The
DEAP
Roots
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A weekly newsletter on digital equity for Black people in the South.
A lot can happen in a week, especially when billions of dollars, new infrastructure and public policy are moving at the same time.
Each Monday, we break down the decisions that shaped the previous week across nine Southern states: Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee and Virginia. We follow the broadband money, the data center approvals, the policy changes and the numbers behind them, then ask the question that often gets skipped: What does this mean for Black communities?
We also track the national decisions influencing what happens across the South.
“One important witness has not yet been heard from.”
Anna Julia Cooper, born in Raleigh, North Carolina
“Our Raison d’Etre,” the preface to A Voice from the South, Xenia, Ohio, The Aldine Printing House, 1892, page II. Full text of the first edition from Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The week in one minute
- Danielle Dillard, a Southaven renter near xAI’s expansion, was told to move by Nov. 30; separate reporting described homeowner buyout offers conditioned on releasing claims.
- Virginia’s own energy plan says data centers account for about half the cost of new power, and projects residential prices rising roughly 60% in a decade.
- Lee County issued a permit for a data center project that a PointOne executive valued at roughly $3.6 billion, including customer IT equipment.
- Lovejoy, Georgia, a city that is 82.7% Black, banned data centers outright.
- Six senators said $21 billion meant for digital skills, devices and help getting online is frozen because an agency has not written the guidance.
- Memphis takes its third and final vote Tuesday on a 12-month pause on large data centers.
- Pew found that artificial intelligence stand-ins for survey respondents got Black people wrong more often than any other group tested.
- Not one of the nine state broadband offices published anything all week, with the supplemental BEAD round now open.
The xAI plant on the state line
A Southaven renter near xAI’s expansion was told to leave by Nov. 30.
Danielle Dillard rents a house in the Colonial Hills area of Southaven, Mississippi, near Tulane Road and Stateline Road. She was told the property is being sold and that she has to be out by Nov. 30, DeSoto County News reported Oct. 2, in an account that describes the notice as about 60 days and does not give the date she received it. A new xAI building is under construction nearby, at Tulane Road and Stanton Road, next to the company’s existing operation on Stateline Road.
“My property is being sold because of the xAI building that’s being built less than a mile from my home,” Dillard told the outlet.
How many other renters got the same letter is not known. The report says it is unclear how many notices went out or which companies are buying the properties, and no acreage, square footage, megawatt or dollar figure has been disclosed for the new building. The county has no public filing that answers those questions yet.
Issue 04 reported the other half of this. An xAI affiliate, MZX Tech, has been offering to buy houses in Southaven from residents who sign a release giving up their claims in the noise lawsuit over the company’s gas turbines. The Memphis Flyer reported Sept. 28 that the release bars a signer from joining the class action or suing individually, and that the letter states MZX “denies all of the allegations against it” while offering to purchase property “in exchange for, among other things, a release of all claims.”
The difference between the two offers falls on people living beside the same construction. A homeowner is being offered a purchase agreement conditioned on a release of claims, which issue 04 reported bars the signer from joining the class action or suing individually. A renter has no property to sell. Dillard was told the house is being sold and that she has to be out by Nov. 30, about 60 days from the notice. The terms are written around ownership, and the reporting does not say how many other renters got the same letter.
The part worth carrying out of this week is that every conversation about data centers and property value assumes the neighbor is an owner. Southaven is 39.3% Black and DeSoto County is 36.5% Black. A renter is not a party to any of it. What reached Dillard was a notice that the property is being sold, which she attributes to the xAI building going up less than a mile from her home.
There is something to do about it. Mississippi has no statewide relocation requirement for a tenant displaced by a private sale, so the only place a notice period or a relocation payment can be written is a local ordinance or a development agreement. Neither DeSoto County nor the city of Southaven is drafting anything on this at the moment. A resident asking either body to put tenant notice into the next data center agreement is asking for something a county attorney can actually draft.
Memphis takes its final vote on the data center pause Tuesday. The City Council hears the third and final reading of its data center moratorium ordinance on Oct. 6, the Memphis Flyer reported Oct. 2. The vote was originally set for Sept. 15 and has been pushed twice. Council Chair Jana Swearengen-Washington describes it as “not a ‘ban’ but a pause.”
We read the companion regulation ordinance the city has posted. It amends Ordinance No. 5367 and defines a large data center as one with electrical demand of 20 megawatts or greater, with any expansion raising demand by 20% or more triggering a fresh review. It sets a renewable energy share of 60% in year one, 75% by year three, 90% by year six and 100% by year 10, and caps carbon-based electricity at 40% in years one through three, 25% in years four through six, 10% in years seven through nine and zero from year 10. It requires separate metering of total water, cooling water, makeup water, non-cooling uses and wastewater discharge, with annual reporting certified by the owner. It sets no square footage, acreage, setback or noise limit, and the signature line on the posted copy is blank.
Council member JB Smiley Jr. said the pause is “a temporary pause intended to give the City time to study the issues, engage the community, assess potential impacts, and develop permanent regulations for large-scale data centers and high-density computing facilities.” Richard Massey, an environmental justice advocate, named the stakes as “emissions, disrupting folks’ quality of life with piercing noise, and…millions of gallons of water from the [Memphis Sand] Aquifer.” Indivisible Memphis planned a rally at City Hall at 3 p.m. before the meeting.
The water metering requirement is the strongest thing in this ordinance and almost nobody is talking about it. Separate meters on cooling water, makeup water and discharge mean a future argument about the Memphis Sand Aquifer can be had with numbers instead of estimates. That is cheap to require now and impossible to retrofit later.
Memphis is 62.9% Black, and the ordinance governs the next facility, while the one already running sits a mile across the state line in Mississippi where this council has no authority at all. Both things are true and the council should still pass it, because 20 megawatts is a low enough threshold to catch most of what comes next.
Two turbine counts are in circulation and we are not reconciling them. The Memphis Flyer’s Sept. 28 account of the buyout letters describes “as many as 27 unpermitted gas turbines” operating to power the company’s Colossus 2 facility. The Mississippi Free Press reported on Sept. 25 that the lawsuit counts 69 unpermitted gas-fired turbines as of July 31, 2026, and covers more than 10,000 class members. Both numbers come from the same litigation and we are attributing each to the outlet that printed it.
The gap matters because the permit question turns on it. An unpermitted turbine is a Clean Air Act problem whether there are 27 or 69, but the number is what a judge weighs against a company’s argument that the site is too important to interrupt. Anyone quoting a figure in a public comment or a council meeting should say which outlet it came from.
Data centers
Lee County issued the permit before residents got their vote.
Lee County, North Carolina issued a construction permit on Sept. 25 for the first phase of a data center on Lower Moncure Road, outside Sanford, THE RANT reported Sept. 29. The permit runs through March 24, 2027. The county planning department collected a permit fee of $76,591.20.
The permit lists the structure at $185,388,791. PointOne’s Kelsey Fehr told The Rant that the structure and related equipment together bring the value to roughly $900 million, rising to about $3.6 billion with customer IT equipment included. The building is more than 300,000 square feet on 56 acres, phase one of a planned 430-acre development whose later phases have no stated use. The permit and the coverage describe 90 megawatts without saying whether that is generating capacity or computing load, and we are not characterizing it as either. No jobs figure appears anywhere in the document or the story.
PointOne is the developer of record, Helix Ventures the developer, CyrusOne the operator and Hitt Contracting the builder. On Oct. 1 the county put out a written statement and a timeline. The project “will proceed,” the county said, and cannot be stopped by a moratorium under state law. On money, the county was blunt: “the Board did not provide any economic development incentives or any funding for this project.”
The timeline the county released is the heart of it. The property was rezoned in 2025. Commissioners were briefed in February 2026. The application was approved by September and the permit issued the same month. Commissioners had turned down repeated resident requests for a moratorium along the way.
Lee County’s Oct. 1 statement says the property was rezoned in September 2025 and that additional data center standards were adopted in April 2026, before the application arrived in June. The county said, based on legal advice, that a moratorium could no longer stop this project under state statute, and that because the building permit had been issued the project would not be subject to revised standards. That is the county’s position, and it does not establish that every step in the approval process complied with the law.
So the question to carry into your own county is which parcels are already zoned to allow one, rather than whether a data center has been announced. That is a public record, it costs nothing to ask for, and the person who knows is the planning director. Lee County is 17.9% Black and Sanford, the county seat, is 23.6% Black.
Worth keeping too: the county said on the record that it gave no abatement and no incentive. When a company tells a room that tax breaks are the price of the project, Lee County is the counterexample sitting right there.
Lovejoy, Georgia banned data centers outright. The Lovejoy City Council passed an ordinance prohibiting data center construction anywhere in the city, repealing its special administrative permit provisions and setting high-density housing standards, Atlanta News First reported Sept. 29. The council acted Monday, Sept. 28. No vote count appears in the coverage and we could not find an ordinance number.
