34 STORIES

34 STORIES / PSV ORIGINAL REPORTING

Policy & Regulation

Regulatory moves, legislation, and grid policy that reshape CRE underwriting, from data center moratoriums to housing acts.

An aerial view of the Navy’s Old Town Campus in San Diego: a row of long, low white industrial buildings with grey and red roofs running beside a multi-lane freeway and rail tracks, a neighborhood of houses and trees in the foreground, and an airport runway and San Diego Bay under a hazy sky in the distance.

THE LEAD / CRE AI NEWS

OCT 18, 20266 MIN READ6 SOURCES

A 400 MW Data Center Pitched for the Navy’s NAVWAR Campus

Manchester Financial Group, the Navy’s selected developer for the 70.3-acre NAVWAR Old Town Campus in San Diego, has explored a 400 megawatt data center on the site, according to public records reported on October 15. The developer says no agreements are in place. Rep. Scott Peters said on October 16 that he opposes it.

PSV ORIGINAL REPORTING & ANALYSIS

More from this desk.

Every Policy & Regulation story PSV has filed, newest first. Each one is written in-house and traced to a primary record.

An aerial photograph looking north over the Phoenix West Valley in daylight, with Arizona State Route 303 running up the center as a divided highway through a grid of brown and green farm fields, a cluster of large white-roofed industrial buildings beside the freeway, subdivisions of houses at the right and left edges, the runways of Luke Air Force Base in the right background, and hazy desert mountains under a blue sky with thin clouds.

DEVELOPING STORY / 01

CRE AI NEWS

01 / 04

Glendale Advances Project Eagle, a Data Center With Its Own Gas Plant

Glendale’s Planning Commission heard ZON26-05 on September 24: a rezoning of about 160 acres next to Luke Air Force Base for three data centers and eighteen 72-foot natural gas turbines that would power the campus until APS builds a substation, anticipated in 2030. Local press reported a 4-2 vote to recommend it. The City Council votes on October 27.

SEP 29, 20268 MIN READ11 SOURCES

Read the operator view

A daylight photograph of the Texas State Capitol in Austin, a pink granite building with a tall columned dome flying the United States and Texas flags, seen at the end of a long paved walkway lined with iron lamp posts and green benches, framed by large live oak trees and wide green lawns, with a few pedestrians small in the distance under a blue sky with white clouds.

DEVELOPING STORY / 02

CRE POLICY NEWS

02 / 04

Texas Halts Data Center Permits Until ERCOT’s Audit Is Done

Governor Greg Abbott directed the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality on September 21 to pause the issuance of all permits related to data center projects until ERCOT completes its review, and said no state agency should move forward with data center approvals until the audit information is in. ERCOT’s responses are due October 12 and its report by December 10. No end date is set.

SEP 28, 20269 MIN READ8 SOURCES

Read the operator view

A daylight photograph of a row of grey stainless steel fuel cell cabinets on a concrete pad beside a modern office building clad in a mirrored glass curtain wall reflecting white clouds and blue sky, with a cream stone wing at the left, white event tents behind the cabinets, a strip of lawn and a black rubber walkway in the foreground, and a small group of people in suits standing on the grass at the right.

DEVELOPING STORY / 03

CRE CAPITAL NEWS

03 / 04

Oracle’s Force Majeure Notice on Project Jupiter

Oracle has sent a force majeure notice to Stack Infrastructure, the developer of Project Jupiter in Doña Ana County, New Mexico, that reportedly lets it defer some rent for up to three years if the campus’s power is late. Oracle’s own July release already conditioned its commitments on a pipeline and air permit that remain unresolved.

SEP 26, 20269 MIN READ6 SOURCES

Read the operator view

A low-angle photograph at dusk of the front of the Maryland State House in Annapolis, looking up a wide flight of granite steps divided by black metal handrails to a portico of six tall cream Corinthian columns under a carved pediment bearing the state seal, set against a red brick facade with lit multi-pane windows and a dark central doorway flanked by two globe lamps, beneath a blue sky with thin cloud.

