The
DEAP
Roots
Report.
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.
“They just say you owe so much. No matter how good account you kept, you had to go by their account.”
Henry Blake, born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1863
Interviewed by Samuel S. Taylor for the Federal Writers’ Project, Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 1, 1937. Blake is describing settling accounts under the share system after the war. Read in the digitized typescript held in the Born in Slavery collection at the Library of Congress, where the period at the end of each sentence is rendered as an asterisk.
The week in one minute
- A federal judge restored the right of six Memphis residents to speak at council, and hours later the council rejected a long data center moratorium and passed a short one nobody had read.
- Virginia regulators’ own staff told them to reject a $67 billion utility merger, and said the companies withheld key projections even under a confidentiality order.
- A rural broadband company holding more than $120 million in Virginia grant commitments filed for bankruptcy after completing 40 connections in one of its two projects.
- A Georgia county took back a data center rezoning because the developer could not produce a power contract, and 700 megawatts came off the table.
- Arkansas regulators had refused to put a solar contract on ratepayers, so Google is paying for it instead, which is the opposite of what happened everywhere else this week.
- North Carolina will test artificial intelligence on food assistance recertification, and the funder’s published measure of success is fewer agency errors.
- The FCC published its October meeting agenda with nothing on Lifeline, nothing on BEAD and nothing on digital equity.
- One of the nine state broadband offices published anything at all this week, and the week’s real decisions were made by utility regulators and county boards.
Data centers
Memphis got its speakers back, then passed a pause nobody had read.
On Oct. 6 the Memphis City Council cleared its chambers and barred six people, including state Rep. Justin Pearson, from coming back, citing violations of decorum after they chanted through a megaphone. Pearson sued. Hours before the council met again on Oct. 20, a federal judge ruled the bans unconstitutional, and he spoke. Amber Sherman, one of the residents, said she was grateful the lawsuit had been filed and that the bans were “officially ruled unconstitutional.”
What happened next is the part that matters. The moratorium on new data center development, sponsored by council member Jerri Green and already delayed twice, failed on a 6-6 tie. Council member Yolanda Cooper-Sutton was absent. Two council members then introduced a 135-day development pause at the last minute, and that passed. Pearson said no one had read it and the public had no time to review it. Neither account we read gives a stated end date for the pause.
A separate measure did pass cleanly. Ordinance No. 5986, sponsored by Councilman Warren, cleared its third and final reading and now governs how large-scale data centers are sited, built and run in the city. It prohibits routine evaporative and once-through cooling, requires closed-loop water circulation, limits major withdrawals of local water for cooling and calls for a schedule to phase out carbon-based electricity, along with public disclosure and enforcement measures. No vote tally was reported for it.
The record disagrees on one detail and we are not going to paper over it. Action News 5 describes the failed measure as a 12-month moratorium and Mother Jones describes it as 18-month. Both report the 6-6 failure. We did not obtain the ordinances or the roll call, so we cannot settle the length.
The council also tightened access to its own meetings. Attendance is now limited, check-in runs through the Main Street doors only, backpacks and purses are banned in favor of clear bags, committee rooms and chambers are inspected beforehand, bullhorns are prohibited and there is a new evacuation procedure. The council’s chief administrative officer said employees had received threats.
The company at the center of this is xAI, which operates three hyperscale artificial intelligence data centers in the Memphis metro and wants to expand. Its Colossus facility runs on gas turbines. Mother Jones reports that Boxtown, the neighborhood next to Colossus I, is majority Black, was founded by formerly enslaved people shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation, and that many homes there lacked water, sewage and electricity as late as 1975. Residents link the turbines to respiratory illness, and Mother Jones reports Boxtown leads Tennessee in emergency room visits for asthma. Whitehaven is also fighting the expansion.
Two things happened in one room on one day, and they point opposite directions. A court said a city cannot bar residents from speaking to their own council, which is a win somebody had to sue for. Then the council voted down the measure those residents came for and replaced it with something introduced minutes before the vote. Winning the right to speak is not the same as being heard, and Memphis demonstrated the gap in a single afternoon.
The 135-day pause is the thing to pin down this week, because nobody has published when it ends. Counting 135 days from Oct. 20 lands around March 4, but the ordinance may run from adoption, from signature or from publication, and that difference is weeks. Ask the council clerk for the adopted text and the effective date, because a pause with no published end date expires quietly.
Ordinance 5986 is the more durable win and it got almost no attention. Closed-loop cooling and a ban on once-through cooling are design requirements, which means they cannot be retrofitted and they have to be in the permit from the start. That is a real constraint on water use in a city sitting on the Memphis Sand aquifer. The question for the next year is enforcement: who inspects, how often, what gets published and what happens when a facility is out of compliance. The ordinance says there are enforcement measures, and it is worth finding out what they are.
One number we are not printing: Mother Jones reports Boxtown’s cancer risk from air pollution at four times the national average but does not name the source or say whether that is modeled or measured. It reads like modeled risk from a federal screening tool rather than counted cases, and those are different claims. Somebody should run it down, because it is the figure most likely to be quoted and most likely to be challenged.
A federal judge refused to let the Justice Department shut down the NAACP’s clean air suit against xAI. U.S. District Judge Debra Brown denied the government’s motion to end the NAACP’s citizen suit over gas turbines on Stanton Road at the Mississippi and Tennessee line, ruling that the Clean Air Act does not let the Environmental Protection Agency unilaterally dismiss a citizen suit, though the agency may take part. The case goes forward. The suit, brought in summer 2026 with Earthjustice among the groups behind it, argues xAI should owe more than $100,000 a day in civil penalties for permitting violations. Mother Jones describes the Justice Department’s motion backing xAI as unprecedented.
The citizen suit provision exists because Congress did not trust enforcement to an agency alone. This ruling says the agency cannot take that tool away from the people using it, which matters well beyond Memphis. Any community group suing a polluter under the Clean Air Act just got a ruling it can cite.
The plaintiff here is the NAACP, which means the organization with the deepest roots in these nine states is carrying the lead case against the largest artificial intelligence data center complex in the South. That matters for anyone deciding where to put their energy locally.
Mississippi is seeking about $6.1 million from the same company, and the public found out through a securities filing. The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality issued notices of violation in August 2026 to MZX Tech, SpaceXAI’s parent, alleging it disturbed land at its three Southaven sites without state stormwater permits. The company disclosed the matter in a quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Oct. 22, which is how it became public. The department is seeking civil penalties of up to $25,000 a day, with preliminary claimed exposure of about $6.1 million. The company says it is cooperating and in discussions to resolve the matters through a single agreed order. The three Southaven sites include a data center, a power plant and a nearby 51-acre parcel the company recently acquired in a land swap with the city.
The sequence matters here. A state agency issued violation notices in August and the public learned about them in late October, from a filing made to investors rather than to residents. Nobody in DeSoto County got a notice. If you want to know what your state environmental agency has alleged against a facility near you, the notices of violation are public records and you can ask for them by name and date.
Southaven sits directly across the state line from the Memphis neighborhoods fighting the same company. That is two states, two agencies, two separate proceedings and one operator. That is a hard thing for a neighborhood group to track and an easy thing for a company to manage, which is the practical advantage of building at a state line.
Coweta County took back a data center rezoning because the developer could not produce a power contract. The Coweta County, Georgia Board of Commissioners approved reverting the zoning on a property along State Route 14 and U.S. 29 from light industrial back to rural conservation at its Oct. 20 meeting, undoing rezoning petition 24-14. The developer, Cyrons One, had failed to deliver a power purchase agreement from Georgia Power or obtain a land disturbance permit by its extended deadline of Oct. 16. Commissioners had granted a 12-month extension in October 2025 to get a will-serve letter and a contract. A public notice in late September said the applicant still had neither. The project, known as Project Peach, was proposed at about 2.1 million square feet and roughly 700 megawatts. Georgia Power would not release a fully unredacted version of its contract with the developers, citing proprietary information. Residents and elected officials from Palmetto spoke against the project at both the original hearing and the extension meeting.