The ban follows a Stillwater Development proposal at 11760 Panhandle Road, filed in December 2025 and withdrawn about a month ago. That proposal was for 15 buildings totaling 3.5 million square feet at 1.25 gigawatts at full build-out, adjacent to Michelle Obama STEM Elementary Academy and Eddie White Middle School. Nothing was built. Resident Kanesha Clemons told the station, “This is a place to have families grow, not data centers.”
Lovejoy is 82.7% Black with about 12,929 residents, and it is the first majority-Black city in these nine states we have found that has banned data centers outright rather than pausing them. A moratorium expires, while a prohibition stays until a council repeals it, which means the burden of changing the rule falls on whoever wants to build, not on residents who have to turn out again every 12 months.
Small cities have this power and most do not use it. A city of 13,000 writing a citywide prohibition is the cheapest version of this fight, because it takes one council and no lawsuit. Clayton County towns watching the Panhandle Road site now have a drafted ordinance to ask Lovejoy for.
Alabama’s data center law took effect Oct. 1, and the contracts stay sealed. Senate Bill 270 took effect Oct. 1, WBRC reported Sept. 30 in a story updated Oct. 2. The law applies to a facility requiring 150 megawatts or more at peak demand at a single site, which the station equates to the monthly consumption of roughly 95,000 average Alabama homes. Contracts for those customers must cover generation, transmission, distribution, fuel, taxes and any other expense the utility would not incur without the data center, and must deliver positive benefits to other customers.
Alabama Public Service Commission President Cynthia Almond said the customers “must pay the full cost to serve their energy needs, including the additional infrastructure costs.” Three large-load contracts have been filed since the commission opened its generic proceeding on June 29. The ADC Holdings contract for a Nebius project in Oxmoor Valley has been approved. Contracts for Wooster LLC and APLD BHM-01 LLC, both tied to Applied Digital in Tuscaloosa County, are under review.
The review window has gone from 10 days to 45 for contracts filed during the proceeding, and the commission is proposing 60 days as the standard. There are no public hearings and no public votes. Only the commission and the state attorney general’s office see the unredacted contracts. The public versions black out pricing, contract length and minimum billing terms. Daniel Tait of Energy Alabama put it this way: “Even if everybody is doing the right thing, if you’re not showing your work, no one’s going to believe you.”
The statute says the data center pays the full cost, and the process leaves nobody outside two state offices able to check. That is the whole Alabama arrangement, and it is now in force.
The attorney general is the one office with standing to see the numbers, and that office is on the ballot this year. Issue 04 reported that Alabama’s attorney general can intervene in rate cases under a statute that has sat mostly unused. Three sealed contracts are sitting in a docket right now, and two of them are in Tuscaloosa County. Black Belt households are on the other side of whatever is inside them.
In Lowndes County, Alabama, the water system cannot supply the project and the records request is unanswered. The American Prospect published a long investigation on Oct. 1 into Project Red Clay, a $1.5 billion data center proposed on about 800 acres of farmland along Highway 80, roughly six miles southwest of Montgomery. Residents turned out again to oppose it on Sept. 28, WSFA reported. The developer is Cloverleaf Infrastructure of Houston, which does not own, operate or build data centers.
The water figure is the one to hold. The project would need 100,000 gallons a day. The Pintlala Water System, a member-owned nonprofit, has capacity for about 50,000 gallons a day. The proposal is a 3-million-square-foot hyperscale facility, with 1,000 construction jobs and at least 50 permanent positions promised. Community money would run up to $10 million through the Central Alabama Community Foundation, structured as $1 million upfront, $4 million after Alabama Power contract approval and $5 million over five years. The tax abatement was previously 30 years and is capped at 20 by state legislation effective Jan. 1, 2027.
Thomas Ellis chairs the county economic development commission and also sits on the Pintlala Water System board. The commission has no written conflict-of-interest policy, and membership dues start at $2,500 a year, or $5,000 for an executive committee seat. The Southern Environmental Law Center and the Natural Resources Defense Council filed an open records request on behalf of Protect Lowndes County and the Alabama Rivers Alliance, and the substantive documents had not been produced as of publication. SELC staff attorney Ryan Anderson said transparency “isn’t a courtesy…It’s the law.” Rev. Tom Gardner, whose property adjoins the site, said, “I don’t know which way to turn if it comes, but I know I couldn’t live here.”
Lowndes County is 67.7% Black, in the heart of the Alabama Black Belt. The arithmetic on the water is public and it does not work. A system with 50,000 gallons a day of capacity cannot serve a customer needing 100,000, which means either the system gets expanded or somebody else goes short. Who pays for that expansion is a question nobody has answered in public.
The same man chairs the body recruiting the project and sits on the board of the water system that would have to serve it, and there is no written policy saying he must step aside. That is a governance gap rather than an allegation against him, and any county commission can close it in one meeting by adopting a conflict policy for its economic development commission.
The open records request is the live document. If it is still unanswered a month from now, that is a story, and under Alabama’s public records law a resident can file the same request.
A $6 billion campus is planned in one of the poorest counties in the country, and no vote is required. Eagle Rock Partners held a public meeting in Jefferson Davis County, Mississippi on the evening of Sept. 29 about a $6 billion project on 800 acres near Gum Swamp Road at the Covington County line, WDAM reported that night and Mississippi Today reported Sept. 30. The plan is about 2 million square feet in three buildings, with 200 permanent jobs and more than 1,000 construction jobs promised. Construction could begin as early as 2027.
Two things set this one apart. The company says it will not seek tax abatements or incentives, which is the opposite of nearly every other project in this region. And the site is private property in a county with no zoning, so there is no rezoning vote and no conditional use permit. Cooling would be closed loop, and on-site natural gas generation would require approval from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality. No megawatt figure has been given for the generation or the computing load.
Resident Patti Warren said residents want “a right to be able to vote” on it. Gary Russell Bass of the county economic development association said the project “could completely transform this county.” Eagle Rock’s Ken Lober said, “We aspire to be completely transparent, and this is a big step towards that.” Seven data center campuses are now under construction in Mississippi, with more than $55 billion in combined announced investment.
Jefferson Davis County is 57.3% Black with 10,941 residents and 23.9% of people in poverty. No zoning means no hearing, no vote and no evening when a resident can say no on the record. Warren is asking for the one thing the county has not given itself.
A county without zoning can adopt it, and that is a board of supervisors decision, not a state one. Short of that, the one approval still required is the air permit from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, and that process has a public comment period. Anyone who wants a say should be asking the department when the application lands and how to be notified, because the permit file is the only door left open.
The refusal to seek incentives is real and worth noting honestly, and it removes the usual argument. It does not answer the water question, the air question or the power bill question, and nobody in that meeting got a megawatt figure.
At its first Brookwood town hall, Applied Digital gave two different answers on water. Applied Digital held its first public town hall on the $3.2 billion Delta Forge 2 campus near Brookwood, Alabama on Thursday, Oct. 2, the Tuscaloosa Thread reported. The county incentive vote was Sept. 24 and was covered in issue 04. This was the first meeting where residents could ask questions.
The company described a closed-loop cooling system taking a one-time water fill of 1.4 million gallons, a 500,000-gallon fire suppression tank plus about 900,000 gallons in the cooling loop, then roughly 750,000 gallons a year ongoing. Hoodline, an aggregating outlet, reported Oct. 2 that the company’s own press release had called the campus “waterless cooling technology.” A one-time fill of 1.4 million gallons and waterless are not the same claim.
The project is just under 1,300 acres owned with 160 acres to be developed, at up to 210 megawatts of computing capacity in a building put at 1.26 million square feet. The $3.2 billion splits roughly $800 million to the tenant and $2.5 billion to Applied Digital. Community benefit payments are $270 million fixed over 20 years, or $13.5 million a year, with about $440 million expected in total community benefit and tax revenue over 20 years and about $170 million of that in taxes. At least 1,000 construction jobs and more than 100 permanent positions are promised. Brookwood Middle School is 4,405 feet away. Construction is expected to take 12 to 16 months.
Waterless and a one-time fill of 1.4 million gallons can both appear in a company’s own material because the terms are doing different jobs. Waterless describes the steady state of a closed loop. The fill is real water, taken once, and the 750,000 gallons a year is real water taken every year after. Neither claim is a lie and the pair of them is why a resident should ask for the number rather than the adjective.
Issue 04 put the two 20-year figures side by side: $314.5 million in abatements against $270 million in community benefit payments. The town hall did not change either number. The question to ask at the next one is who signs the community benefit agreement, who can amend it, and whether anyone outside the economic development authority gets to read it.
A majority-Black South Carolina county published the calendar for its one-year pause. Fairfield County, South Carolina released the schedule for the 12-month data center moratorium its council approved Sept. 14, WIS News 10 reported Sept. 29. Town halls are set for Oct. 22 in Jenkinsville, Jan. 7 in Ridgeway and Jan. 21 in Winnsboro. A Planning Commission hearing follows March 25, with final zoning votes expected to conclude by June.