DEVELOPING STORY / 04

CRE POLICY NEWS

04 / 04

Maryland Puts Every 25 MW Data Center Through State Review

Governor Wes Moore signed Executive Order 01.01.2026.16 on September 23, putting any Maryland data center of 25 megawatts or more through one state review the moment it asks the state for a permit, incentive or letter of support. A new task force grades each project Aligned, Conditionally Aligned or Not Aligned on a public dashboard, and the governor will ask lawmakers to repeal the 2020 sales tax exemption.

SEP 25, 202610 MIN READ5 SOURCES

Read the operator view

Latest from PSV

24 STORIES / NEWEST FIRST

05BRIEF

CRE POLICY NEWS

Prince William Ends By-Right Data Center Development

Prince William County’s supervisors voted September 22 on DPA2026-00006, a zoning text amendment that closes the county’s Data Center Opportunity Zone Overlay District to any future expansion and routes new data centers outside it through the special use permit process. County staff put the revised overlay at roughly 214 parcels and 3,504 acres, down about 6,194 acres, or approximately 64 percent.

SEP 23, 202610 MIN READ6 SOURCES

06BRIEF

CRE POLICY NEWS

New York Starts RAISE Act Registration for Frontier AI

Governor Kathy Hochul said on September 21, 2026 that New York will direct large frontier AI developers to register with the state starting in November, ahead of the RAISE Act’s January 1, 2027 compliance date, and named the first full-time hire of the new DIGIT office. Some coverage called it new data center rules. The statute never mentions data centers.

SEP 22, 20268 MIN READ5 SOURCES

07BRIEF

CRE POLICY NEWS

Data Center Watch Q2 2026: $68B of Projects Disrupted

Data Center Watch, a research project of 10a Labs that tracks local opposition to data center development, says at least 45 U.S. projects worth nearly $68 billion were blocked or delayed by local opposition from April through June 2026. That is below its Q1 count of 75 projects and about $130 billion, but the first half of 2026 now exceeds its full-year 2025 total.

SEP 21, 20267 MIN READ7 SOURCES

08BRIEF

CRE POLICY NEWS

Ratepayer Protection Act Stalls in Senate

The House passed H.R. 9340, the Ratepayer Protection Act, by 417 to 3 on September 16, 2026. It would add a federal standard to the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act making data center campuses of 100 megawatts or more pay the full incremental cost of the grid upgrades built for them. On September 17 Senator Martin Heinrich blocked fast passage in the Senate.

SEP 18, 20268 MIN READ8 SOURCES

09BRIEF

CRE POLICY NEWS

Virginia Proposes $2.5M Penalty on Microsoft Data Center

Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality has proposed a consent order requiring Microsoft to pay a $2,499,000 civil charge after its Leesburg data center ran 62 emergency diesel engines for seven days during a 2025 substation failure and exceeded its permitted fuel and emissions limits. Public comment runs through October 14, 2026. All but $99,000 goes to air quality monitoring for data center areas.

SEP 17, 20269 MIN READ7 SOURCES

10BRIEF

CRE POLICY NEWS

Loudoun Votes to Pause New Data Center Applications

Loudoun County’s Board of Supervisors voted 7-1-1 on September 15 to direct staff to draft a resolution pausing new data center applications for up to 12 months while it rewrites its data center zoning rules, over a staff recommendation to take no action. A final vote is reported for October. The Planning Commission is not expected to take up the new rules until February 2027.

SEP 16, 202610 MIN READ7 SOURCES

11BRIEF

CRE POLICY NEWS

SpaceX’s Terafab Suit Tests What a Texas Incentive File Keeps Secret

SpaceX has sued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Grimes County to stop the county releasing records behind the incentives for Terafab, its planned chip plant, including its tax abatement application. Much of the deal is already public: eight state JETI filings with an estimated $1.66 billion in school tax benefit, and county agreements that set its county tax payments at $20 million a year for a decade, then cap them there through 2061.

SEP 11, 202614 MIN READ13 SOURCES

12BRIEF

CRE POLICY NEWS

Massachusetts’ Data Center Order Puts a Contract Before the Permit

Governor Maura Healey signed Executive Order No. 658 on September 8, barring MassDEP, the Energy Facilities Siting Board, the MEPA Office and other permitting agencies from issuing any permit to a data center above 25 megawatts of peak demand until it conforms with her June 25 framework and files a community benefits agreement reviewed by the state’s environmental justice office. It also orders a clean energy mandate with a payment alternative.