This is the cleanest piece of news in the issue, and the mechanism is worth copying. Coweta did not ban anything, win a lawsuit or pass a moratorium. It attached a deadline and a condition to its rezoning, the developer missed both, and the zoning went back to what it was. A condition with a date on it did what two years of public comment could not.
Coweta’s decision gives residents elsewhere a concrete question to bring to planning staff and county attorneys: can their county attach enforceable deadlines and conditions to a rezoning, and what would happen if a developer missed them? The answer needs to be checked locally, and this one decision does not establish that every county can use the same approach. The place to ask is before the rezoning hearing rather than after it.
The redaction is the other half of the story. A utility would not show a county an unredacted copy of the contract that the county’s own zoning decision depended on. The developer could not produce the agreement either, and the project died of that. Transparency was not granted here; it was simply unavailable to everybody, including the company.
Arkansas regulators pushed a data center cost off ratepayers, and the company picked it up. Google and Entergy Arkansas expanded their agreement on Oct. 20 for Google’s 600-megawatt data center under development in West Memphis, Crittenden County. Google will fund three renewable projects and grid upgrades: a power purchase agreement for the full 440-megawatt output of the Big Island solar plant in Mississippi County, up to 1.4 gigawatt-hours of battery storage by 2028, and an expansion of the Galet substation in West Memphis plus two 230-kilovolt transmission lines. The backstory is the point. In early September the Arkansas Public Service Commission rejected Entergy Arkansas’s request to enter the Big Island contract, finding the utility had not shown the costs were reasonable or that customers would save money, and advised Entergy to work with Google instead. Google says the contract was added based on that guidance. The companies claim $2.1 billion in net benefits toward fixed costs shared by all customers. Entergy plans to submit the expansion to the commission for approval.
This sits next to everything else in this issue. In Virginia the fight is over how much of a data center buildout lands on residential bills. In Louisiana a commission has been asked to fast-track seven gas plants for one company. In Arkansas a commission told a utility no, said the cost case had not been made, and the customer ended up paying. That is the outcome everybody else is arguing for, and it happened because three commissioners refused a filing.
Two cautions belong with this. The $2.1 billion in net benefits is a company projection, not a commission finding, and the expansion still has to go back to the commission for approval, so this is not finished. More to the point, West Memphis and Crittenden County will host a 600-megawatt facility on 1,178 acres and no source we read gives a single job number, a local hiring commitment or a host-community benefit. A commission protected ratepayers statewide, and nobody has said what Crittenden County gets.
The filing is the thing to watch, and it does not exist yet. When Entergy Arkansas submits the expansion, the docket becomes the only place where the terms are public and the only place a resident can intervene. Ask the commission’s docket office to flag it.
A Tennessee county wrote data center rules before anyone applied, and raised the setback fivefold on the floor. The Montgomery County Commission approved an amended data center zoning resolution 17-4 on Oct. 19. It is not final: the amendment sends it back to the Regional Planning Commission for a second review, then returns to the commission in November. Under the resolution a data center needs Board of Zoning Appeals approval, must sit on at least 10 and no more than 100 acres, and must keep a minimum setback of 100 feet from all zones except the two manufacturing districts. Monday’s amendment raised that to 500 feet from residential, after Commissioner Joshua Beal proposed 1,000 feet. An applicant must submit a noise plan showing no more than 3 decibels above ambient and not exceeding 55 decibels next to property outside the manufacturing districts, a letter from the water provider confirming supply and a letter from the power and gas provider confirming electricity can be supplied. The applicant pays for any infrastructure upgrades needed for utility service and is solely responsible for those utilities. Commissioners LaTonia Brown, Lekeshia Hicks, Jeremiah Walker and Carmelle Chandler voted no. A moratorium and a postponement were discussed and not approved. There are no data center proposals under consideration in the county.
The two letters are what another county can copy. Before a data center can get zoning approval in Montgomery County it has to hand the county written confirmation from the water utility that the water exists and from the power utility that the electricity exists. That turns a developer’s projection into somebody else’s signed statement, and it does it before the vote rather than after. Coweta County in this same issue lost two years because that confirmation never arrived.
The noise standard is written the harder way. Three decibels above ambient is a relative limit, so it protects a quiet rural area at a quiet rural level instead of letting a facility run up to a fixed number. The 55-decibel cap sits on top of it. A county using a single fixed decibel figure is allowing more noise than this.
It is also not law yet, and four commissioners voted no. The resolution goes back to the Regional Planning Commission and returns in November with no date published. Rules that pass on an amendment and then travel to a second body are where provisions get quietly loosened, so the November agenda is the one to read.
Little Rock failed to pass a data center moratorium for the second time, on the same split. The Little Rock Board of Directors deadlocked 4-4 on a data center moratorium on Oct. 20, the same split that killed an 18-month version in August. Director Kathy Webb sponsored it. Director Capi Peck, listed as a co-sponsor, voted no and called it too technical. Google plans a $1 billion data center at the Port of Little Rock, on the city’s southeast side.
Two 4-4 votes two months apart amount to a working majority for doing nothing rather than a stalemate. The city has a billion-dollar project announced at a port facility and no data center regulations, which means the rules that apply are whatever the existing industrial zoning says.
The question to put to the board is narrower than a moratorium and harder to vote against: what does the city’s current zoning require of a data center on port property regarding water, noise, setbacks and who pays for the power infrastructure? If the answer is nothing, that is the gap, and Montgomery County, Tennessee just published a template for closing it.
An Alabama city said no to a moratorium and wrote an 18-page ordinance instead. Irondale, in the Birmingham metro, will not impose a moratorium on data center development. Mayor James Stewart Jr. called moratoria “the easy way out,” and the planning and zoning commission he chairs voted at a public hearing to recommend an 18-page zoning ordinance proposed by Councilman Aaron Sims after six months of study. The ordinance would define hyperscale and other data center types, require closed-loop cooling, limit noise to under 50 decibels at the property line during the day and set minimum setbacks from residential areas that vary by facility type. At least 17 Alabama cities, mostly in central Alabama, have passed six-month or year-long moratoria. Irondale has no data centers proposed or seeking permits, and Sims says he does not expect a large one to locate there. The City Council’s binding vote is expected in December.
Seventeen Alabama cities have bought themselves six or twelve months and most of them will reach the end of it without an ordinance written. A pause is only worth the rule you write during it, and Irondale is making the argument that you may as well skip to the rule. That is a defensible position in a city with no application pending and a bad one in a city with a developer at the door.
What the coverage does not contain is any ratepayer or equity framing at all, in a state where a single county commission gave away 20 years of taxes this month. Fifty decibels at the property line is a real standard. Who pays for the substation is a question this ordinance apparently does not answer, and the December council vote is when to ask it.
Analysts went to court in Louisiana to pry loose the numbers behind seven more gas plants for Meta. Entergy Louisiana filed in March 2026 for seven additional gas plants plus battery storage and new transmission to serve Meta’s Hyperion data center in Richland Parish, using a fast-track process the Public Service Commission created under what is known as the Lightning Amendment. Three plants were already approved in 2025, so the total would reach 10. In late September, Earthjustice filed an appeal in state district court in Baton Rouge on behalf of the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Alliance for Affordable Energy. The appeal argues the commission unlawfully overrode an administrative law judge’s ruling that would have required Meta to disclose its expected investment, permanent jobs and electricity demand, calling the override arbitrary and capricious. In August, three of four commissioners voted to deny the Meta subpoena. The plants are 754 megawatts each, roughly 7.54 gigawatts of capacity in total. The initial price tag for the power infrastructure is put at more than $15 billion, with Entergy estimating about $13.6 billion in new generation capital costs, of which it estimates about 75% would be paid down by the end of Meta’s 20-year contract, leaving about $3.4 billion for other customers. The supply contract is confidential and Entergy would not need competitive bids.
