New regulations taking effect next January will shine more light on how much water data centers use in Virginia — though information on specific facilities is still protected as a trade secret. And a state budget amendment seeks to add more reporting requirements.
Instead of ordering data centers to report their individual monthly water usage, the new law requires waterworks operators to categorize their monthly sales reporting data.
Operators will have to split it up into usage by data centers with state air permits, domestic users, industrial and commercial users and all other non-categorized purposes. That usage will be split into potable and non-potable withdrawals.
State Sen. Kannan Srinivasan (D–Loudoun) carried the bill — passed into law at the General Assembly this year — which orders the new data breakdown. He said while presenting the measure to fellow legislators that it fills a gap in data.
"This is a transparency bill," Srinivasan said. "There's a lot of opaqueness, and that clearly hurts everyone, including the data center industry, because they've done a lot of innovation and it doesn't show in any report."
Srinivasan also said the reports would be an important tool for the state Department of Environmental Quality for water supply planning, particularly during droughts.
Virginia is currently experiencing an extended drought — 10 out of the state's 11 drought monitoring zones have been under a drought warning since May 2026. Some community water systems had mandatory conservation measures in place as of the June 9 Drought Monitoring Task Force report.
Because the reporting requirements only apply to water that is withdrawn at one site (i.e. a waterworks) and used at another (i.e. a data center, a household, etc.), some non-data center major water users that withdraw directly from a body of water or groundwater and use that water on-site are not captured in the reporting.
Steve Yob, Henrico County's deputy director of county operations and a member of the state Water Control Board, noted at a June 23 meeting of the board that Henrico's utilities department reads meters over an 8-week period, rather than the monthly reporting requirement.
Andrea Wortzel, a natural resource attorney representing the stakeholder group Mission H2O Virginia, seconded Yob's concerns — adding that the reporting requirements call for data categorization that many waterworks don't already do.
"For many utilities, this information is not readily available without extensive manual manipulation of the information, it's not categorized the way that the legislation lays out," Wortzel said.
Mike Rolband, director of the DEQ, said the agency was working to make a process that minimizes additional work for water treatment plants. He also noted that the reporting requirements were set by the state legislature, not DEQ.
"The overall intent is to be able to deal with the debate over how much water data centers are using," Rolband said.
Wortzel said utilities want a formal work group to discuss implementation of the regulation — Rolband said the process would be informal, but DEQ is reaching out to waterworks operators to make a system that works for all parties.
The law allows for quarterly reporting when monthly data is infeasible. Rolband noted the goal is to get the most detailed data possible under the law to see seasonal trends in water use — but noted that the program would be flexible to account for possible future changes ordered by legislators.
"We expect changes again next year," Rolband said.
The proposed state budget passed this week includes a proposal to make public more information about data centers. The amendment requires the State Corporation Commission, in conjunction with DEQ and any applicable utilities and state agencies, to aggregate data on all contracted data center electric demand, water usage information and backup generator permitting. The first yearly report detailing that information is due to lawmakers on October 1.
The waterworks' reporting requirements will begin on January 1, 2027.
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