The county names three objectives: assessing impacts on local power, water and road infrastructure, updating its Land Management Ordinance, and soliciting input from residents across the area. No project, megawatt, acreage, dollar or jobs figure appears in the story.
Fairfield County is 51.4% Black with 20,340 residents, the largest Black share of any place with data center business in this issue. Its calendar sits against Lee County, North Carolina, at the top of this section. Lee County rezoned the property in September 2025, adopted its data center standards in April 2026 and issued the building permit in September, on an application filed in June. Fairfield published four dates and nine months of notice before writing a single rule.
The difference between the two is a published calendar, and that is the thing to ask your own county for; the first town hall is Oct. 22 in Jenkinsville.
Jasper County, South Carolina passed a second reading unanimously. The Jasper County Council unanimously approved the second reading of a one-year moratorium on data centers, crypto mining operations and related facilities in unincorporated areas, Bluffton Today reported Sept. 28. The pause can be extended in six-month increments and halts applications for rezoning, site plans, building permits and economic incentives. A third reading comes at the next council meeting, and the story does not give that date.
Staff is to produce comprehensive regulations on water and power consumption, environmental impact and siting before the moratorium expires. Lia Wagner directs the county’s planning and building services. Grant McClure of the Coastal Conservation League and Ridgeland resident Nancy Lowther spoke. No project, megawatt, acreage or dollar figure appears.
Jasper County is 27.2% Black. The detail worth copying is that the pause covers applications for economic incentives, not just permits. Most moratoriums stop the building and leave the incentive negotiation running, which means the deal is finished by the time the pause lifts. Freezing both at once is a one-line change to an ordinance and it is the version to ask for.
Jesup, Georgia advanced a data center ordinance 4 to 2 and residents wanted a moratorium with it. The Jesup City Council approved the first reading of an ordinance defining data centers and permitting them as a conditional use in light industrial zoning districts, by a vote of 4 to 2 on Tuesday, Sept. 29, WTOC reported Sept. 30. The second reading is set for Tuesday, Oct. 6 at 7 p.m. Residents packed the room and asked commissioners to adopt a moratorium alongside or instead of the ordinance. One resident said, “It just seems disingenuous to me that we don’t do both.”
Conditional use is better than by right and it is not a pause. It means every application gets a hearing, which is real, and it also means the city has decided data centers belong in its light industrial districts before writing the water, noise and power rules. The residents were asking for the sequence to run the other way.
Jesup is 33.9% Black. The second reading is tomorrow night at 7, which is the last scheduled chance to ask for a pause before the use is on the books.
Data centers became a dividing line in the Georgia governor’s race. The Georgia Recorder reported Sept. 29 that the two nominees for governor have taken opposite positions. Democratic nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms backs a statewide temporary moratorium: “Let us take a pause, assess fully, assess comprehensively, assess the impact that these data centers are having on our environment, on our utility bills, what it means to have them in communities.” Republican nominee Rick Jackson backs local control: “Every community should decide…with the right guardrails on these data centers…this could be one of the biggest economic benefits to a community if they want one.” The Georgia Chamber of Commerce endorses the local-control approach.
About 20 bipartisan data center bills were introduced in the 2026 legislative session and none reached the governor’s desk. Effingham County anticipates OpenAI’s $20 billion project, reported in issue 04. Community advocates in the piece question whether local governments have the negotiating leverage to extract anything from developers that size.
Local control sounds like the answer that protects a community, but Lovejoy and Jesup happened in the same week. Lovejoy, a city of 13,000, could ban data centers because the project had already withdrawn. Effingham County, facing a $20 billion campus, is in court over whether it was told the truth. Local control gives the smallest governments the biggest counterparties.
A statewide standard and local control are not opposites in practice. A floor set in Atlanta, on cost allocation and disclosure, would leave every county free to be stricter. That is the version worth asking both candidates about. Twenty bills died this year, so the January session is where the question lands either way.
Louisiana regulators begin hearings Wednesday on the gas buildout for Meta. The Louisiana Public Service Commission opens an evidentiary hearing Oct. 7 on Entergy Louisiana’s Project Evest, expected to run three days and followed by a full commission vote, The Center Square reported Sept. 30 in a story carried by the American Press. No docket number appears in the account.
Project Evest is seven combined-cycle natural gas generating units, four near Richland Parish and three near Pointe Coupee Parish, plus three battery storage projects, more than 250 miles of new 500-kilovolt and 230-kilovolt transmission and a new interconnection substation. The story gives no megawatt figures for the gas units. It supports Meta’s $50 billion Richland Parish campus, whose electricity demand exceeds 1 gigawatt. An earlier package, Project Laidley, was approved in August 2025 and covered three natural gas units and about 60 miles of high-voltage transmission.
Richland Parish is 36.1% Black. The hearing on Wednesday is the proceeding where the cost allocation gets decided, which means it is the proceeding that decides whether a household in Rayville pays for generation built for one customer. Three days of testimony are scheduled, and then a vote.
Louisiana elects its public service commissioners. A commission vote following a three-day hearing is a thing residents can watch, comment on and hold a commissioner to at the next election, and it is considerably more accessible than a zoning board. The docket number is not in the coverage, and the commission’s own portal is where to get it.
Louisiana landowners say surveyors came onto their land before anyone told them. A coalition of landowners is fighting the West Fork Creek to Boeuf 500-kilovolt transmission project, nicknamed Project Omega, which would run from Richland Parish through Rapides Parish to Avoyelles Parish to serve Meta’s campus, KALB reported Oct. 3. Landowners reported unauthorized surveying on their property. State Rep. Johnson called it inexcusable that notification came only after the trespass. The coalition was founded by Dustin McAnn, a LaSalle Parish teacher and rancher.
Meta holds a 20-year service contract with Entergy Louisiana. Entergy Louisiana Vice President Larry Hand said, “Under the law we are obligated to negotiate in good-faith with any landowner. If we can avoid that landowner or work it out [then] that needs to happen in good-faith negotiations.” The story gives no mileage or acreage for the route.
Transmission is where the costs of a data center travel furthest from it. The campus is in Richland Parish and the line crosses three parishes of other people’s land to reach it, taken by negotiation or by eminent domain.
Landowners along a route have more leverage than most residents in these stories, because a company needs something from each of them individually. The useful thing here is the organizing: one teacher and rancher put a coalition together, which is why there is reporting on the surveying at all.
North Carolina has 54 data center buildings planned and 13 operating. At least 54 buildings with a combined 4,258 megawatts of capacity were planned in North Carolina as of September, against 13 buildings currently operating statewide, Axios Charlotte reported Oct. 1 using records from Cleanview, a market intelligence vendor. The only named project is American Tower’s proposal in east Charlotte, paused under a moratorium, with no figures given.
Fifty-four planned against 13 operating is the shape of the pipeline, and it is the number to hold when a county is told its project is one of a kind. The figure comes from a vendor dataset rather than a government filing, and it does not break down by project or say whether the capacity is generating capacity or computing load, so treat it as a planning total and nothing more precise.
The old paper mill in Natchez is being looked at for a data center. The former International Paper mill in Natchez, Mississippi is under evaluation for data center development, Mississippi Today reported Oct. 1 in its weekly business roundup. The same report puts Southern Power Company usage up 49% year to date, driven by data center demand, and recaps the Sierra Club grades covered in issue 04. Gov. Tate Reeves described his energy position as “an all-of-the-above approach.”
Natchez is a majority-Black city on the river, and a closed paper mill is exactly the kind of site these projects want: industrial zoning already in place, water rights already established, transmission already built. That combination is also what lets a project arrive without a rezoning vote, which is the Lee County pattern at the top of this section.
Nothing has been proposed yet, which makes now the useful moment, before an application, when the Adams County and Natchez planning offices can still be asked what the mill site is zoned for and what a data center would and would not need a hearing to do there.
Virginia
Virginia’s own energy plan says who the bill is for.
The Commonwealth of Virginia released its 2026 Virginia Energy Plan on Oct. 1. It is the first official state document to put a figure on how much of the coming grid buildout is attributable to data centers and what that does to household bills.
The plan says data center infrastructure accounts for “roughly half the system-wide cost of new energy additions in the Current Policies case under a moderate load outlook, or about $200 billion.” Both qualifiers belong on the number. It is a scenario under a load assumption, not a forecast of what will be spent. The plan also puts data center electricity revenue through 2050 at roughly $265 billion, a figure it derives from about 20 gigawatts of projected demand at approximately $700 million a year per gigawatt.
On households, the plan projects residential electricity prices rising about 60% over the next decade for Dominion Energy customers and about 17% for Appalachian Power customers. It states that about 17% of Virginia households, more than 550,000, face high energy burdens, which it defines as home energy costs above 6% of income, and describes those households as primarily low-income. It does not break energy burden out by race.