That $3.4 billion is Entergy’s own estimate of what everybody else pays, and it is the only number in this item that was not withheld. The demand figure justifying 7.54 gigawatts of new gas is itself a projection the public is not allowed to inspect, because the commission refused the subpoena that would have produced it. Louisiana ratepayers are being asked to accept an amount they cannot check, calculated from a load they cannot see.
Louisiana elects its public service commissioners, which makes this the one state in these nine where the people deciding answer directly to voters. The commission’s final vote is scheduled for December. Public comment in a commission docket is free and does not require a lawyer, and the most useful thing a resident can say in that record is the narrow thing: the load forecast has not been disclosed, so the cost allocation cannot be evaluated.
Richland Parish is in the Delta, near Monroe and Rayville, and the costs land on Entergy Louisiana’s residential customers statewide including New Orleans and Baton Rouge. None of the writing on this proceeding addresses the racial makeup of the host parish or the ratepayer base at all. That absence has held for months now and it is a gap somebody local should fill.
Walmart says it was shut out of the Duke Energy data center rate talks, and the question of who pays got pushed two years down the road. Duke Energy Carolinas and Duke Energy Progress filed a large load tariff settlement with the North Carolina Utilities Commission on Oct. 6. Walmart filed on Oct. 12 asking the commission to reopen comments, saying it was excluded from the negotiations and learned of them only after the agreement was submitted. The settlement defines a large load customer as one with contract demand of at least 50 megawatts and an expected load factor of at least 80%, or contract demand of at least 150 megawatts at any load factor. Those customers go on a new rate schedule with minimum billing at 75% of contract demand, initial contract terms of 10 years below 100 megawatts and 15 years at or above it, and liquidated damages on early termination. On the central question the settlement defers: Duke will provide a large load class cost-of-service analysis in its next rate case, roughly two years away, and will file a report within 12 months on methods for assigning part of the cost of network upgrades directly to these customers. Signatories include Duke, the commission’s Public Staff, Amazon Data Services, Google and Microsoft. Supporting Walmart’s request are the Carolina Utility Customers Association, the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association, a North Carolina Justice Center coalition and the Carolinas Clean Energy Business Association.
The structure matters more than the dispute. Amazon, Google and Microsoft signed this agreement, while Walmart, which buys a great deal of electricity and is not a data center operator, says it was not in the room. And the question of how much of the grid buildout these customers pay for is answered with a promise to study it in the next rate case, which is about two years out. Everything that gets built between now and then gets allocated under the old rules.
The 75% minimum billing is the provision with teeth and it deserves credit. A customer who reserves 150 megawatts pays for 112.5 of it whether it uses the capacity or not, which is what stops a developer from holding a place in the queue it never takes. That is a real protection and it is why the deferred cost allocation is the weak point rather than the whole thing being weak.
The North Carolina Justice Center coalition is in this proceeding, which means somebody is in the room on behalf of households rather than large customers. They are the people to ask what a 15-year contract term and a two-year deferral mean for residential bills in eastern North Carolina, and they will have a more specific answer than we can give.
Suffolk banned data centers in every zoning district in the city, unanimously and with no end date. Suffolk City Council voted unanimously on Oct. 21 to adopt a temporary prohibition on data center development in all zoning districts, amending the city’s Unified Development Ordinance. The amendment also rewrites the definitions of trucking terminals, warehouses and freight storage and distribution to explicitly exclude data centers, closing a loophole planners had warned about. Neither account we read gives a fixed end date. The Planning Commission recommended it unanimously on Sept. 15. Suffolk currently has no data centers. Mayor Michael Duman said the city “will not be accepting any applications for data centers whatsoever.” Draft permanent rules circulating unofficially would require council-approved permits, limit data centers to manufacturing districts and require soundproofing, limits on generator testing hours, a ban on well water for operations, written approval from the electricity provider and underground transmission lines. The planning director said staff is not ready to present it. Virginia Beach enacted a 12-month moratorium in August and Chesapeake eliminated by-right development the same month.
The definitional rewrite is the quiet, important part. A data center that cannot be permitted as a data center will be submitted as a warehouse or a freight distribution facility, because those uses are already allowed in industrial districts almost everywhere. Suffolk closed that door in the same ordinance that shut the front one. Any city or county writing a pause should check its own definitions of warehouse and trucking terminal before it congratulates itself.
Hampton Roads now has three jurisdictions with pauses or by-right restrictions, and Suffolk sits where the industrial corridor runs. The draft permanent rules include a ban on well water for operations and written confirmation from the electricity provider, which are the two provisions that decide whether a facility is a neighbor or a competitor for the things a household needs. They are still drafts, and the planning director hopes to reach the Planning Commission in early 2027, so until then the pause is what exists.
Loudoun County did not enact the pause everyone reported it enacted. The Loudoun County Board of Supervisors was scheduled to vote on Oct. 20 on the resolution enacting a 12-month legislative pause on data center and substation applications. Item 14p was deferred to the second November business meeting, which is Nov. 17. Staff said the delay gives them more time to develop information for the board. Several outlets and aggregators have reported the pause as enacted. It is not. The board voted 7-1-1 on Sept. 15 to advance it, and if adopted it would be retroactive to that date. The pause covers final board votes on applications requiring legislative approval, which means administrative applications are unaffected, including at least 17 grandfathered administrative cases covering more than 11 million square feet that proceed by right. Loudoun’s adopted fiscal 2027 budget projects data center revenue at $1.3 billion, 40% of the total county budget. Board Chair Phyllis Randall says this is “not a moratorium.” Separately, Randall announced on Oct. 20 that Amazon Data Services will withdraw its data center application for the former George Washington University campus and will not sue to build there, donating 25 acres to the county valued at $65 million plus $5 million to the county housing fund. Amazon bought the 120-acre campus for $427 million in February.
Correcting this matters because the error travels. A county board advancing a measure in September and deferring the enacting vote in October is not a county that paused data centers, and anyone citing Loudoun as proof that the biggest data center market in the world has stopped approving them is citing something that has not happened. The vote is Nov. 17.
The 40% is the number that explains the rest. Loudoun’s own adopted budget projects that two out of every five dollars it plans to spend next year come from data centers. That is the clearest available measure of how a local government becomes unable to say no, and it is the answer to anyone who wonders why rural counties in these nine states are signing 20-year abatements. Loudoun got the revenue, and the counties hosting the generation and the transmission corridors did not.
The 17 grandfathered administrative cases, more than 11 million square feet proceeding by right, are the same carve-out pattern running through every item in this issue. Rules arrive after the largest projects are already permitted.
Stafford County voted to condemn nine properties for a pipe that will mostly cool data centers. The Stafford County Board of Supervisors approved a process on Oct. 20 to condemn nine parcels for the reuse-water system known locally as the purple pipe. All nine related votes were 4-2-1. Vice Chairwoman Maya Guy and Rock Hill Supervisor Crystal Vanuch dissented, and Griffis-Widewater Supervisor Tinesha Allen abstained. Ten property owners had settled with the developers and nine had not, including homeowners associations and individuals, some of whom have not responded to the county’s inquiries according to its outside counsel. The pipe carries treated, non-potable reuse water for data center cooling instead of potable water, and other businesses could use it for industrial cooling. The developers build it and the county owns it on completion. Residents of the Somerset Landing subdivision objected over the route through woods behind their homes, which their homeowners association owns as common area and which rejected the developers’ monetary offer. Speakers accused the county of acting for data center developers. County Administrator Bill Ashton disputed that and called the pipe a governmental utility.
