Executive Order 22 bars Virginia executive-branch agencies from entering into or requiring nondisclosure agreements that block public disclosure of material data-center information, cuts off VEDP site-readiness and expedited-review assistance for new projects at 25 MW or more of anticipated peak demand, and forms a rapid-response AI Task Force that directs state officials and no private party

Two directives operate on signing; the rest are deliverables

The effective-date clause on page 9 provides that the order "shall become effective upon its signing and shall remain in full force and effect unless amended or rescinded by further executive order", and the attestation dates the signing to 18 September 2026. That makes the whole order in force, and several things happen on that date: a lead office is designated, a Task Force and a Unit are formed, two Youngkin instruments are rescinded and a groundwater area is named. But only two provisions change today what the state may do in its dealings with a data-center developer, and both of them constrain the state's own side of the table.

The first is Part I.B.2, headed State Agency Transparency and Banning Nondisclosure Agreements, on page 4. The second is Part I.B.4, headed Exclusion From State Site-Readiness and Expedited-Review Programs, on page 5, which opens with the words "Effective upon issuance of this Executive Order". Both are in force now and both are addressed to executive-branch bodies.

Beyond those two, Part I is instructions to coordinate, update, develop, evaluate, engage, advocate or submit. The Office of the Chief Energy Officer is designated as the lead for the Data Center Accountability Framework in Part I.A, and the sections that follow hand it and the Department of Environmental Quality, Virginia Energy, the Secretary of Labor, Virginia Works and the Department of Forestry a set of plans and reports due to the Governor. None of those sections adopts a rule, sets a noise limit, designates a certification or imposes a reporting duty on a data-center operator. We set out the clocks below.

The nondisclosure bar binds agencies, and it preserves what they already signed

Part I.B.2 provides that no executive-branch agencies, departments, boards, commissions, authorities or other employees under the Governor's supervision shall enter into, and are otherwise prohibited from enforcing or requiring, "a nondisclosure agreement that prevents public disclosure of material information concerning a proposed commercial data center development, its public incentives, anticipated resource demands, or its potential community impacts", as of the order's effective date. This is in force. The word shall in that sentence is the order's own, and the bodies it reaches are the ones the Governor supervises.

The same paragraph carries two limits that a headline would lose. It states that "Executive branch agencies are expected to honor existing contractual commitments and nondisclosure agreements". And it frames the forward-looking prohibition with an exception: "absent extraordinary circumstances including matters related to national security, any future nondisclosure agreement involving a proposed data center development would violate this Executive Order." Existing agreements are not voided. A future agreement is a violation of the order unless it falls within extraordinary circumstances, of which national security is the one example given.

Who is outside the sentence matters as much as who is inside it. Localities are not named. The General Assembly is not named. The State Corporation Commission appears elsewhere in the order as a body the Chief Energy Officer is to engage with, not as an addressee of I.B.2. Private parties are not addressed at all. So the order does not ban data-center nondisclosure agreements in Virginia; it bars the executive branch from being party to the ones described. On our reading, the practical consequence for a developer is this: a Virginia executive-branch agency is expected to honor the agreements it already has, but, absent extraordinary circumstances such as national security, it can no longer agree to a new term that would keep those four categories of material information out of public view, whatever the developer asks for.

The 25 MW exclusion withdraws assistance; it is not a permit decision

Part I.B.4 reads in full: "Effective upon issuance of this Executive Order, VEDP shall not provide assistance through the Virginia Business Ready Sites Program, any expedited permitting program, or any similar discretionary state economic development, site-readiness, or expedited review program for a new data center project with an anticipated peak electrical demand of 25 MW or greater." That is the whole provision.

Three features of the sentence set its reach. The actor is VEDP, the Virginia Economic Development Partnership. The subject is discretionary assistance programs, of which the Business Ready Sites Program and expedited permitting programs are the named examples. The threshold is measured by anticipated peak electrical demand, and the project has to be new. The order does not say how anticipated peak demand is to be determined or by whom, and we do not supply a method.

What the provision does not touch is the rest of the approval chain. It makes no reference to a State Corporation Commission certificate, a DEQ permit, a local zoning or site-plan decision, or a utility interconnection. A 25 MW project can still be proposed, permitted and built under whatever law otherwise applies; what it can no longer obtain is VEDP's discretionary site-readiness or expedited-review help. This is a withdrawal of state assistance, not a moratorium, a freeze or a permit decision.

The order also points at a future mechanism that does not exist yet. Part I.B.3 directs the Chief Energy Officer to develop VA-LEAD, a Virginia Local Energy and Accountable Data Centers designation with a tiered scoring system, and provides that "Once established, the VA-LEAD program shall serve as the baseline for how executive branch agencies align incentives and administrative services to prioritize developers that achieve the highest tier of responsible development." The proposed criteria and implementation plan are to be submitted to the Governor by the end of calendar year 2027, which is a latest date for that submission, not a start date for the programme. EO 22 does not itself establish any qualifying tier; the criteria are still to be proposed, and the 25 MW exclusion in I.B.4 operates on its own terms, independent of any future VA-LEAD scoring.