Its recommendations say data centers “should bear the costs of the infrastructure they require,” call for tariffs aligned with cost-causation principles, and would require large data centers to demonstrate onsite and offsite demand-flexibility capability. On low-income households it proposes expanding the Percentage of Income Payment Program and advancing Pay As You Save financing. Across scenarios it projects roughly 2,600 to 9,700 megawatts of offshore wind and 1,000 to 5,800 megawatts of advanced nuclear as clean firm capacity by 2050, and 5,000 to 20,000 annual construction jobs with 10,000 to 20,000 operating jobs by 2050.
Coverage fills in the demand picture. Virginia Mercury reported the same day that PJM’s peak demand forecast is 68.8 gigawatts and that Dominion’s connection queue holds 25 gigawatts with set electrification dates and 75 more gigawatts pending. Cardinal News reported a no-policy scenario total of $725 billion through 2050, made up of $295 billion in generation, $285 billion in carbon social costs and $145 billion in health impacts from air pollution, with demand growth of 2.3% to 3.5% annually. It also gives the increases already in effect: $11.24 a month for the average Dominion residential customer starting Jan. 1, 2026, and a further $2.36 a month in 2027. Sen. Mark Obenshain called the health and social cost figures “based on wildly speculative assumptions” and said “a modeled health-impact estimate does not erase the additional cost of generating electricity.”
Dominion’s service territory covers Richmond, Petersburg, Chesterfield, Henrico and Hampton Roads, which is where most of Virginia’s Black households are. The 60% projection is the number in the state’s own plan for those bills, and the 550,000 energy-burdened households it names are already paying more than 6% of income to keep the lights on. Those two findings sit on the same pages.
The plan does not say how many of those households are Black. Nobody at the state has published that cut, and we are not going to assert a racial breakdown that does not exist. The structural point stands without it: the price increase is largest in the territory with the most Black customers, and the energy burden threshold is a share of income.
The question is what to do with it. The plan’s own recommendation is cost-causation tariffs and demand flexibility, which are State Corporation Commission and General Assembly decisions, not governor’s office ones. The General Assembly convenes in January. A bill that writes “data centers should bear the costs of the infrastructure they require” into the code, rather than into a plan, is the ask, and the state’s own document is now the citation for it.
The first public hearing on the $67 billion Dominion and NextEra merger is Wednesday in Newport News. The State Corporation Commission has scheduled three in-person hearings, Virginia Mercury reported Sept. 29. Newport News is Oct. 7 from 6 to 8 p.m. at Christopher Newport University’s Freeman Center, Gaines Theater, 1 University Place. Fairfax follows Oct. 9 from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Fairfax County Government Center. Richmond is Nov. 5 from 2 to 5 p.m. in the commission’s second-floor courtroom at 1300 E. Main Street. Written comments are due Nov. 9 and registration for phone testimony closes Nov. 2.
The transaction would create what the coverage calls the largest regulated utility in the country. A September amendment extended bill credits to four years, with no dollar amount given. Neither this story nor any other we read names the commission’s case number; issue 04 carried PUR-2026-00112 from coverage and we have still not confirmed it against the docket.
Issue 04 reported that three-quarters of Virginia voters had not heard of this transaction. Wednesday is the first chance any of them gets to say something into the record, and Newport News is the only hearing east of Richmond.
The map of the three locations tells it. Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia got a hearing, while Southside and the Tri-Cities got nothing, and Petersburg, Emporia and the Southside counties are inside the territory whose prices the energy plan above projects rising 60%. Two hours in Newport News on a Wednesday evening is the whole opportunity, and written comments are open until Nov. 9 for anyone who cannot get there.
The window to extend the merger review closed Sept. 30. Legislators who wanted a special session to lengthen the State Corporation Commission’s review of the merger have run out of time, Cardinal News reported Oct. 1. The procedural deadline to call one passed Sept. 30. The commission must complete its review by Jan. 11, 2027, with a determination due within 60 days of a completed application and one extension of up to 120 days. Virginia has the shortest review timeline of the five regulatory bodies involved.
Sen. David Suetterlein and Del. Joe McNamara, both of Roanoke County, had asked in July for the session. Their statement: “Governor Spanberger failed to take the simplest action to protect Virginians from the threat of even higher electric bills.” The merger was announced in May 2026 at $67 billion. The combined company would operate under the NextEra name, with Dominion Energy Virginia continuing as the state subsidiary, serving approximately 10 million customer accounts and owning 110 gigawatts of generation.
A review clock that runs out in January, on a transaction that reorganizes the utility billing most Black households in Virginia, is the structural fact here. Three public hearings and a Nov. 9 comment deadline is what a 60-day statutory window produces.
No ratepayer impact analysis has been published in any of this reporting. That is the document to ask the commission for by name, and asking for it is itself a comment that goes in the record.
Eighty percent of Virginia localities with data centers had signed nondisclosure agreements. NPR reported Oct. 1 that 80% of Virginia localities with data centers had signed nondisclosure agreements, in a piece on what data centers cost ratepayers. It cites PJM’s Independent Market Monitor estimating that data centers cost 67 million ratepayers about $29 billion over roughly the past two years, and puts the increase for Maryland customers at approximately $168 to $216 a year. About 250 data centers are in Loudoun County. Dominion spokesperson Jeremy L. Slayton said, “We recover costs for distribution and transmission infrastructure from customers,” reviewed by the State Corporation Commission.
Four out of five is the figure to keep, because it says the Bessemer arrangement issue 04 reported is not an outlier anywhere. A locality that has signed one cannot answer a resident’s question at a public meeting even when the official wants to.
Virginia barred its state agencies from signing these in an executive order on Sept. 18. That order does not reach counties and cities, which is where the 80% lives. A county ordinance barring its own staff and board from signing them is a local decision, and no city in these nine states has to wait for a governor.
A developer is appealing Chesterfield’s requirement for a public permit. WestDulles Properties is appealing the conditional use permit requirement for a data center at 1120 Battery Brook Parkway before the Chesterfield County Board of Zoning Appeals on Wednesday, Oct. 7, Richmond BizSense reported Oct. 5 in its local government agenda brief. County staff recommends denying the appeal. A similar appeal by a different developer was rejected earlier this year.
The thing being appealed is the hearing itself. A conditional use permit is what forces a public meeting, and this appeal argues the project should not need one. Chesterfield’s board indicated in August that it would approve no further data centers, which is why the fight has moved to whether the board gets to decide at all.
Chesterfield is in Dominion territory, where the energy plan above projects a 60% residential increase. The board of zoning appeals meets Wednesday and we have not seen the agenda packet, which should carry the acreage, the square footage and the zoning history.
Appalachian Power asked for $9.10 a month and the commission’s own staff said cut rates instead. Regulators are preparing to hear Appalachian Power’s rate case, docketed as PUR-2026-00044, Cardinal News reported Oct. 1. The company seeks a base rate increase of $9.10 a month for an average residential customer using 1,000 kilowatt-hours, a 5.4% increase on a typical bill of about $168, amounting to $61.4 million in additional annual revenue, or 3.3%, effective no earlier than March 1, 2027. A further $3.99 a month is sought for renewable energy recovery on the same date.
State Corporation Commission staff recommended a $5.5 million revenue decrease instead, with a 9.65% authorized return on equity. A public comment hearing is set for Oct. 19 with registration closing Oct. 15, the evidentiary hearing is Oct. 20, and a final order is due Jan. 15, 2027. Del. Will Morefield said residents would be “forced to choose between paying the electric bill or buying groceries and medicine.”
Appalachian Power serves southwest Virginia, not the Dominion territory where most of the state’s Black households are, and this reporting does not tie the case to data centers or large-load cost allocation. We are carrying it because the gap between the request and the staff recommendation is instructive: a company asked for $61.4 million more and the commission’s own analysts said revenue should fall by $5.5 million.
That gap is why an intervenor matters. The staff position is public and the hearing is Oct. 19, with registration closing Oct. 15. The Dominion case that reaches Richmond and Hampton Roads will have the same shape and the same kind of staff filing, and this is what one looks like.
A researcher put the whole Virginia data center ledger in one column. Cardinal News published a commentary on Oct. 5 by Tommy Turner, an independent researcher documenting local government and energy effects of Virginia’s data center expansion, who serves on an advisory board for a Sloan Foundation study at Emory University. His figures: about 50 jobs for each 250,000-square-foot facility, about half of them contract workers; $1.94 billion in forgone state revenue in fiscal 2025, or $1.6 billion by state audit; and 48 cents in state revenue for every dollar spent.
He also reports, from his own analysis of 16 years of federal filings covering 2009 to 2025, that union membership grew 17.3% faster in data center metropolitan areas than in comparable areas, and cites a finding that 30% of Georgia’s data centers could be attributed to that state’s tax exemption. One Botetourt County land transaction he documents is 312.55 acres for $14,055,406.37 plus $4 million. He draws on a PwC study commissioned by the Data Center Coalition and on the 2024 study of data centers by Virginia’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission.