Eminent domain is the sharpest power a local government has, and here it is being used on residential common land for infrastructure whose primary customer is private data centers, built by developers and handed to the county. Calling it a governmental utility is not wrong, but it is not the whole description either, and the residents who lose the woods behind their houses are the ones carrying the difference.
The question the reporting does not answer is who pays. The article gives no cost figure, no gallons-per-day figure and no named data center. If the developers build it and the county takes ownership, somebody maintains it and somebody eventually replaces it, and that is a ratepayer or taxpayer obligation that outlasts any single facility. Ask the county what the pipe cost, what it costs to run and who is billed for it.
Using reuse water instead of drinking water for cooling is genuinely better than the alternative, and it is the thing Memphis and Suffolk are both legislating toward. This item is not an argument against that; it is an argument for knowing the full price of it before the condemnation, rather than after.
Virginia
Virginia’s own regulators’ staff told them to reject the $67 billion merger.
Staff at the State Corporation Commission filed testimony on Oct. 19 in case PUR-2026-00112 concluding that the companies had not carried their burden under Virginia’s Utility Transfers Act. The same day, Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s office filed testimony demanding conditions. Attorney General Jay Jones and Lt. Gov. Ghazala Hashmi also oppose the deal as filed. The commission decides in January.
The governor’s asks are specific. Freeze residential base-rate increases across three rate-review cycles, which is six years. Give customers credits of $29 a month for four years. Raise Dominion’s debt share in financing the deal from 48% to 60%. Create a Virginia-based subsidiary for zero-carbon generation serving large data centers, financially walled off from other customers. And revise cost allocation to cut the residential share, which her office says would reduce residential costs by 25%.
Dominion’s counter-offer is a $10 monthly credit for four years for a residential customer using 1,000 kilowatt-hours a month. Commission staff endorsed the $10 version, partly funded by withholding credits from data centers. For scale, VPM puts the average Virginia household bill in 2025 at about $150 a month. The companies value the all-stock transaction at $67 billion, with NextEra shareholders holding 74.5% of the combined company and Dominion shareholders 25.5%. Dominion has announced a package it describes as more than $2.1 billion in near-term customer and community benefits and 1,000 new direct jobs in Virginia, with state headcount maintained for five years. Staff want 10 years.
If the commissioners approve the deal anyway, staff want conditions: an independent Virginia board, dividend limits, a bankruptcy ring-fence around the holding company, no consolidation of generating facilities or local district offices for 10 years, and a re-review seven to eight years after closing.
One line in the staff filing deserves its own sentence. Staff complained that key projections for the combined company were redacted during discovery, even under a confidentiality protection order. The regulators’ own analysts say they were not shown the numbers they were asked to evaluate.
A $29 monthly credit and a $10 monthly credit are both on the table, and the difference between them is about $228 a year for a household. On a bill averaging around $150 a month, that is a utility bill payment rather than a rounding error. The commission’s own staff recommended the smaller one, and recommended paying for part of it by withholding credits from data centers, which is at least an honest statement about who should carry the cost.
The walled-off subsidiary in the governor’s filing is the structural idea to watch, and it is the first serious proposal of its kind in these nine states. If generation built for large data centers sits in a separate company with its own finances, then a cost overrun there cannot be spread across households in Richmond, Petersburg or Hampton Roads. That is the whole fight, written as a corporate structure instead of a slogan.
There are four chances to speak and they are all in the next two weeks. The in-person hearing is Nov. 5 from 2 to 5 p.m. at the commission’s courtroom at 1300 E. Main St. in Richmond. Telephonic hearings run Nov. 5 from 8:30 to 11 a.m., Nov. 9 from 4 to 7 p.m. and Nov. 10 from 4 to 7 p.m. The evidentiary hearing begins Nov. 17. The written comment deadline is either Nov. 9 or Nov. 12 depending on which notice you read, so treat Nov. 9 as the deadline and file early. The commission already held its Hampton Roads hearing on Oct. 7 in Newport News, before this window, so the Richmond date is the remaining in-person opportunity for anyone in the eastern half of the state.
One more thing to know before January. Virginia Business reports that under state law, if the commission fails to rule by its deadline the merger is approved automatically. Sources conflict on whether that deadline is Jan. 11 or Jan. 15. A deadline that converts silence into approval is worth confirming against the docket.
Appalachian Power customers would get a one-year rate freeze, and the company wants a data center rate class that starts at four times Dominion’s threshold. Appalachian Power and most parties filed a settlement with the State Corporation Commission on Oct. 14, reported by Cardinal News on Oct. 21. Residential customers would see no base-rate increase for one year beginning March 1, then 92 cents a month the following year. The company’s original May request would have raised the benchmark 1,000-kilowatt-hour bill by $9.10 a month. The residential customer charge stays at $7.96 instead of rising to $9. The settlement sets return on equity at 9.8%, against the current 9.75% and the company’s request for 10.5%. Vegetation management moves out of base rates and into future riders, which still need approval and whose costs still land on bills. A separate pending renewable energy rider would add $3.99 a month from March 1 if approved. The company serves about 540,000 customers in western Virginia, about 466,000 of them residential. Signatories include the company, commission staff, Google, Kroger and Walmart. The attorney general’s Office of Consumer Counsel, the Virginia Poverty Law Center and Virginia Organizing did not sign and did not oppose. Over 50 written public comments were filed, overwhelmingly opposing any increase. The company separately plans to request a new rate class for customers needing 100 megawatts or more, most of whom would be data centers. The commission has already approved a Dominion large-load class at a 25-megawatt threshold, effective Jan. 1, 2027.
The gap between thresholds is the story. Dominion’s approved large-load class catches customers at 25 megawatts, while Appalachian Power wants to catch them at 100. A 99-megawatt facility in Appalachian Power territory would stay in the general rate classes and its costs would be spread like anyone else’s. That is a four-fold difference in who gets treated as a large load, in a service territory covering some of the poorest counties in Virginia.
Two things in this settlement are moving costs rather than cutting them. Tree trimming leaves base rates and comes back as a rider, and a renewable rider would add $3.99 a month from the same March 1 date the freeze begins. A freeze on base rates while riders grow is a freeze on one line of the bill.
The item left unresolved is the one that matters most to a household that has already been cut off: whether to reduce or eliminate reconnection fees for customers whose power was shut off. The settlement does not resolve it. Written briefs are due Nov. 24 and the final order is due Jan. 15. A reconnection fee is the price of getting your lights back on after you could not pay, and it is still on the table.
Dominion filed a 20-year plan, and the two ways of projecting your bill differ by $175 a month. Dominion filed its annual Integrated Resource Plan update with the State Corporation Commission, published Oct. 19. It projects load growth of about 4% a year, or 500 to 700 megawatts a year of peak demand growth, with demand doubling by 2045, and those figures exclude load growth for the cooperative utilities that depend on Dominion for power and transmission. It proposes more than 39 gigawatts of new capacity over 20 years: more than 21 gigawatts of solar, 9 gigawatts of natural gas, 3.5 gigawatts of battery storage, 3.3 gigawatts of wind and 2 gigawatts of small modular reactors. The filing says natural gas will remain a critical component because carbon-free dispatchable alternatives are not yet commercially viable. The projected monthly bill for a household using 1,000 kilowatt-hours comes in two versions. Under Dominion’s own method it is about $258 by 2036 and about $284 by 2046. Under the method the commission requires it is about $320 by 2036 and about $458 by 2046. Dominion disputes the commission’s method, arguing it overstates bills by not accounting for expected sales growth. A full trial is scheduled for fall 2027.
Two numbers for the same household bill in the same filing, $284 and $458 by 2046, and the larger one is the one the regulator requires. That $175 a month gap is the entire argument about who pays for this buildout, expressed as a methodology dispute. When a utility tells you its own projection is the realistic one, it is asking you to go by its account.
