Services, Google, CloudHQ, the Data Center Coalition, Microsoft, Iron Mountain Data Centers and STACK were respondents. In Case PUR-2025-00037 it certified the 944 MW, $1.47B Chesterfield Energy Reliability Center gas plant under the Clean Economy Act's reliability exception, with cost recovery through Rider CERC; that order was suspended Dec 16, 2025, reinstated Feb 12, 2026, and appealed to the Supreme Court of Virginia on Feb 17, 2026. The Attorney General's Division of Consumer Counsel was a respondent in both. Sources: the SCC's final orders (https://www.scc.virginia.gov/docketsearch/DOCS/89g601!.PDF and https://www.scc.virginia.gov/docketsearch/DOCS/89g501!.PDF) and its docket records.
• Locally, the Digital Gateway rezoning was voided in court (Aug 2025, affirmed Mar 2026, abandoned Apr 2026); Loudoun ended by-right data centers (Mar 2025) and is voting on a 12-month pause (Oct 20, 2026); Prince William ended by-right countywide (Sept 22, 2026).

The full treatment, with the scale of the industry, the year-by-year money, the correlation between Dominion's recipient ranking and the gatekeeping votes, the timing of the cheques, political callouts and the district analysis, is in case-study-virginia.md.

Readiness. The Virginia money is in the database as of the evening of 2026-10-14 (DC-4, Virginia session, commits 8aeac75 and 9023b74): 2,553 rows, $90,890,194, 335 distinct recipient entities, every row labelled "corporate direct giving (VPAP, reported by recipient)" or "committee direct giving (VPAP, reported by recipient)". 154 of the 163 General Assembly members carry rows (Eric Phillips and Kannan Srinivasan hold theirs on separate candidate rows); the other seven appear in no payer's 2023–2026 listing. Speaker Scott reconciles at $2,885,409 ($1,720,409 campaign plus $1,165,000 to his Virginia Future Generations PAC), 92.8% of VPAP's all-time $3,110,308. The itemization is now complete for every recipient in every payer's listing (the first load reached 169 recipients; the 620 remaining recipient and committee pages were gathered through the Firecrawl connector and loaded from the cache the same evening), and the itemized rows sum to each payer's listing total to within VPAP's own $1–$4 rounding: Dominion $72,145,558 itemized against $72,145,562 listed, of which 52 self-transfer rows are exactly the $38,390,000 self-transfer, leaving $33,755,558 net; Amazon $1,314,079 against $1,314,080; Google $610,000, DCC PAC $405,000, STACK $250,000, CloudHQ $435,500 and Vantage $192,250 exact; Clean Virginia $15,504,167 exact. Inaugural committees are committee entities linked to the person by affiliated_with, so Spanberger's profile shows $0 campaign money from Dominion and the data center payers (and Clean Virginia's $1.2M), and her inaugural committee shows the $100,000 cheques, as the case study states. The chains above can now be rendered as entity-page numbers with those labels. Every figure in the crosswalk and the subcommittee paragraph was re-derived from the ingested rows on 2026-10-15 (section 11).

The outcome side is in the database too. The eight data center bills and SB 253 / HB 1393 carry their final status, dates and governor action (DC-5). The two SCC orders of Nov 25, 2025 are policy_outcomes rows (va-scc-pur-2025-00058-final-order and va-scc-pur-2025-00037-cerc-final-order, status challenged, migration 205). Each has an issued_rule edge from the SCC and a benefited edge from Dominion as applicant, and commented_on edges for Attorney General Miyares and for the data center respondents. The Miyares edge is commented_on, not shaped_policy, because the record shows his office participating, not the Commission adopting its position.

6.3 Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Illinois, Michigan, Oregon, Minnesota, California

Evidence file: evidence-states.md. Every money figure in this table now comes from the state's own filing system, pulled on 2026-10-14 by the DC-7 sessions (Texas Ethics Commission, Ohio Secretary of State, Wisconsin Ethics Commission, Indiana Election Division, Arizona See The Money, Tennessee Registry of Election Finance, Louisiana Ethics Administration, Pennsylvania Department of State, Georgia Ethics Commission, North Carolina State Board of Elections), and on 2026-10-20 for Illinois (State Board of Elections bulk files) and Michigan (MiTN contribution exports; notes in dc7-il-mi-notes.md) and Oregon (ORESTAR transaction exports; notes in dc7-or-notes.md) and Minnesota (Campaign Finance Board bulk files, 2026-10-21; notes in dc7-mn-notes.md), and California (the Cal-Access bulk export, 2026-10-21; notes in dc7-ca-notes.md). The Energy and Policy Institute (EPI), Floodlight and Food & Water Watch tallies that supplied the leads are kept in the Status column as the figures each pull was reconciled against; where a press figure could not be reproduced (Floodlight's Louisiana decade shares, which rest on an employer classification the filings do not carry) the row says so and the session notes explain the gap. Items checked directly against the primary document on 2026-10-14 are marked ✓.