This is one researcher’s argument, not a state finding, and it should be read that way. The number worth carrying is 48 cents on the dollar, because it is the kind of figure an economic development authority never presents at a ribbon cutting.
So is the jobs ratio. Fifty jobs per 250,000 square feet, about half of them contract, is the measure to hold against a promise of hundreds of positions at a 3-million-square-foot campus. Lowndes County’s proposal, above, is 3 million square feet with at least 50 permanent jobs promised, and on Turner’s ratio that is roughly what the building would hold anyway.
Federal
Six senators said the $21 billion is frozen because nobody wrote the guidance.
Six senators wrote to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and National Telecommunications and Information Administration Assistant Secretary Arielle Roth on Sept. 29 asking them to release the guidance immediately. BEAD is the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program, the $42 billion federal broadband fund created in 2021. The letter says that “up to $21 billion in funding intended to support the adoption of new broadband infrastructure is in limbo across the country.”
The signers are Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Susan Collins of Maine, Angus King of Maine, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and Mark Warner of Virginia. Two of the nine states covered here are represented. “States have dedicated significant time and resources developing their BEAD plans and are eager to use their full awarded allocations to connect every American with broadband service,” the letter says. Government Technology reported Sept. 29 that the senators name workforce development programs, telehealth connectivity and technical assistance for rural small businesses as uses with bipartisan support.
This is the non-deployment money. BEAD’s deployment half pays to build lines. The non-deployment half is what pays for digital skills classes, devices, and the people who sit with someone and get them online. New Hampshire, as the senators describe their own state, secured $18.6 million for deployment last year and has nearly $200 million remaining for non-deployment.
This is the money that was supposed to replace the Digital Equity Act after the administration moved to cancel it. Building a line past a house does not get anybody online. A person who has never had service at home needs a device, help setting it up and somebody to call, and that is precisely the category of spending now sitting still.
None of these nine states has published a plan for its own non-deployment share, because no state can until the guidance exists. What a reader can do now is ask their state broadband office one question in writing: what is our non-deployment allocation and who is drafting the plan for it. The answer, or the absence of one, is useful either way.
The signatures matter here. Cassidy of Louisiana and Warner of Virginia are on this letter, and of the 14 senators representing the other seven states covered here, none is.
The FCC made it easier to turn off copper phone lines, effective Oct. 15. The Federal Communications Commission published a rule in the Federal Register on Oct. 1 that eliminates filing requirements and public notice processes for short-term network changes and copper retirements. Notice may now be given through “publicly accessible industry fora, industry publications, or the incumbent LEC’s website.” LEC means local exchange carrier, the traditional phone company. The rule takes effect Oct. 15.
Carriers must still give direct notice to 911 service providers and interconnecting carriers at least 90 days before a copper retirement. Most applications to discontinue a service are now granted automatically after 31 days, and technology-transition discontinuances are auto-approved where a replacement using internet-based voice, wireless or another alternative meets specified criteria. Filing is eliminated entirely for grandfathering legacy voice, lower-speed data and internet voice over copper. A carrier grandfathering a service must notify existing customers, including “an approximate date” for discontinuance and “alternative services available in the affected service area.”
The rule is docketed as WC 25-208 and 25-209 and numbered FCC 26-19. The commission counts approximately 4,452 respondents and 452,623 annual reporting hours under the network change rules, and 78 respondents and 648 hours under the discontinuance rules. Those are paperwork burden figures and not counts of affected customers.
Copper works when the power is out, because the phone company powers the line from its own building. The replacement equipment needs electricity inside the house. The households still on copper skew old, rural and poor, and in the Black Belt and the Delta that line is what works after a storm.
What changed on Oct. 15 is where the notice goes. A retirement can now be announced on a company website or in a trade publication, which means a county emergency management director who is not reading trade publications will not see it. That is a thing a county can fix for itself by writing the carrier and the commission and asking to be put on direct notice. The 90-day direct notice requirement still exists for 911 providers, so the county 911 center is the office that will know first.
Prison phone companies must report what they charge, with a Dec. 21 deadline. The commission’s Wireline Competition Bureau and Office of Economics and Analytics adopted the 2026 mandatory data collection for incarcerated people’s communications services, published in the Federal Register on Oct. 5. Providers must report calendar year 2025 data by Dec. 21, which is 90 days from release, unless federal paperwork review is not finished by then.
The required categories are specific: capital assets and capital and operating expenses by subcategory; audio and video usage and revenues; tablet usage minutes, split between regulated and non-regulated services; payment processing fees paid to third parties; monetary and in-kind payments to correctional facilities; discrete safety and security measures with their costs; and a company-wide summary of site commission payments. The order is numbered DA 26-1008 in dockets WC 23-62 and 12-375.
This is a household telecom bill that almost never gets counted as one. A family paying to talk to someone inside is buying a communications service at a price set by a contract between a company and a jail, and the South has the highest incarceration rates in the country.
Site commissions are the line to watch. That is the money the provider pays the facility for the exclusive right to sell to the people in it, and it is why the price is what it is. The commission is now requiring that number, which means for the first time there will be a record of how much of a family’s phone bill is a payment to the county. Sheriffs and county commissions negotiate those contracts, and they are public bodies a resident can ask.
Georgia’s food assistance records will be checked against Lifeline applications. The commission published two notices in the Federal Register on Sept. 29 establishing computer matching programs under the Privacy Act, one with the Georgia Department of Human Services Division of Family and Children Services and one with the Connecticut Department of Social Services. The commission and the Universal Service Administrative Company will verify Lifeline applicant and subscriber eligibility against Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program participation records held by each state agency.
Both programs begin Oct. 29, 2026 and conclude after 18 months. Comments are due Oct. 29. The notices describe Lifeline as providing “support for discounted broadband and voice services to low-income consumers.” Neither gives a subscriber or household count.
Lifeline is the last standing federal broadband subsidy at $9.25 a month, and only about one in five eligible households is enrolled. Automatic matching against food assistance records cuts both ways. It can make enrollment easier for someone already in the state system, and it can knock someone off because two databases disagree about their name or address.
Georgia is the state in these nine on this list. Which way it goes depends on details not in the notice: whether a mismatch suspends the benefit before anyone is contacted, and what the appeal looks like. Comments are due Oct. 29, and a legal aid office or a benefits navigator in Georgia is exactly the kind of commenter who would know the answer from practice.
The commission renewed its accessibility advisory committee for two years. The Federal Register published the renewal of the Consumer Protection and Accessibility Advisory Committee charter on Sept. 30. The committee runs two more years with approximately 35 uncompensated members and an annual operating cost of $372,154. Its scope covers communications access and video programming access for people with disabilities, and it draws members who are blind, deaf or hard of hearing, cognitively disabled, deafblind, or have speech disabilities.
The notice credits past committee recommendations with shaping commission action on relay services for video conferencing platforms and on artificial intelligence captioning for live video programming. It states no nomination deadline.
Digital accessibility is the part of digital equity that gets left out of the conversation most often, and a renewed federal charter is a seat at a table. Thirty-five seats, two years, no stated nomination deadline, which means asking the commission how to be considered is the entire process for now.
A second group asked the FCC to wind down the $4.5 billion rural high-cost fund. Consumers’ Research Executive Director Will Hild filed a letter dated Sept. 30 urging the commission to end high-cost spending, Broadband Breakfast reported Oct. 2. “Consumers’ Research therefore urges the FCC to discontinue High-Cost spending on redundant infrastructure,” the letter says, arguing against new long-term mechanisms funding duplicative networks. The group joins SpaceX, which filed comments calling rural high-cost subsidies obsolete.
The high-cost fund is what keeps a telephone and internet company willing to serve a rural county where the cost per line is higher than anybody would pay. Winding it down does not change the cost of serving those lines. It changes who absorbs it, and the candidates are the customer and nobody.
The argument that a satellite service makes the subsidy obsolete is the one to watch, because it decides the standard. If satellite counts as served, then every Delta and Black Belt county the fund currently supports is redefined as finished. That is a comment worth filing by anyone who has tried to hold a video call on satellite in bad weather.
The commission cut environmental review for about 14,800 wireless deployments a year. At its Sept. 30 open meeting the commission modernized its National Environmental Policy Act regulations, exempting space-based operations and most wireless infrastructure deployments from review. It projects eliminating environmental evaluations for approximately 14,800 annual wireless deployments and more than $2.2 billion in compliance costs over the next decade. The same meeting took up satellite spectrum, ultra-wideband device rules, a Next Generation 911 notice of inquiry and robocall opt-out rules.
Environmental review is the step at which a community gets told a tower or a facility is coming and gets to say something about where it goes. Fourteen thousand eight hundred deployments a year is a lot of notices that will no longer be generated. Faster buildout is a real benefit and the review step is a real protection, and this trade was made without a public hearing in anybody’s county.