What the filing does not say publicly is the part that matters most here. The coverage gives no data center share of the load forecast and names no counties for siting the 9 gigawatts of gas. The load is the reason for the plan and the siting is where the exhaust goes, and neither is in the published account. Those are the two questions for the commission proceeding, and the trial is a year out.
The excluded cooperatives are a real omission for rural Virginia. The 500 to 700 megawatts a year of peak growth leaves out the co-ops that buy their power and transmission from Dominion, which serve much of Southside and the rural east. Whatever this plan costs, their members are not in its forecast.
Southside’s biggest project filed for its permits: 21 buildings, 3,000 megawatts and 7 million gallons of water a day. Stack Infrastructure filed a joint permit application running thousands of pages seeking construction and environmental permits from several agencies including the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for its campus at the Southern Virginia Megasite at Berry Hill in Pittsylvania County. Cardinal News published the details Oct. 20. The proposal is 21 data center buildings phased over 15 years, with no square footage disclosed. Announced investment is up to $100 billion over three decades; the contractual minimum in the March 2026 performance agreement is at least $73.5 billion. Jobs promised are more than 2,500 at salaries above $80,000 over 20 years, against an agreement minimum of at least 2,050 jobs averaging $80,500 a year with penalties if the company misses. Construction would run 12 to 15 years at 2,000 to 4,000 workers a day at peak, not counted in the job figures. Stack claimed nearly 3,000 of the megasite’s 3,528 acres, of which 1,715 are developable and 1,733 would be disturbed during construction. Power capacity is about 3,000 megawatts at full build-out, mostly generated on site, with natural gas expected to supply much of it. The March agreement sets a minimum load of 299 megawatts to be supplied by Appalachian Power by the end of 2028, with no cap above that. Water is up to 7 million gallons a day, with Eden, North Carolina supplying up to 6 million and Danville Utilities up to 1 million. The application asserts a negligible effect on water supply, which is the applicant’s characterization and not a finding. Zoning is already in place from a fast-tracked rezoning approved unanimously in January 2026. The permits are proposed, not approved.
Two numbers tell you how to read this project. The announced investment is up to $100 billion and the enforceable minimum in the signed agreement is $73.5 billion. The promised jobs are more than 2,500 and the enforceable minimum is 2,050. The headline figures and the contract figures are different documents, and only one of them has penalties attached. Ask for the performance agreement, because it is the only version anybody can hold the company to.
The 299-megawatt floor with no ceiling is the provision that should worry every Appalachian Power customer in Virginia. The agreement guarantees the company at least 299 megawatts from the grid by the end of 2028 and sets no upper limit, in the same service territory where the company is now asking for a large-load rate class that starts at 100 megawatts. Who pays for the lines and the generation above 299 is not settled anywhere in the public record.
Seven million gallons a day is roughly what Danville uses in a day, and 6 million of it would come from Eden, North Carolina. A project in one state drawing most of its water from a city in another is not a Pittsylvania County decision alone. Eden residents have a stake and no vote in the Virginia permits.
The missing item is the one to chase this week. No public comment period for the joint permit application has been noticed that we could find, and that deadline is the single most important date for Southside. The Department of Environmental Quality and the Army Corps both run public notices. Ask both for the application number and whether a comment period has opened.
Virginians comfortable with a data center nearby fell from 69% to 35% in three years. A Virginia Mercury commentary on Oct. 19 by columnist Bob Lewis gathered the politics of the issue ahead of the Nov. 3 election. A Schar School and Washington Post poll of 1,101 registered Virginia voters at the end of March 2026 found 35% comfortable with a data center in their community, down from 69% in 2023. The data processing and computer services sector has given $372,000 since Jan. 1, 2025 to 10 Virginia congressional and Senate candidates, according to OpenSecrets, with almost four of every five dollars going to Democrats. Lewis reports that Virginia’s Senate Democratic majority and the House majority allied with Gov. Spanberger disagreed over ending the data center sales tax exemption, bringing the state closer than ever to a budget-related shutdown. That exemption totaled about $1.9 billion in 2025. Localities named as denying, delaying or limiting construction include western Prince William, Fauquier, Loudoun and Carroll. Sen. Mark Warner has made data centers and artificial intelligence the subject of his first campaign ad.
A 34-point collapse in three years is the kind of movement that changes what elected officials are willing to do, and it explains why four moratorium bills are prefiled for a session that has not started. Public opinion arrived before the policy did.
The sales tax exemption matters more than the moratoriums, and a moratorium expires by its own terms. The exemption is about $1.9 billion a year in foregone state revenue, it has survived every attempt to end it, and it nearly caused a budget shutdown this year. One developer has already said publicly it would abandon a $73.5 billion project in Pittsylvania County if the exemption is cut. That is the lever, and it is the one with real money behind both sides.
Federal
The FCC published its October agenda with nothing on Lifeline, BEAD or digital equity.
The commission released the agenda for its Oct. 29 open meeting on Oct. 22. One item touches this beat. It is a proposed rulemaking implementing the Rural Broadband Protection Act, enacted May 11, 2026, which required a rulemaking within 180 days. It would create a vetting process for applicants seeking high-cost universal service money, in dockets WC 10-90, 26-96 and 26-288.
The other seven items are a spectrum auction further notice, a direct-to-device and satellite coverage proposal, a drone spectrum order, a test-lab order, an international review order, an accessibility rules proposal and an enforcement action.
What is not there is the news. There is no Lifeline item, in a month when a federal appeals court held that the company administering Lifeline was created unlawfully. There is no BEAD item, in a month when states were due to submit supplemental location lists. There is no digital equity item, more than a year after the Digital Equity Act grant program was terminated and three months after a court ordered it partly reinstated.
The quiet extends past the agenda. We found no BEAD final proposal approved or returned this week, no notice from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration on BEAD, no new decision on the roughly $21 billion in BEAD savings, no Government Accountability Office report, no activity in the Digital Equity Act litigation and no congressional hearing on broadband. The agency’s only publication we could confirm in the window was an Oct. 23 blog post about satellite policy, which restates the $21 billion savings figure that has been in its messaging since March and describes low-earth-orbit providers as selected for almost a quarter of BEAD households. BEAD counts locations, which are addresses. It does not count households, and the agency should not either.
A quiet federal week is not neutral when the clock is running on other people’s deadlines. South Carolina says it is pushing its BEAD challenge process into 2027 because it is waiting on a federal map update expected in late November. The roughly $21 billion in BEAD savings still has no guidance attached, which is money appropriated to connect people in these nine states and sitting unspent. Nothing on the October agenda changes either of those.
The thing with a date on it is next week. The commission’s meeting is Oct. 29, and reply comments in the E-Rate proceeding close Nov. 12 in docket WC 26-133. E-Rate is the discount that pays for internet at schools and libraries, and the South receives more of it than any other region of the country. Anyone can file in that docket, including a school board or a library board, with no lawyer and no fee. What carries weight in a record like that is a specific building and what stops working without the discount.
A North Carolina carrier gave up the designation that lets it provide Lifeline, and nobody has said how many people are on it. The Federal Communications Commission approved Carolina West Wireless’s request to relinquish its eligible telecommunications carrier designations across all of its North Carolina service area, tied to a transaction transferring its spectrum and certain assets to Verizon Wireless. Eligible telecommunications carrier status is the designation a company needs to draw Lifeline and high-cost universal service support, so giving it up means the company stops providing Lifeline service there. Carolina West says customers can continue Lifeline through other carriers, including Verizon’s affiliate TracFone Wireless. No source we reached gives a subscriber count.
Lifeline is $9.25 a month toward a phone or internet bill for a low-income household, and it has not increased since 2012. When the carrier providing it in a rural area withdraws, the benefit does not disappear but the household has to find another carrier and re-enroll, and re-enrollment is where people fall off. Nobody has published how many households in western North Carolina this touches.
