✍️ Petition: Media Must Cover VA Budget as Big Tech Giveaway

Virginia just struck a budget deal that preserved a $2 billion annual sales tax exemption for data centers — some of the most profitable companies on earth — while ordinary Virginians pay sales tax on everything they buy and watch their electricity bills climb. The compromise does impose a new energy consumption tax on data centers, but caps revenues at $600 million per year, and crucially, any money collected above that cap gets refunded — not to residents, but back to the data center operators. One developer announced a major new project almost immediately after the deal passed, which tells you everything about how threatening the industry found it.

This is not a neutral budget story. It is a story about who state government works for. Residents in Northern Virginia have spent years watching data centers consume their land, strain their power grids, and drive up their energy rates — while the industry pockets billions in tax breaks. Lawmakers heard from their constituents. Then they cut a deal with Big Tech anyway.

We call on the media to cover Virginia's data center budget compromise not as a wonky tax policy story, but as a clear-cut accountability story about corporate power winning over constituent will. Voters in Utah just ousted a state Senate president over a data center deal. New York passed a statewide moratorium. Virginia's lawmakers are next on the ballot in 2027 — and the public deserves reporting that makes that connection explicit.