The commission stopped Verizon’s legacy voice shutoff from going through automatically in nine states. An application by Verizon to discontinue domestic legacy voice service, which was set to be granted automatically on Sept. 26, was removed from automatic-grant status, the Benton Institute reported Sept. 28. The commission said it “requires additional time to complete its review. Accordingly, the Application as filed with the FCC will not be automatically granted.” The nine states are Arizona, Delaware, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Utah and Virginia. Two of them are in this coverage area. No subscriber count is given.
This sits against the rule above. On Oct. 1 the commission published a rule making discontinuance applications grant themselves after 31 days, and on Sept. 26 it declined to let one do exactly that. Both are the same commission in the same week, and the difference is that someone looked at this one.
South Carolina and Virginia are the two states here. The customers on legacy voice in those states are the people for whom the 31-day clock is the whole protection, and the only reason it did not run this time is that the agency chose to stop it.
Digital Equity Act grants are expected to reopen as soon as December. Connect Humanity published guidance on Oct. 1 saying the Commerce Department is expected to reopen the Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program with applications possibly opening in December 2026, following the July 2026 federal court ruling that blocked cancellation of the program. A federal paperwork notice published Aug. 25 carries a comment deadline of Oct. 26, and the agency estimates roughly 18 hours per application.
The piece warns that the application window is likely to be short and badly timed. The 2024 round ran from July 24 to Sept. 23, 2024. Author Samantha Schartman says more than a dozen organizations and several states have raised partnership interest, clustered in workforce development and healthcare, which is her own count rather than a dataset.
A short window opening in December means the groups that win are the ones with partnerships already in place when the notice drops. Nobody assembles a coalition over the holidays. If your organization intends to apply, the work that matters is the memorandum of understanding you sign in October, not the narrative you write in December.
The Oct. 26 comment deadline on the paperwork notice is the one chance to tell the agency that an 18-hour estimate and a holiday window exclude small organizations. That comment is a letter.
BEAD watch
The supplemental round has a clock, and the trade press puts the whole thing at nine months. Light Reading reported Oct. 1 on the complications in the new BEAD supplemental deployment round, which lets states direct a portion of their BEAD savings toward newly identified unserved locations. Roughly $21 billion of the $42 billion program remains available. Carol Mattey, a former Federal Communications Commission official, laid out the sequence at a Fiber Broadband Association session aired Sept. 30: states get 30 days to validate unserved location lists, seven days to publish revised lists, then a 30-day provider challenge window, then 30 days for states to adjudicate challenges, then approval, then a 90-day supplemental bidding round. “Realistically, this process could take nine months,” she said.
Mattey also flagged a structural problem in the cost model. The supplemental funding cap uses an average cost across fiber, fixed wireless and satellite winners, and because satellite bids came in lower, averaging brings the state average down. That squeezes terrestrial providers on the hardest-to-reach remaining locations. Broadband Breakfast reported Sept. 30 that all 50 states’ BEAD plans have been approved and that the next round could roll out in nine months, naming none of the nine states covered here.
The averaging is the part that lands here. The locations left in these nine states after the first round are the scattered ones, at the end of long roads, in the counties with the fewest people per mile. Those are the most expensive places to run fiber, and a funding cap set by an average that includes satellite bids is a cap set below what fiber there costs.
Which means the likely answer for a lot of Black Belt and Delta addresses in this round is satellite, decided by a cost model rather than by anybody asking. The 30-day challenge window is where a county or a cooperative can contest that, and it opens when a state publishes its list. None of the nine has.
Indiana moved $400 million. The nine states covered here moved nothing. Gov. Mike Braun announced on Sept. 30 that Indiana will spend $400 million in federal broadband contracts to reach more than 122,000 homes and businesses, with 24 internet service providers selected, construction beginning in fall 2026 and buildouts targeted for completion by 2030, Broadband Breakfast reported Oct. 1. Indiana is not in this coverage area and is here as the contrast. It was the one state to announce a supplemental-round spend during the week.
One state said where $400 million is going and named the 24 companies. Nine Southern states said nothing. The money is allocated to all of them either way, and the difference is whether residents can see what is being decided with it.
The Indiana announcement is also a template for what to ask for: a dollar figure, a location count, a provider list and a completion date, in one release. Any of these nine broadband offices could publish that.
Louisiana got the first environmental review memo in the country, and the location count does not match. NTIA’s September BroadbandUSA newsletter says Louisiana is the first state in the nation to receive an agency decision memo under the National Environmental Policy Act for a BEAD project, covering more than 50,000 serviceable locations. It puts Louisiana’s allocation at $1.36 billion to reach approximately 124,000 locations, with universal high-speed access expected by 2028.
Two notes on that. The article page carries only “September 2026” with no day, and the Sept. 28 date comes from the agency’s own news index, which we loaded. And the 124,000 figure does not match the 127,000 location figure that appeared in trade coverage of Louisiana’s program in April. We are printing the agency’s own number and naming the discrepancy rather than reconciling it.
Louisiana is the state in this region that publishes most and moves fastest, and it is the only one of the nine the federal agency named this week. That is worth saying plainly.
It is also still a location count. One hundred twenty-four thousand addresses becoming serviceable by 2028 tells a family in Tensas Parish nothing about whether they will subscribe at a price they can pay. The environmental memo clears a legal step. It does not clear the bill.
Around the states
All nine state broadband offices published nothing, in the week the supplemental round opened. We checked every one of the nine between Sept. 28 and Oct. 5. Not one published a news item, a press release, a supplemental eligible location list or a challenge notice. Last week eight of nine were silent; this week it is nine of nine.
The staleness is worth printing. Georgia’s broadband program press page carries nothing newer than July 20, 2021, its blog nothing since December 2021, and the Georgia Technology Authority press release page reads “No press releases.” Tennessee’s Economic and Community Development broadband office page lists nothing newer than Nov. 13, 2024. Mississippi’s BEAM news page is dormant, with its newest dated content from 2023 and 2024 engagement meetings. Arkansas last posted June 11, 2026. South Carolina’s Office of Regulatory Staff last posted June 30, 2026, with only three items all year. Louisiana’s press releases stop at Sept. 16 and its news page at Sept. 10. Alabama’s broadband news site is newest at March 24, 2026. North Carolina’s most recent item is Sept. 23, five days before this window. Virginia’s housing and community development news page is newest at Sept. 17 and its press releases at Aug. 27, and the broadband office address at dhcd.virginia.gov/obb now returns a 404.
Several governors’ offices and economic development agencies in these states did publish during the week. Alabama’s Department of Economic and Community Affairs posted on outdoor recreation grants and rural health grants on Oct. 1 and Oct. 2. Tennessee’s economic development office posted a $1 billion battery plant announcement on Sept. 29. None of it was broadband.
The supplemental round’s challenge window is 30 days and it starts when a state publishes a list. If that list posts on a Friday on a page nobody has updated since 2021, the window is a third gone before anyone knows it opened.
So watch the BEAD document pages rather than the news pages, and check on a schedule. The counties with the most addresses riding on that list are the rural Black counties with the fewest staff to watch for it. A county manager who sets a weekly calendar reminder to check the state’s BEAD page is doing something the state is not doing for them.
A broadband press page last updated in July 2021, in a state spending federal broadband money right now, is itself a finding. Georgia residents are entitled to ask the Georgia Technology Authority why its press release page says there are none.
Arkansas update: the Pulaski County judge vetoed the data center ordinance, and no override has been scheduled. Issue 04 reported that County Judge Barry Hyde had several days to veto the data center regulations the Pulaski County quorum court passed 11 to 4 on Sept. 22, and that two outlets gave different windows. He vetoed it on Sept. 25, three days before we published, and we missed it. The Arkansas Times reported the veto that day, writing that Hyde does not believe the ordinance can be lawfully administered without exposing the county to legal risk, and that the ordinance’s author, Justice of the Peace Julie Blackwood, said she will seek an override.
We found no evidence that an override vote happened on or before Oct. 5, and no override has been publicly scheduled that we could confirm. An Associated Press account of the veto was republished during this window by a station whose page would not load for us, so we are not citing it.
A quorum court override in Arkansas is the next move and it is a vote, which means it is a thing residents can turn out for. Pulaski County is 37.1% Black, and the project the ordinance declined to exempt is the $6 billion AVAIO Digital campus planned near Wrightsville, a small historically Black city.
Blackwood’s office is where to ask whether an override is on an agenda. Until one happens, the county has no data center regulations at all, which is the state the ordinance was written to end.
Mississippi update: the Walls mayor says no developer ever approached the town and no nondisclosure agreement exists. Mayor Keidron Henderson has set four listening sessions on the town’s future and addressed the data center question directly, DeSoto County News and the DeSoto Times-Tribune both reported Oct. 1. “No data center developer has ever approached us and if one did, we would be completely transparent,” Henderson said. He denied that any nondisclosure agreement exists and said no town official has been authorized to sign one. He says there are currently no data center plans for Walls.