That number exists. The Universal Service Administrative Company tracks Lifeline subscribers by carrier and by state, and the North Carolina Utilities Commission has an interest in continuity of service. Either could answer it. The useful local step is a county social services office or library telling Lifeline users in that footprint that they need to switch, before the service stops rather than after.
New Census estimates land Oct. 29, and they will not tell you anything about your county. The Census Bureau announced on Oct. 22 that the 2025 American Community Survey one-year estimates become public at 10 a.m. Eastern on Oct. 29. The geographies covered are states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, congressional districts, metropolitan statistical areas and other areas meeting a publication threshold of 65,000 population, or 20,000 for the supplemental estimates. The release does not mention counties. It lists language spoken at home, education, commuting, employment, mortgage and rent status, income, poverty and health insurance among its topics, and says the survey covers more than 40 topics overall. It does not name internet subscription or computer ownership.
This is the practical limit on county-level digital equity data in the rural South, and it is worth understanding before somebody promises you a number. Most counties in these nine states have fewer than 65,000 people, which means they are not in this product at all. County-level internet subscription figures come from the five-year estimates, in tables B28002 and S2801, not from next week’s release.
If you need to know how many households in your county pay for internet at home, those five-year tables are the source and they are free on data.census.gov. They are also the only disaggregated county figures that exist for this, which is why nobody has a Southern breakdown of the BEAD location counts. The data gap is the sample size rather than an oversight.
BEAD watch
RiverStreet took $87 million to wire three Virginia counties and completed 40 connections.
RiverStreet Communications of Virginia filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Oct. 21 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, case 26-72823. The company, headquartered in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, held two large Virginia grant commitments under the Virginia Telecommunication Initiative, known as VATI: $33.5 million for an eastern project and $87 million for the West Broadband Project. Local governments and the company were to match that with $59.4 million in the east and $65.4 million in the west.
The eastern project covered 27,997 potential customer locations across Amelia, Bedford, Campbell, Charlotte, Nottoway and Pittsylvania counties, with connections completed to about 35% of them. The West Broadband Project covered 14,547 locations across Henry, Patrick and Franklin counties, and completed 40 connections. Cardinal News reports that the company’s own site shows 2,324 locations completed in Bedford County, with the subscriber count unclear, while the West Piedmont Planning District Commission puts multi-county subscribers at 2,080.
The company also holds $44 million in BEAD funding for new areas overlapping Patrick, Henry and Amelia counties. By mid-2026 Virginia had removed it from $229.2 million of broadband commitments across 12 counties, which the company disputes in its filing. A separate figure, about $219 million, is what it owes under a prepetition credit facility from the lender CoBank, including roughly $18 million in accrued interest and fees. Those two numbers are different things and should not be added together.
Virginia’s Department of Housing and Community Development determined in July 2026 that the company could not obtain new financing and therefore could not finish its Virginia work. The department says it is working with legal counsel to recoup state investments, coordinating with affected counties to find new partners, and confirming with federal agencies that those counties qualify for BEAD supplemental funding, which it projects will be available early next year. Office of Broadband Director Chandler Vaughan called the bankruptcy a disappointment. Oaktree Capital Management has put in a stalking-horse bid of $92.5 million plus assumed liabilities, subject to higher bids, with about $20 million in debtor-in-possession support from CoBank. Across Virginia and North Carolina the company had planned to build to about 182,000 locations.
A company held $87 million in state grant commitments to serve 14,547 addresses in three counties and finished 40 connections, none of them in Patrick County. Whatever the eventual accounting shows about how much of that money was actually drawn, the households are the same households they were in 2021, and the state is now in bankruptcy court trying to recover what it already paid out.
Watch the word Virginia is using. The department says it is working to recoup state investments, which is not the same as having recovered anything, and Cardinal News reports no amount recovered or clawed back. In a Chapter 11 case, a state grantor stands in line with CoBank, which is owed about $219 million and is also funding the debtor through the case. The realistic outcome is that most of this is not coming back.
The practical question for Patrick, Henry, Franklin, Amelia, Bedford, Campbell, Charlotte, Nottoway and Pittsylvania counties is who builds now and when. The department’s answer is BEAD supplemental funding, projected early next year, which means another application cycle, another procurement and another construction timeline on top of five years already spent. A county administrator in those nine counties should be asking the Office of Broadband two things in writing: whether the county is confirmed eligible for supplemental funding, and what the department is doing differently in vetting the next grantee’s financing.
And there is a lesson here for every state in this coverage area that is about to sign BEAD agreements. Arkansas pays its subgrantees on verified milestones rather than reimbursing costs, which is a structure that limits exactly this exposure. Virginia’s own experience is now the argument for it.
South Carolina calls the new BEAD round a cleanup, and its real deadline is Dec. 31. South Carolina Broadband Office Director Jim Stritzinger told Telecompetitor in an interview published Oct. 22 that the supplemental BEAD round is minor for his state, because it was designed mainly for states hit hard by defaults in an earlier federal program and South Carolina was not. He expects small, dispersed bids and no big projects, and calls the non-deployment funds a distraction for now. As of June 30 the state had eight BEAD projects covering 19,022 locations, six wireline and two satellite. The state has funded more than 277 projects with federal pandemic relief money, many in closeout, and all of it must be spent and paid out by Dec. 31, 2026. South Carolina plans to push its BEAD challenge process into 2027, waiting on the next version of the federal location map, expected in the second half of November. The BEAD period of performance runs through Dec. 31, 2040.
Two dates sit 10 weeks apart and point in opposite directions. Everything funded with pandemic relief money in South Carolina has to be spent and paid out by Dec. 31 of this year, and the BEAD challenge process that decides which addresses get served is being pushed into next year. If a project in your county is running on the first kind of money, the end of the year is a hard wall, and a project that misses it does not get an extension.
The challenge window is the part that affects individual addresses, and it is the part nobody will announce well. When the state publishes its supplemental location list, there are 30 days to challenge whether an address is correctly classified. A house marked as served that is not served stays out of the funding. Watching the broadband office’s BEAD document pages rather than its news page is the only reliable way to catch it, because that is where the list appears first.
Arkansas has now signed every BEAD grant agreement in the state and won a national award for it. The Arkansas State Broadband Office reported in its October newsletter, published Oct. 22, that the state has signed every BEAD grant agreement and distributed its first round of program funding. Director Glen E. Howie Jr. has been the only state broadband official in these nine states speaking publicly about the coming supplemental round. Separately, on Oct. 20 the office announced it received the Outstanding Achievement Award for Enterprise Computing and Broadband Expansion from the Center for Digital Government, as part of its 2026 Digital States Survey. The office reports that the share of homes and businesses without high-speed broadband went from roughly one in four to fewer than one in 10, with about 73% of locations having access to service at 100 megabits per second download and 20 up or better in June 2022, rising above 90% by the end of 2025. It has awarded more than $800 million since its creation in 2019, covering more than 200,000 homes and businesses, and expects more than 400,000 to gain access for the first time between 2020 and 2030. During Get Connected Arkansas Week earlier in October, seven Arkansas Head Start programs received $3,500 in capacity-building investments for digital learning, funded by the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, the Arkansas Black Philanthropy Collaborative, the Carl B. and Florence E. King Foundation and Entergy Arkansas.
Arkansas is doing the administrative work and it deserves the credit. Every agreement signed, money moving on verified milestones, a director who answers questions on the record. Set that against RiverStreet in Virginia at the top of this section and the difference in approach is not abstract.
Every figure in the award announcement is availability, which means service is offered at an address. Above 90% of locations with access at 100 megabits down and 20 up is a real achievement and it says nothing about what those connections cost or how many households bought one. The state has signed the subaward agreements, which means the price terms at those addresses were negotiable at the moment of signing and the office knows what is in them. That is the question worth asking now, while construction is starting rather than after.