SEP 10, 202612 MIN READ5 SOURCES

13BRIEF

CRE POLICY NEWS

PJM’s Firm Power Exemption Is a 10 Year Commitment

PJM told this desk’s readers in July what its Board had directed. The filings themselves are now at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, in dockets ER26-3380-000 and ER26-3515-000, and the comment window closed on September 3. They contain terms the Board letter never stated, and the most consequential one is what a site has to promise to keep firm power.

SEP 7, 202614 MIN READ5 SOURCES

14BRIEF

CRE POLICY NEWS

Wisconsin Made Its 100 Megawatt Customers Sign for the Power

WEC Energy Group filed a Form 8-K on September 4 attaching the investor deck that finally puts numbers on Wisconsin’s Very Large Customer tariff. The Public Service Commission approved it in docket 6630-TE-113 and made it mandatory for any customer with 100 megawatts or more of annual demand. WEC now forecasts 3.9 gigawatts of new electric demand through 2030, and two data center campuses are all of it.

SEP 6, 202616 MIN READ6 SOURCES

15BRIEF

CRE POLICY NEWS

APS Has Not Committed to Serve a New Large Load Since 2024

Closing briefs in the Arizona Public Service rate case were docketed on August 27, and they carry a fact no site selection memo in metro Phoenix can ignore. Microsoft, an intervenor, told the Arizona Corporation Commission that APS has been unable to commit to serve any new large load customer since January 1, 2024. APS’s own brief describes a large queue of uncommitted customers. PSV read the briefs.

SEP 4, 202615 MIN READ6 SOURCES

16BRIEF

CRE POLICY NEWS

A 22 Million SF Data Center Rezoning Died Over an Ad

The Court of Appeals of Virginia held on March 31, 2026 that Prince William County’s three Digital Gateway rezoning ordinances are void from the beginning, because the county advertised the December 2023 hearing defectively. The county chose not to appeal on April 14, 2026. Compass Datacenters withdrew on April 29, and QTS told the Supreme Court of Virginia on July 2 that it was terminating the project.

SEP 3, 20268 MIN READ6 SOURCES

17BRIEF

CRE CAPITAL NEWS

Google Signed for 396 Megawatts Before It Named a Building

Fervo Energy filed an 8-K on Tuesday morning disclosing that a wholly owned subsidiary signed a 15-year power purchase agreement with Google Energy for 396 megawatts of enhanced geothermal capacity at Cape Station in Beaver County, Utah, plus an option that would take the total to roughly 950 megawatts. Fervo calls the power a building block for a potential Utah data center. No building has been announced. PSV read the filing and the statute behind it.

SEP 1, 202613 MIN READ5 SOURCES

18BRIEF

CRE POLICY NEWS

Texas Paused the Data Center Grid Queue, and the Gate Is Paperwork

Governor Greg Abbott directed a verification and audit of every data center advancing through ERCOT’s interconnection process on August 3. The Public Utility Commission of Texas made it operative on August 20, granting ERCOT good cause exceptions that suspend Batch Zero classification deadlines. ERCOT then told the market it intends to issue conditional classifications by August 31. PSV read the letter, the order and ERCOT’s filed presentation.

AUG 29, 202612 MIN READ7 SOURCES

19BRIEF

CRE POLICY NEWS

EPA Would Let a Data Center Break Ground Before Its Air Permit

Two EPA proposals now sitting in the docket would change data center permitting from opposite ends: one narrows what counts as starting construction, so site work could begin before an air permit issues, and the other drops the federal floor requiring public notice on minor source permits. PSV read both rules. Neither is final, and neither says “data center” once.

AUG 27, 202610 MIN READ6 SOURCES

20BRIEF

CRE POLICY NEWS

Six Federal Cases Are Testing Where a Data Center Can Sit

Five federal class actions filed since April accuse data center operators of pushing unreasonable noise onto neighboring homes, and a sixth case runs the other direction: a developer suing Nashville over a permit moratorium. PSV read all six dockets. Two of the five have already ended, neither of them on the merits, and the pattern is not the one the trade press is describing.