The sessions are at Walls Town Hall with registration required, on Monday Oct. 12 at 5:30 p.m., Monday Oct. 19 at 10 a.m. and 5:30 p.m., and Saturday Oct. 24 at 10 a.m. The planning commission rejected the roughly 1,200-acre rezoning request on Sept. 22, which issue 04 reported. No board of aldermen vote happened during this window.
Issue 04 told readers in Walls to find out when the board of aldermen would take the rezoning up, because no date had been announced. The mayor’s answer is that there is no project and no agreement, and four meetings where residents can say what they want the town to be. Both of those are worth knowing and the second one is a date on a calendar.
Residents at the Sept. 22 hearing cited the xAI plant in Southaven, 20 minutes away, and the renters in this issue’s lead item are the people living with it. Walls is a majority-Black town that turned out a quarter of its population to stop a rezoning. The listening sessions are where that turnout either becomes a zoning ordinance or dissipates.
Cost and access
Eight days to the E-Rate comment deadline, and nothing new was filed in public. No federal action on E-Rate appeared between Sept. 28 and Oct. 5. The date stands. Comments in the Federal Communications Commission’s inquiry into the program that pays for internet at schools and libraries are due Oct. 13, with reply comments Nov. 12, in docket WC 26-133. The inquiry asks whether the program should be limited to rural areas, conditioned on device restrictions and parental opt-out policies, or ended. Issue 04 carried the full item.
That is eight days out. A school board, a library board or a county commission can file a comment in docket 26-133 as a plain letter, with no lawyer, no filing fee and no particular format.
What carries weight in a record like this is specificity. A superintendent writing what the money actually buys in one named district, and what would stop if it went away, is worth more than another association brief. In a lot of small Southern counties the school and the library are the only two buildings with a reliable connection, and the library is where people without one at home file for benefits and apply for jobs.
Still no release date for the Census broadband numbers, 60 days on. The Census Bureau has not set a release date for the 2025 American Community Survey one-year estimates. The bureau’s updates page still carries an Aug. 6 entry saying the date “is being determined” while it assesses a new Commerce Department disclosure avoidance order. Nothing changed during this window.
The practical consequence is worth stating plainly. The newest Census broadband subscription and computer ownership estimates anyone can cite are the 2020 to 2024 five-year tables, which are centered on 2022. Any figure described this month as the latest Census broadband number is a five-year estimate, not a 2026 measurement. The bureau did publish the 2024 Nonemployer Statistics on Sept. 29, which counts businesses with no paid employees and is not a digital equity dataset.
American Community Survey table S2801 is the source for nearly every county-level broadband subscription figure in circulation. Without a one-year release there is no current county number for any of these nine states, which is exactly what a county commissioner needs when a company tells the room that everybody here is already connected.
This is the fourth issue running that the answer has been the same. A room full of Black residents arguing with a state average has nothing to show that the Black Belt and the Delta look different from the state, because the state average is where that difference disappears.
We could not confirm a single provider price change this week. No internet provider rate change dated within this window could be confirmed from a page carrying a publication date. The aggregator pages that track provider price increases are continuously updated and carry no fixed date, so none of them meets the standard we hold every other figure to. Treat provider pricing as unreported this week rather than unchanged.
Negative result · Measures nothing · Checked against dated outlet coverage; the running price-tracker pages we found carry no publication dateAlgorithms
Pew tested artificial intelligence stand-ins for survey respondents and they got Black people wrong most often. Pew Research Center published a methods study on Sept. 30 testing whether artificial intelligence can substitute for human survey respondents. Researchers ran roughly 300 survey questions through simulated respondents, described in the field as digital twins, and compared the answers against those of real people across three survey waves.
The synthetic answers diverged from human answers by an average of 12 percentage points, and the gap exceeded 15 points on about 28% of questions. Broken out by race, the average error was 15.1 percentage points for Black respondents, the highest of the racial groups tested, against 12.5 for white respondents and 13.9 for Hispanic respondents. By party it was 16.1 points for Republicans and 13.6 for Democrats. In one case the simulated poll put 95% of Republicans as favorable toward Israel where the actual figure was 58%. Human respondents were four times more likely than the simulations to answer that they were not sure. The model tested was Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6.
The study reports no breakout by state or region, so there is nothing in it specific to the South. The authors are Athena Chapekis, Arnold Lau, Samuel Bestvater, Sono Shah, Andrew Mercer and Aaron Smith.
Synthetic survey panels are being sold right now as a cheaper way to find out what the public thinks. This study says the cheaper method is least accurate for Black respondents, and it does not stop at being wrong. It is wrong in a particular direction, flattening people into the stereotype the model holds and almost never saying it is unsure.
Consider where survey data decides things that matter here. Broadband needs assessments. Market studies that tell a company whether a neighborhood is worth serving. Public opinion research a utility puts in front of a commission. If a vendor runs any of those on simulated respondents, the group whose answers get invented most confidently is ours.
The question to ask is short and it works in a procurement conversation, a grant review or a public meeting: were these responses collected from people. A vendor who cannot answer plainly has answered.
Governors formed a bipartisan group on artificial intelligence, and it is not about discrimination. Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland, who chairs the National Governors Association, has formed a bipartisan group of governors on artificial intelligence, citing federal inaction, the Associated Press reported Oct. 2 in a story carried by Broadband Breakfast. Gov. Mike Braun of Indiana is co-chair, with other governors from both parties planning to participate and not named. States cited as having issued executive orders or taken steps on artificial intelligence standards are Maryland, California, Illinois, Oregon and Virginia. Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas are cited on data center crackdowns.
The piece contains no figures. Its subjects are data centers, concerns about advanced artificial intelligence and voluntary industry accords. It does not address algorithmic discrimination in hiring, housing, benefits or policing, and no state in this coverage area appears except Virginia.
A governors’ working group is a venue, and right now its agenda is data centers and existential risk. Automated decisions in benefits eligibility, tenant screening and policing are the artificial intelligence questions that reach Black households in the South first, and they are not on this list.
Eight of these nine states have a governor who could put them there. That is a letter from a coalition of state organizations, not a federal campaign.
No federal or state enforcement action on algorithmic discrimination could be dated to this week. We looked for action on automated decision systems in benefits eligibility, tenant screening, hiring, credit and policing, at the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Justice and state attorneys general. Nothing in the window could be dated from a page we loaded. One lead we could not date is a report that the Justice Department intervened in a case against an algorithmic discrimination law, and we are not reporting it until it carries a date.
Negative result · Federal Register sweeps across the window and direct checks of agency pages · Section 508 and Americans with Disabilities Act web accessibility enforcement was also quiet; the only results were undated vendor compliance material, which we excludedThe African Diaspora
African governments pressed for a seat at the table where artificial intelligence safety gets defined. Rest of World reported Oct. 2 from Harare on African governments arguing that they must help set the standards for advanced artificial intelligence rather than receive them. Lewis Garseedah Brown II of Liberia made the case at the United Nations Security Council, saying Africa “must be equal co-architects in determining the standards, ethics, and architectures.” Ali Mohamed Omar, Somalia’s state minister for foreign affairs, also appears. Kenya is identified as the sole African nation in an international artificial intelligence safety network developing evaluation methods for advanced models.
The piece cites a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey of 85 large companies in which more than 80% are running artificial intelligence pilots. That survey is PwC’s and we have not read it, and its field dates are not given.
One African country in the network that writes the evaluation methods. That is the whole structure, and it is the same structure as a county with no seat in a rate case. Whoever writes the test decides what counts as a passing grade, and the people the system will be used on are not in the room.
Hold it beside the Pew finding above. A model that misrepresents Black respondents in the United States by 15.1 percentage points is being evaluated by institutions in which one African government participates.
A United Nations agency and the mobile industry announced a partnership with no numbers in it. The United Nations Development Programme and the GSMA, the global mobile operators’ association, announced a partnership on Oct. 2 to scale African-led artificial intelligence innovation. The stated focus is connecting local talent with development opportunities, improving access to computing infrastructure for pilots, and supporting African-language artificial intelligence through a project called ATLAS Umoja AI launched in July 2026. Aissata De, the programme’s regional director for Africa, said “Africa has the talent and creativity to shape the future of artificial intelligence.”
The release names no countries, no number of people, startups or languages, no dollar figure and no measurable outcome. We are reporting that absence because it is the whole content of the announcement.
African-language artificial intelligence is a real access question. A system that cannot work in the language somebody speaks is not available to them whatever the network looks like, which is the same point the usage gap makes about price. A partnership announcement with no figures in it is not yet evidence of anything, and the thing to watch for is the first number.
People and money
Mississippi’s economic development chief resigned with little explanation. Bill Cork resigned as head of the Mississippi Development Authority, and Gov. Tate Reeves appointed Waldrop to succeed him, Mississippi Today reported Sept. 30. During Cork’s tenure the state recorded $65 billion in total announced investments, mostly data centers, and 23,000 jobs created. The resignation came with little public explanation.