Worth naming plainly: the digital learning money for Head Start programs came from four foundations and a utility, not from the Digital Equity Act. The federal program that funded this kind of work is still terminated, and philanthropy is covering $3,500 across seven programs. That is the scale of the substitute.
Around the states
One of the nine state broadband offices published anything this week, and the week’s real decisions were made elsewhere. Here is the whole picture, state by state. Arkansas published twice, a newsletter on Oct. 22 and an award announcement on Oct. 20, and it is the only one of the nine with a dated in-window post we could confirm. Alabama’s broadband news feed has nothing newer than March 24, 2026. Mississippi’s BEAM office has no dated news feed we could reach at all; its newest dated content is from 2023. Georgia’s Technology Authority broadband page has nothing newer than Dec. 3, 2025, and broadband.georgia.gov nothing newer than 2021. Louisiana’s ConnectLA press releases stop at Oct. 16, three days before this window opened. South Carolina’s Office of Regulatory Staff broadband news for 2026 holds three items, the newest dated June 30, though its director gave an on-record interview that ran Oct. 22. North Carolina’s Division of Broadband and Digital Equity has nothing newer than Sept. 23. Tennessee’s economic and community development newsroom posted twice in the window, on a Marion County manufacturer and a Shelby County pump company, neither about broadband, and its broadband office page carries only undated announcements. Virginia’s housing and community development broadband pages carry no dated news feed at all.
None of the nine states produced a legislative or gubernatorial action on broadband, digital access, devices, libraries or artificial intelligence in the window. No public service or public utility commission in the nine issued a decision in the window. No municipal or county digital navigator program, device distribution or library connectivity item appeared. And no state produced any activity at all on its digital equity plan following the federal Digital Equity Act grant terminations, which we checked against all nine office sites directly.
Eight of nine broadband offices published nothing in a week when the supplemental BEAD location lists are expected within weeks and the challenge window runs 30 days from publication. A resident of eight of these nine states cannot learn from their own state government what is happening with their broadband money. That is not a complaint about communications staffing. It is a gap in a legal process with a deadline in it.
The week’s decisions actually happened in a Virginia utility commission docket, a North Carolina utility commission docket, an Arkansas commission’s earlier refusal, a Louisiana commission’s subpoena denial, a Memphis council chamber, a Coweta County zoning vote, a Montgomery County commission floor amendment and a Suffolk ordinance. If you are organizing on digital equity in the South right now, those are the rooms. The broadband offices are administering money that was decided years ago. The utility commissions and county boards are deciding what the next 20 years cost.
North Louisiana added more than 44,000 served locations in two years, and we cannot find the release that says so. The Louisiana Office of Broadband Development and Connectivity reported that 26 north Louisiana parishes added more than 44,000 served locations between December 2023 and December 2025, about a third of the state’s total gain, and that Louisiana had the sixth-largest percentage-point improvement nationally. The Benton Institute carried it on Oct. 22.
If this holds up it is the largest parish-level gain anybody in these nine states has reported this year, and north Louisiana is where Entergy also wants to build 7.54 gigawatts of gas for a data center. The same region is getting broadband and the generation bill at the same time, which is a fair description of the whole beat.
We are running it with the caveat rather than the number as settled, because the office distributes some releases only by email and we could not reach the original. Anyone citing the 44,000 should ask ConnectLA for the release and its date. Served locations means availability, which is service offered at an address, not households and not a count of anyone who signed up.
South Carolina fell from 20th to 40th in one state ranking and led the country on another, because the two count different things. Two state broadband rankings were presented on Oct. 21 and covered Oct. 22. On BroadbandNow’s 2026 index South Carolina fell from 20th to 40th and Tennessee ranks 33rd. That index is weighted 35% on wired service availability, 30% on whether plans priced at $60 a month or less are available, 10% each on median download, median upload and latency, and 5% on fiber availability. South Carolina’s median upload is 18.6 megabits per second and its latency 31.8 milliseconds. On Ookla’s separate report, which measures the share of speed-test users whose connections met 100 megabits down and 20 up split by rural and urban, Tennessee placed in the top 10 and South Carolina was the only state in the country where a slightly larger share of rural than urban tested users met the benchmark. Nationally the average state median download reached 133.7 megabits per second, up about 25% year over year, and average state fiber availability rose from 49.7% to 56.6% of households.
This is the most useful illustration of unit discipline we have seen all year, and it happens to land on two of these nine states. One ranking says South Carolina got much worse. The other says South Carolina is the single best state in the country at closing its rural gap. Both can be true, because the first measures whether service and cheap plans are offered and the second measures how fast the connections of people who ran a speed test actually were.
Neither one measures subscription. Thirty percent of the BroadbandNow score is whether a plan at $60 a month or less exists in an area, not whether anybody buys one and not what residents actually pay. And Ookla’s figure comes from people who chose to run a speed test, which is not a sample of the population. If somebody hands you a state ranking to argue that broadband is solved or that it is a disaster, the first question is which of those four things it counted.
A South Carolina county postponed its data center ordinance and added inspections at the applicant’s expense. McCormick County Council postponed the third reading of Ordinance 26-06, its data center regulations, on Oct. 20 after adopting amendments. The ordinance returns to the Planning Commission, which is expected to take it up in November. The amendments added third-party inspections at the applicant’s expense, limits on groundwater wells, a requirement to take water from public utilities and authority for the county to suspend or revoke permits for repeated violations.
Third-party inspections paid for by the applicant is the provision small counties most need and least often write. A county of a few thousand people does not have an engineer on staff who can verify a cooling system or a noise plan, which is how an ordinance becomes unenforceable the day it passes. Making the company pay for an independent inspector closes that gap without a new county position.
Suspension and revocation authority for repeated violations is the other half, because a standard with no consequence is a suggestion. Those two provisions together are a small county’s whole enforcement capacity, and McCormick added them on the floor at third reading. The November Planning Commission agenda is where to see whether they survive.
Cost and access
Home broadband subscription has not recovered since the federal discount ended. The Pew Research Center published its annual internet and broadband fact sheet on Oct. 19 with 2026 survey data. It reports that 97% of U.S. adults say they use the internet, 78% say they subscribe to home broadband and 16% own a smartphone but do not use home broadband at home. The subscription figure is the one to sit with. It was 80% in 2023, 79% in 2024, 78% in 2025 and 78% in 2026. The Affordable Connectivity Program, which paid up to $30 a month toward internet for low-income households, ran out of money in 2024. The smartphone-only share has gone the other way, from 15% in 2023 to 16% now. The survey is Pew’s National Public Opinion Reference Survey, 5,511 U.S. adults, fielded Jan. 30 to June 18, 2026, with a margin of error of 1.8 percentage points.
Two years after the federal discount ended, the share of adults paying for internet at home is lower than it was before, and the share getting by on a phone alone is higher. Nothing in this week’s news changes that in either direction. No state in these nine has a broadband affordability program, and this week’s BEAD news from Arkansas and South Carolina is entirely about availability.
A phone is not a job application, a nursing prerequisite, a benefits recertification or a comment filed in a utility docket. Every action this issue suggests is easier on a large screen, and 16% of adults do not have one at home with a connection behind it.
On race, we are going to be precise, because this is where the newsletter either keeps its credibility or spends it. Pew’s 2026 fact sheet has a race breakdown but only inside an interactive chart, and we could not retrieve the 2026 values. So there is no verified 2026 racial figure to give you. The most recent one we can stand behind comes from Pew’s short read published Jan. 8, 2026, using 2025 survey data: home broadband subscription at 71% of Black adults against 81% of White adults, and smartphone dependence at 19% of Black adults against 13% of White adults. Those are adults, not households, they are 2025 data, the subgroup sample sizes were not disclosed, and anyone who tells you there is a new 2026 racial gap figure this week has not opened the file.
