Resources for Regulating Data Centers
With the rapid buildout of data centers across the country, states must have strong policies to mitigate their impacts on climate and local communities. While these resource-intensive facilities may support economic development, they also pose significant challenges for states related to ensuring energy affordability, decreasing fossil fuel dependency, bolstering grid reliability, and conserving local land and water resources. It’s important for state policymakers and advocates to consider how they can ensure the rise in data centers fits within their larger clean energy and economic goals, while also protecting communities.
Enacting effective data center regulations is a key priority for climate and energy advocates. Each state faces its own unique landscape of challenges, requiring advocates and policymakers to prioritize different factors in their approaches to regulating these facilities. Climate XChange is working to support state advocates and policymakers to understand the landscape of data center policy tools, build on lessons learned from network members, and ultimately enact robust, enforceable, and comprehensive data center regulations in their states.
Note: With the rapid buildout of data centers across the country, states must have strong policies to prevent their negative impacts on the environment, climate, energy systems, and local communities. Climate XChange’s policy toolkits, educational programming, and technical assistance are solely focused on addressing these impacts. Our organization is not involved in advocacy, nor does it have the expertise to assess the broader societal and economic effects of widespread artificial intelligence adoption in the United States.
Sign up to receive our resources on state-level data center regulations as they’re released.
Data Center Events
With the rapid buildout of data centers across the country, states must have strong policies to mitigate their impacts on climate and local communities. While these resource-intensive facilities may support economic development, they also pose significant challenges for states related to ensuring energy affordability, decreasing fossil fuel dependency, bolstering grid reliability, and conserving local land and water resources. It’s important for state policymakers and advocates to consider how they can ensure the rise in data centers fits within their larger clean energy and economic goals, while also protecting communities.
Enacting effective data center regulations is a key priority for climate and energy advocates. Each state faces its own unique landscape of challenges, requiring advocates and policymakers to prioritize different factors in their approaches to regulating these facilities. Climate XChange is working to support state advocates and policymakers to understand the landscape of data center policy tools, build on lessons learned from network members, and ultimately enact robust, enforceable, and comprehensive data center regulations in their states.
Note: With the rapid buildout of data centers across the country, states must have strong policies to prevent their negative impacts on the environment, climate, energy systems, and local communities. Climate XChange’s policy toolkits, educational programming, and technical assistance are solely focused on addressing these impacts. Our organization is not involved in advocacy, nor does it have the expertise to assess the broader societal and economic effects of widespread artificial intelligence adoption in the United States.
Sign up to receive our resources on state-level data center regulations as they’re released.
State Policy Toolkits for Data Center Regulation
Climate XChange is releasing five toolkits describing state policies addressing data center impacts on water, electricity affordability and reliability, greenhouse gas emissions, tax and employment justice, and transparency concerns.
Water Impacts
In this toolkit, we analyzed over 160 state-level bills from 2025 and 2026 sessions across the country to identify policy tools that protect water supply, quality, and rates.
Electricity Affordability and Reliability
In this toolkit, we analyzed state-level bills from 2025 and 2026 sessions across the country to identify policy tools that address data centers’ impacts on electricity affordability and reliability.
Read More About Data Center Regulations
Webinar Recap: State Policy Solutions for Data Center Water Impacts
As data centers continue to threaten local resources, ratepayers, and communities, understanding how these facilities impact water supply and infrastructure is essential. State policy actors have a vast array of tools and policy mechanisms for regulating water usage, discharge, and...
Research Brief: Identifying Priority States for Data Center Regulation
The United States is seeing record buildout of data centers, in large part due to the AI boom and generous tax incentives across states. These facilities pose unprecedented risks to our water resources, climate and clean energy targets, energy affordability,...
Lessons Learned for Data Center Regulation: A Conversation with Minnesota Advocates
With growing demand for artificial intelligence and the expansion of cloud computing, increased data center deployment poses a key threat to countless public interest issues: energy affordability, grid reliability, and local water and air quality, to name a few. While...
Webinar Recap: Where States Stand on Data Centers — Exploring Climate Impacts and Policy Approaches
Enacting effective data center regulations has been a key priority for climate and energy advocates in 2025. Without meaningful policy guardrails, unchecked data center development threatens water resources, energy affordability, grid reliability, and public health. Each state faces its own...
Recap: Data Centers and State Climate Policy
With the rapid buildout of data centers across the country, states must have strong policies to mitigate their impacts to the climate and local communities. While these resource-intensive facilities may support economic development, they also pose significant challenges for states...