The clocks: 120, 180 and 240 days, and end-2027

The order sets its deadlines as day counts from the order's date, plus one calendar-year date, and it is effective on signing, so on our reading each period runs from 18 September 2026. Converted by our count, 120 days lands on 16 January 2027, 180 days on 17 March 2027 and 240 days on 16 May 2027. Those calendar dates are ours, not the order's.

One item runs on the 120-day clock: Part I.B.1 directs the Office of the Chief Energy Officer to publish an initial Data Center Planning and Community Engagement Toolkit for local governments and communities, with model information requests and disclosure templates, model approaches for community-benefit agreements and mitigation recommendations among its contents.

Six items run on the 180-day clock, each addressed to a state actor and each a plan, a set of findings or criteria rather than a rule. DEQ owes the Governor a proposed accelerated timeline, workplan and stakeholder-engagement plan for a noise rulemaking (I.C.1), and the same for a cooling-water-scarcity-area rule (I.C.3). DEQ, consulting the Department of Health and Virginia Energy, owes findings and recommendations from a cumulative-impact review of diesel and other backup generation (I.C.2); the review is to consider "measures to promote retrofit of Tier II gen-sets to Tier IV or equivalent emissions controls", which is a subject for consideration, not a retrofit mandate. Virginia Energy is to evaluate and solicit input on siting opportunities (I.C.4). The Chief Energy Officer owes an update on methane-reduction findings (I.E.3). And Virginia Works, in consultation with the Secretary of Labor, is to develop criteria for project-level workforce data collection and reporting (I.F.2), for incorporation into VA-LEAD as applicable; that assignment sits with Virginia Works, not with the Secretary of Labor alone, and the order directs that whatever requirements it develops be incorporated into VA-LEAD as applicable; it imposes no reporting duty on any developer itself.

Virginia Energy's siting recommendations are the single 240-day item (I.C.4), and the VA-LEAD proposal is the single end-2027 item (I.B.3). Two further provisions carry no clock and a condition or an ambiguity worth flagging. Part I.E.1 directs the Chief Energy Officer to work with the SCC and utilities on emergency curtailment procedures for data centers that have not brought their own new capacity under PJM's Interim Resource Adequacy Service, "when such proposal is approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission"; the order does not say that approval has occurred and we have not checked. Part I.C.3 states that "The Eastern Virginia Groundwater Management Area shall be designated as a cooling water scarcity area." The preceding sentence directs DEQ to develop the regulations that would set criteria for such designations, and the text does not say whether the naming is self-executing or takes effect through that future rule. We report the designation as the order states it and attach no permit consequence to it.

Part II builds a task force, names six developers, and gives them nothing to do

Part II, on page 8, opens with the Governor's purpose and then the direction: "To address the unparalleled risks posed by unregulated AI development while steering AI development in directions that maximize its promise to work in service of Virginians, I hereby direct the formation of a rapid-response AI Task Force." The order provides that the Task Force "shall be co-led by the Chief Transformation Officer, Counsel to the Governor, and Secretary of Administration", and that the Chief Transformation Officer is responsible for coordinating the required actions with support from "an AI Policy Planning Unit, which is hereby established as part of the Office of the Chief Transformation Officer." No membership size, staffing level, budget, meeting cadence or sunset appears; the Task Force reports to the Governor "on a continuous and ongoing basis until terminated at my direction."

Seven immediate actions follow. In the order's own sequence: address AI risks through executive and legislative action, including workforce displacement and data privacy, and build the expertise and government systems to do so; evaluate Virginia law and precedent "to identify existing enforcement and regulatory options" against AI harms; identify and assess cybersecurity risks to state systems and critical infrastructure "from AI agents, bots, and other developments"; partner with other Governors, federal and international leaders and philanthropy; support Commonwealth-wide efforts on secure and responsible AI use; coordinate with frontier developers; and engage outside experts. The sixth is the one that names names: the Task Force is to "coordinate with all relevant artificial intelligence frontier developers, including Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft, to address the risks, mitigations, and people-first design requirements". The word including makes that list illustrative; Google is not on it, and we do not add anyone to it.

Here is the desk's reading of what Part II does to a private party, which is nothing express. Every shall in Part II attaches to the Task Force, to the Chief Transformation Officer, or to Secretariats and executive-branch agencies, which the order says shall support the Task Force on request and treat its requests as urgent. The only verb pointed at the developers is coordinate with. Nothing in Part II requires, prohibits, registers, audits or penalises any act of a developer; the only reporting obligation in Part II is the Task Force's own report to the Governor, and the phrase people-first design requirements sits inside that coordination instruction as a topic to address, not as a design standard the order enacts. The order does not say any named company has agreed to take part, was consulted, or has responded, and it contains no sentence stating that it does not bind private parties. Our conclusion rests on the addressees and the verbs, and we state it as ours.