Sixty-five billion dollars in announcements and 23,000 jobs created are two different measures and the gap between them is the point. Dollars announced are a press release, and jobs created are people working. Mississippi has seven data center campuses under construction and a new $6 billion project proposed this week in a county that is 57.3% Black.
The person who runs this agency negotiates the agreements. A change at the top is the moment to ask the successor a question the predecessor was not asked: will the authority publish the community benefit and incentive agreements it signs.
Nothing has been published yet on what Bessemer’s new mayor will do about Project Marvel. No reporting on Project Marvel, the $14.5 billion QTS campus, or on Mayor-elect Louise Alexander’s intentions appeared between Sept. 28 and Oct. 5. The Birmingham Free Press, which reported the runoff, published no data center or utility items at all during the week. The nondisclosure agreement issue 04 reported runs through February 2027.
Negative result for the window · Direct checks of the outlets that covered the runoff · Issue 04 carried the election result and the nondisclosure agreementOn the calendar
Oct. 6: the Memphis City Council takes its third and final vote on the data center moratorium. Twelve months. A rally at City Hall is set for 3 p.m. beforehand.
Council meeting · Memphis Flyer, Oct. 2Oct. 6: Jesup, Georgia holds the second reading of its data center ordinance, 7 p.m. The first reading passed 4 to 2. Residents have asked for a moratorium alongside it.
Council meeting · WTOC, Sept. 30Oct. 6: the Mississippi Public Service Commission meets at 10 a.m. We read the October utility docket. It contains no item filed as a data center or large-load tariff matter, in a state with seven campuses under construction. Entergy Mississippi matters on it include docket 2024-UA-101 on the Andes and Mantero project, filed Aug. 8, and 2025-UA-122 on the Independence transaction property transfers. Mississippi Power has docket 2026-UA-26, a petition for transmission facilities in Jackson County.
Commission meeting · Primary source: the commission’s October 2026 utility docket, which carries the meeting date but no publication dateOct. 7: the first public hearing on the Dominion and NextEra merger, in Newport News. Christopher Newport University, Freeman Center, Gaines Theater, 1 University Place, 6 to 8 p.m. Fairfax follows Oct. 9 and Richmond Nov. 5. Written comments close Nov. 9 and phone testimony registration closes Nov. 2.
Hearing schedule · Virginia Mercury, Sept. 29Oct. 7: the Louisiana Public Service Commission opens three days of hearings on Project Evest. Seven combined-cycle gas units, three battery projects and more than 250 miles of transmission for Meta’s Richland Parish campus. A full commission vote follows.
Hearing · The Center Square, Sept. 30, via the American Press · No docket number appears in the coverageOct. 7: the Chesterfield County Board of Zoning Appeals hears a developer’s appeal of a conditional use permit requirement. 1120 Battery Brook Parkway. County staff recommends denying the appeal.
Board meeting · Richmond BizSense, Oct. 5Oct. 12, 19 and 24: the Walls, Mississippi listening sessions. Walls Town Hall, registration required. Oct. 12 at 5:30 p.m., Oct. 19 at 10 a.m. and 5:30 p.m., Oct. 24 at 10 a.m.
Public meetings · DeSoto County News, Oct. 1Oct. 13: comments due at the FCC on the future of E-Rate. Docket WC 26-133. Reply comments Nov. 12. The inquiry asks whether the school and library internet program should be limited to rural areas, conditioned on device restrictions, or ended.
Deadline · Chalkbeat via Route Fifty, Sept. 23Oct. 15: the FCC’s copper retirement and discontinuance rule takes effect. Notice of a copper retirement may be given on a company website or in a trade publication. Direct notice to 911 providers remains at 90 days.
Effective date · Federal Register, Oct. 1Oct. 19 and Oct. 20: the Appalachian Power rate case hearings in Virginia. Public comment Oct. 19 with registration closing Oct. 15, evidentiary hearing Oct. 20, final order due Jan. 15, 2027. Case PUR-2026-00044.
Hearings · Cardinal News, Oct. 1Oct. 22: the first Fairfield County, South Carolina town hall on data centers, in Jenkinsville. Ridgeway follows Jan. 7 and Winnsboro Jan. 21, with a Planning Commission hearing March 25.
Town hall · WIS News 10, Sept. 29Oct. 26: comments due on the federal paperwork notice for the Digital Equity Act competitive grants. The agency estimates roughly 18 hours per application. The grant round itself is expected to open as soon as December.
Deadline · Connect Humanity, Oct. 1Oct. 29: comments due on the Lifeline computer matching programs, and both programs begin. Georgia and Connecticut food assistance records will be checked against Lifeline eligibility. Each program runs 18 months.
Deadline and start date · Federal Register, Sept. 29Nov. 9: written comments close in the Dominion and NextEra merger case. For anyone who cannot reach Newport News, Fairfax or Richmond in person.
Deadline · Virginia Mercury, Sept. 29Nov. 15: the earliest date AT&T’s approved copper discontinuation could begin. Roughly 90,000 customers across 18 states, eight of them in this coverage area.
Authorization granted January 2026 · Broadband Breakfast, Jan. 13, 2026, carried here for the November dateNov. 18: Chesterfield County supervisors vote on how to spend data center revenue. Delayed twice. A car tax cut, school maintenance and fire staffing are the competing uses.
Board meeting · The Richmonder, Sept. 24Nov. 30: the date Danielle Dillard has to be out of her house in Southaven. The notice is described as about 60 days and its date is not reported.
Reported notice · DeSoto County News, Oct. 2Dec. 21: prison phone providers must file their 2025 cost, usage and site commission data. Unless federal paperwork review is incomplete by then.
Deadline · Federal Register, Oct. 5Jan. 11, 2027: the deadline for the State Corporation Commission to decide the Dominion and NextEra merger. The window to extend the review closed Sept. 30.
Statutory deadline · Cardinal News, Oct. 1Coming up
Nine states, one list, and a thirty-day window that opens without warning.
“Realistically, this process could take nine months.”
Every state in this coverage area now has approved BEAD plans and a share of roughly $21 billion still unspent. The supplemental round requires a state to publish a revised list of unserved locations, after which providers, local governments and nonprofits get 30 days to challenge it. Not one of the nine has published that list, and not one published anything at all during this week.
So the thing to watch is a document, on a page, at a state agency. We will check all nine every week and say when one posts. If you work for a county, a cooperative or a nonprofit in any of these nine states, the 30-day clock is the only moment your address can be contested, and it starts whether or not anyone tells you.
The addresses most likely to be sorted into the satellite column by a cost-model average are in the rural Black counties at the end of the longest roads. Nobody there can check without the list, and the list is late in all nine states.
One item we could not confirm. A report exists that a Walker County, Georgia panel met a third time during this window to debate a draft data center ordinance and parcel-size rules. The county page that would carry it returned a 404 on repeated attempts, so we have no date and are not reporting it. If it happened in this window it belongs in this issue, and it will be in the next one either way.
Unconfirmed · County page would not loadA second item we could not date. A Caribbean submarine cable project, the EllaLink Caribbean Gateway, was announced during CTU ICT Week in Cayenne, connecting French Guiana to roughly 13 Caribbean territories with a 2,100-kilometer extension funded by a 29.9 million euro European grant and targeted for completion by the end of 2029. The only page we found carries a relative timestamp rather than a publication date, and we could not corroborate it with a second dated source. We are naming it here rather than running it as a dated item.
Unconfirmed date · The page shows only a relative timestamp · The primary announcement from the company was not readWhat we are chasing in South Carolina. The South Carolina Public Service Commission has a generic large load docket, numbered 2026-138-E, which is the state’s regulatory vehicle for data center cost allocation and has a noticed workshop. The commission’s document management system is closed to automated access, so we could not load the notice or date it. We will get it by other means.
Pending · dms.psc.sc.gov is blocked to our workspace by its own robots fileCorrections
One from issue 04. We reported that Pulaski County Judge Barry Hyde had a window of several days to veto the county’s new data center ordinance, and that two outlets disagreed about whether it was five days or seven. He had already vetoed it. The Arkansas Times reported the veto on Sept. 25, three days before we published, and we did not find it. The full update is in Around the states above.
Veto reported by the Arkansas Times, Sept. 25What the numbers mean
You’ll see a few terms throughout this report that sound similar, but they don’t always mean the same thing. We try to be clear about what each number actually tells us.
Every figure is labeled based on what was counted or measured. And when we’re using someone else’s research instead of the original source, we’ll say that too.
- Availability
- Internet service is offered where you live. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have it.
- Subscription
- Your household pays for internet service at home.
- Adoption
- Internet service is available to you, you have it, and you’re actually using it.
- Use
- You’re getting online somehow, whether that’s at home, on your phone, at the library, at work or somewhere else.
- Location
- A physical place or address. It might be a home, business, school, warehouse or another building.
- Household
- The people who live together in a home. One household is not always the same thing as one location.