6.4 Cross-state pattern: national formulation, local execution

The state fights are not fifteen separate stories. They are one policy, formulated nationally and executed locally, and the evidence for that is on the record rather than inferred:

• One ask list, one wording. Keep the sales-tax exemption; certify gas generation on data-center demand; keep cost allocation inside the utility commission and out of statute; preserve by-right or fast-track siting; no moratorium. The same four items appear in Virginia, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Tennessee, South Carolina and Arizona, often in the same phrases ("pay their own way", "reliable partner", "patchwork").
• One set of carriers. The Data Center Coalition (Leesburg, VA; revenue $583K to $2.5M in a year) lobbied in at least eight states, urged Georgia's veto, rewrote Indiana's local-payment clause in private meetings and ran an eight-state ad campaign; ALEC's model "Digital Infrastructure & Ratepayer and Resource Protection Accord" (Aug 12, 2026) opposes bans and endorses "cost responsibility", the industry's preferred frame; the White House proclaimed the industry's own voluntary pledge (Mar 2026) and enrolled 23 Republican governors and 187 utilities in it (Jul 23, 2026).
• One federal backstop. When Congress refused state-law pre-emption twice, the policy moved to EO 14365 and to DOJ litigation; when the House codified the pledge (417-3) the Senate let it die (57-43), and the binding decisions stayed where they had been all along, in PSC dockets and subcommittee tables.
• Local execution by whoever held the gavel. A House Labor and Commerce subcommittee in Richmond; a five-member commission in Atlanta; a four-to-one commission in Plaquemine; a lame-duck county board in Prince William; a city council in Port Washington voting a $458M TIF. The bodies with the least public attention carried the most consequential votes.

What reversed it was voters, acting around their representatives. Every reversal in this study came from outside the legislature that had the power to act: Georgia's PSC incumbents removed at the ballot (Nov 4, 2025); Prince William's board chair defeated in a primary over the Digital Gateway (June 2023) and the rezoning voided in court (Aug 2025, affirmed Mar 2026); Port Washington's first-in-the-nation referendum (Apr 7, 2026, ~66%); North Carolina's three override Democrats defeated in primaries (Mar 3, 2026); Tucson's 7-0 rejection under public pressure (Aug 6, 2025); the Loudoun and Prince William boards ending by-right development only after elections turned on the issue. Where a legislature then acted, voters had moved first (Arizona's pause after Tucson; New Jersey's Fair Share Act after a governor's race; Virginia's consumption tax after a governor's race in which Dominion gave the winner nothing). The polling is bipartisan: 77% fear higher bills (Reuters/Ipsos), 61% oppose a local data center (Annenberg), and more than 600 of the 700-plus 2026 campaigns that mentioned data centers in ads did so against them.

The editorial case built on this pattern, with its limits stated, is in case-study-national.md.

• The utility, not the hyperscaler, is usually the payer of record. Dominion in Virginia, Georgia Power's ecosystem, Entergy in Louisiana, Oncor/CenterPoint/Vistra/NRG in Texas, Duke in North Carolina, WEC in Wisconsin. The data center companies' direct political money is small and routed through trade groups (DCC), inaugural committees, caucus committees, charitable "community" funds, and local landowners.
• The policy asks are the same everywhere: keep the sales-tax exemption, get new gas generation certified, keep cost allocation out of statute and inside the PSC, and preserve by-right or fast-track siting. Where legislatures acted (Texas SB 6, Oregon, Missouri, New Jersey, Utah, Oklahoma, Kansas, Alabama, Tennessee) the model is "large loads pay their own way" without a moratorium; 28 moratorium bills in 14 states, none enacted (Maine's was vetoed).
• The reversals came from voters and courts, not legislatures: Georgia PSC incumbents removed (Nov 2025); Prince William's chair lost her primary and the Digital Gateway was voided in court; Port Washington's referendum; North Carolina's three override Democrats lost primaries; Tucson's 7-0 rejection. The 2026 ballot carries the Ohio Senate and governor races, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin governors, and PSC seats in Georgia, Louisiana and Arizona.
• Federal overlay: the White House "Ratepayer Protection Pledge" (Mar 2026; 23 Republican governors and 187 utilities by July 23, 2026) and the House-passed Ratepayer Protection Act (417-3, Sept 15, 2026, stalled in the Senate) are voluntary or pending; the binding decisions remain in state capitals and PSC dockets.