The preamble that precedes Part II is argument, and we attribute it. The Governor writes that "In the absence of federal leadership, states must do more to address the risks that unregulated AI presents to safeguard people and communities." She writes that certain AI companies have revealed instances of terroristic uses and that new models have escaped their developers' control and broken laws; no company and no incident is named for those statements, and the order cites no source. The title's nation-leading and the text's lead the nation are the order's self-descriptions. None of that is a finding of ours.

What is rescinded, and what survives

Under the heading Effective Date of the Executive Order on page 9: "This Executive Order rescinds Executive Order No. 30 (Jan. 18, 2024) and Executive Directive No. 5 (Sept. 20, 2023) issued by Governor Glenn Youngkin. The policies, standards, and guidelines published pursuant to Executive Order No. 30 shall remain in effect unless or until replaced through a future executive or agency action."

The two halves of that clause have to be read together. EO 30 is rescinded as an instrument, but the material published under it stays in force until something replaces it, and the replacing act can be executive or agency action. Nothing is said about material published under Executive Directive 5, and we do not fill that gap.

EO 22 itself does not describe either Youngkin instrument. From a Wayback Machine capture of Executive Order Number Thirty (2024), an image-only scan of which we read page 1 for its title, that title is Implementation of Standards for the Safe Use of Artificial Intelligence Across the Commonwealth. We describe it as Youngkin's January 2024 order on state-government AI safety standards and go no further. We did not obtain Executive Directive 5 and identify it only as EO 22 does. For a state contractor or agency operating under the EO 30 standards, the operative effect on 18 September 2026 is continuity: the standards remain, and EO 22 sets no AI procurement rule, no state-government AI use restriction and no replacement standard of its own.

What we did not verify

What we opened: the nine-page signed PDF of Executive Order 22 (2026) as served from the Governor of Virginia's website, retained with SHA-256 ac73834d160242c3a6cb68ac4d862b2da5c3708419d68dfdf262e05c301cbbd0, and its text layer, read end to end from the title on page 1 through the seven Part II actions on page 8 and the rescission, effective-date and attestation clauses on page 9; the rendered page 9, on which the Governor's signature appears above her printed name and the Secretary of the Commonwealth's signature above hers; the Governor's executive-actions listing, which dates EO-22 to September 18, 2026 and links the same PDF path; and page 1 only of an image-only Wayback Machine capture of Youngkin's Executive Order Number Thirty (2024), read for its title.

What we did not open: the Governor's 18 September 2026 press release, whose stored fetch returned the newsroom index rather than the release, so nothing here rests on it; Executive Directive 5 (2023); the body of EO 30 beyond page 1; the policies, standards and guidelines published under EO 30; sections 2.2-103 and 2.2-110 of the Code of Virginia; the Virginia Business Ready Sites Program rules; any DEQ, VEDP, Virginia Energy or Virginia Works action taken since the order; and any PJM, SCC or Federal Energy Regulatory Commission filing on the Interim Resource Adequacy Service or the Reliability Backstop Procurement. We describe those instruments and bodies only as this order describes them.

What we refuse to claim: we do not call the order a moratorium, freeze or ban on data centers, because Part I.B.4 withdraws VEDP assistance and nothing else. We do not say nondisclosure agreements are banned for localities, the General Assembly, the SCC or private parties, because Part I.B.2 names executive-branch bodies and employees under the Governor's supervision. We do not say existing agreements are voided, because the order says agencies are expected to honor them. We do not say noise limits, cooling-water rules, generator retrofits, VA-LEAD tiers or workforce-reporting duties exist, because each is a plan, review or set of criteria still to be produced. We do not restate the 25 MW threshold as capacity, load or connection size. We do not say any of the six named developers has agreed to coordinate, was consulted or faces any obligation, and we do not say the Task Force can license, audit or penalise anyone. We give no staffing, budget or membership figure for the Task Force or the Unit, because the order gives none. We do not report nation-leading, or the preamble's statements about federal inaction and AI incidents, as our findings. We do not describe the contents of EO 30 beyond its title, or the contents of Executive Directive 5 at all. We do not say FERC has approved the IRAS proposal or that the Eastern Virginia Groundwater Management Area designation has any present permit effect. Calendar deadlines in this article are our arithmetic from 18 September 2026; the order states day counts and one calendar year. Where the words must or shall appear above, they are quoting or closely reporting the order's own text, which is in force.

Informational analysis for working professionals, not legal advice. Confirm how any rule applies to your situation with qualified counsel.

Related briefings

• New York Executive Order 62 and the hyperscale data-center moratorium
• Pennsylvania Executive Order 2026-05 and the grid-based data-center permit gate
• FERC and PJM rules on AI data-center grid connection
• North America AI regulation tracker
• AI Regulation News hub