AUG 26, 202610 MIN READ8 SOURCES

21BRIEF

CRE POLICY NEWS

The FTC Unwound Zillow’s $100M Deal. The Date That Matters Comes Later.

The Federal Trade Commission and five state attorneys general filed a stipulated final order on August 24 resolving their antitrust case over the February 2025 agreement in which Zillow paid Redfin $100 million to leave apartment advertising. Redfin has six months from entry to relaunch. Zillow’s own SEC filing says the syndication partnership continues, with no admission of liability.

AUG 25, 202611 MIN READ8 SOURCES

22BRIEF

CRE POLICY NEWS

TVA Repriced Data Center Power. The Tariff Isn’t Public.

The TVA Board voted in Memphis on August 20 to move data centers out of the manufacturing rate class and onto a rate of their own. Officials at the meeting described an October 1 start, a roughly 10 percent increase, a three-year phase-in for existing sites, and an upfront capacity commitment charge on new load above 5 megawatts. TVA’s own release names none of those terms.

AUG 21, 202612 MIN READ5 SOURCES

23BRIEF

CRE POLICY NEWS

Pennsylvania’s Data Center Order Turns on One Number

Governor Josh Shapiro signed Executive Order 2026-05 on August 18, directing Commonwealth agencies to hold every data center proposal with peak demand over 25 megawatts to the Governor’s Responsible Infrastructure Development Requirements. Data centers come out of the Permit Fast Track Program entirely, and the Department of Environmental Protection will not issue a permit until a project has its local and municipal approvals in hand.

AUG 19, 202616 MIN READ4 SOURCES

24BRIEF

CRE CAPITAL NEWS

DOE Leases Paducah for a $100B AI Campus: The CRE Read

The Department of Energy said on July 29 that it selected Brookfield to lease land and develop a data center campus at its Paducah Site in western Kentucky, and selected NextEra Energy to build and own the power behind it. The partners put the privately funded investment above $100 billion, with up to 1.8 gigawatts of utility capacity and more than 1.2 gigawatts of compute. No tenant has been named.

AUG 2, 202612 MIN READ3 SOURCES

25BRIEF

CRE POLICY NEWS

PJM Moves to Curtail Data Centers: The CRE Read on Firm Power

The PJM Board of Managers issued a decisional letter on July 27 directing two filings to FERC by the end of July. One creates a Reliability Backstop Procurement to backfill a 6,831 megawatt capacity shortfall. The other creates an Interim Resource Adequacy Service, under which new large loads that have not brought their own new capacity by June 1, 2027 are cut before anybody else is.

JUL 29, 202610 MIN READ5 SOURCES

26BRIEF

CRE POLICY NEWS

OpenAI’s $20B Project Camellia: The CRE Read on an Unfiled Entitlement

Effingham County, Georgia announced on July 22 that OpenAI will build a $20 billion, 3.2 gigawatt campus inside the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub. Five days later the county published a second statement: the only document it has received is a Development of Regional Impact cover page, no completed application has been submitted, and the site plan circulating online is a blank state template someone filled in.

JUL 28, 20269 MIN READ5 SOURCES

27BRIEF

CRE POLICY NEWS

New York’s Hyperscale Data Center Moratorium: The CRE Read

Governor Kathy Hochul signed Executive Order 62 on July 14, pausing state environmental permits for new hyperscale data centers of 50 megawatts or more for up to one year while New York writes a statewide environmental study and new development standards. It is the first statewide freeze in the country, and it lands on the hottest development pipeline in commercial real estate.

JUL 17, 20266 MIN READ4 SOURCES

28BRIEF

CRE POLICY NEWS

The ROAD to Housing Act Is Law: What Changes for CRE Investors

The broadest federal housing law in years took effect on July 11 without a presidential signature. It restricts large-scale purchases of single-family homes while exempting build-to-rent development, and it ships a supply-side stack most coverage is skipping.

JUL 14, 20266 MIN READ3 SOURCES