Digital Inclusion Week drew 156 organizations across 26 states, and the wrap-up names none of them. The National Digital Inclusion Alliance published its Digital Inclusion Week 2026 wrap-up on Oct. 23, reporting 156 participating organizations, agencies, cities and Tribal organizations across 26 states and territories, 285 registered events, materials and programming in 11 languages and proclamations issued by five cities and counties. No attendance or people-reached figure is given and the post names no states.
A count of participating organizations is a count of organizations, and the post does not say which 26 states and territories they are in, so nobody in these nine states can tell from it whether anyone here took part. If you ran an event, the alliance has your name and the South’s absence or presence in that list is worth asking about directly.
One deadline is attached to the page and worth passing on: a teaser says two federal grant programs for digital inclusion activities by Native entities accept applications through Nov. 17. We did not reach the underlying post, so confirm it before relying on it.
Algorithms
North Carolina will test artificial intelligence on food assistance recertification. The Center for Civic Futures, a program of Renaissance Philanthropy, awarded $11 million across 11 projects through its Public Benefit Innovation Fund to put artificial intelligence into public benefits administration, StateScoop reported Oct. 23. North Carolina will test artificial intelligence-assisted recertification for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP and formerly as food stamps, beginning with synthetic data rather than real case files. Maryland and Colorado will work with Stanford’s RegLab on flagging missing or unclear information in unemployment insurance applications. Other projects in the round would identify SNAP cases likely to contain errors, link corrections data with Medicaid and SNAP systems, map legacy systems and translate SNAP eligibility rules into machine-readable formats. From an earlier round, the fund reports that Mississippi’s SNAP verification tool helped cut the state’s payment error liability by $40 million, and that tools in New Jersey helped deliver an estimated $19 million in benefits to more than 97,000 residents.
Recertification, rather than denial at application, is the moment people lose food assistance: it is the periodic paperwork that proves you still qualify. It is where benefits churn happens, it falls hardest on households with irregular hours and unstable addresses, and it is now the place a Southern state is putting an algorithm.
The published measure of success tells you what the system will be tuned for. The funder’s reported wins are a reduced payment error liability in Mississippi and faster delivery in New Jersey. Payment error liability is the money a state owes the federal government for issuing benefits incorrectly, and reducing it is a state fiscal goal. It is not the same as reducing wrongful terminations. A tool optimized to cut the state’s error liability can hit that target by flagging more cases for scrutiny, which means more people asked for more documents.
Starting with synthetic data is the right call and it buys time to ask the real question. The question for North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services is this: before this goes anywhere near a live caseload, what is the false-negative rate, broken out by race, by county and by household type? That is not overall accuracy; it is the rate at which the tool is wrong about an eligible household. That number either exists or the pilot is not ready, and asking for it now is cheaper than asking after somebody loses their benefits.
Colorado’s automated decision rules close their comment window today, and other states will copy them. The Colorado Attorney General released its regulatory analysis on Oct. 21 for proposed rules governing automated decision-making technology and chatbot safety. Public comment closes today, Oct. 26, at 11:59 p.m. Mountain time, and the rulemaking hearing is today at 10 a.m., in person at 1300 Broadway in Denver or virtually with registration. If the hearing runs past today, comments are accepted until the last day of it. The underlying statutes take effect Jan. 1, 2027, and the automated decision law requires rules adopted before that date. No Southern state has a comparable rulemaking.
We are running an out-of-region item because the deadline is today and because this is the rulebook. When a state writes the first detailed rules on automated decision systems, the definitions, the notice requirements and the exemptions get lifted into other states’ bills more or less whole. Reading what Colorado adopts is the cheapest way to know what will be proposed in Atlanta or Raleigh in two years.
Eight of these nine states have nothing pending on automated decisions that a national tracker can find. The same legislatures writing data center tax exemptions and utility review carve-outs have written nothing about the systems deciding health coverage, rent, insurance rates, hiring and, as of this week in North Carolina, food assistance recertification.
Virginia’s governor ordered a statewide plan for artificial intelligence cyber risk, and it does not touch state decision-making. Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed Executive Directive 6 on Oct. 23, directing a statewide cyberattack prevention and response plan, a Cyber Consortium and regular briefings between the Secretary of Public Safety and Homeland Security, Virginia’s artificial intelligence task force, companies, researchers and regulators, including an assessment of artificial intelligence cyber-risk preparedness. No deadlines were stated in the coverage we read.
This is worth knowing and worth not overselling. It is about defending state systems from attack. It does not address how the state uses automated systems to make decisions about residents, and it does not address algorithmic discrimination at all. Virginia now has machinery for artificial intelligence as a security threat and nothing for artificial intelligence as a decision-maker.
The African Diaspora
Some internet shutdowns simply never end, and nobody is counting them. Access Now published a piece on Oct. 20 on shutdowns with no end date, drawing on testimony from its Shutdown Impact Stories project and partners in the #KeepItOn coalition. Residents of Tigray, Ethiopia were cut off for more than two years during the civil war, and new shutdowns were reported as the piece was written. Myanmar’s are described as repeated and prolonged. Testimonies from Annobón, Gaza and Sudan appear with no durations given. The post contains no counts at all: no number of shutdowns, no days offline, no people affected. It says only that prolonged shutdowns have risen steadily each year.
The absence of numbers is the finding here and we are not going to invent any. An organization that tracks shutdowns for a living published a piece on indefinite ones without a single count in it, which tells you that the duration of a shutdown with no announced end is not a thing anyone has figured out how to measure.
What transfers to these nine states is the mechanism rather than the scale. A government or a carrier switches something off, no end date is published, and the people affected have no way to find out when it comes back or whom to ask. That is a smaller version of the Memphis pause with no published end date and the Suffolk ban with no fixed duration in this same issue. An action with no announced end date is a different kind of action, and it is harder to challenge precisely because there is nothing to count down to.
Nigeria had Africa’s biggest decline in internet freedom and The Gambia its biggest gain, in a report that paused 34 countries. Freedom House’s Freedom on the Net 2026 names Nigeria as the biggest African decline, driven by months-long localized internet disruptions affecting parts of Zamfara State, and The Gambia as the biggest African improvement, ranking second overall worldwide behind Bangladesh after censorship rule reforms and a data protection law passed in December 2025. An analysis of the report ran Oct. 22 in Tech Policy Press. One methodological fact has to travel with any use of it: this edition assessed 38 countries and paused coverage of 34, so no continental trend claim survives it.
The Gambia at second in the world is the item to carry, because the sequence is instructive. A country removed a long-serving ruler, then reformed its censorship rules, then passed a data protection law, and the measured result followed. Legal change produced the improvement, not technology.
The paused countries are why we are not going to tell you internet freedom is declining in Africa. The report covers 38 countries and skipped 34, and the page names only two scored African countries with no full African list and no scores. No Caribbean country is scored at all, which is a gap in the report rather than in our reading of it.
On the calendar
Oct. 26: comment closes and the hearing is held in Colorado’s automated decision rulemaking. Comments until 11:59 p.m. Mountain time, hearing at 10 a.m. at 1300 Broadway, Room 1D, Denver, or virtually with registration. The underlying statutes take effect Jan. 1, 2027.
Deadline and hearing · Colorado Attorney General, page last modified Oct. 21Oct. 29: the Census Bureau releases the 2025 American Community Survey one-year estimates. Public at 10 a.m. Eastern on data.census.gov. The publication threshold is 65,000 population, so most rural Southern counties are not covered, and the release does not list internet subscription or computer ownership among its topics.
Data release · Primary source we read: Census Bureau release CB26-175, Oct. 22Oct. 29: the FCC’s open meeting. Eight items, one on this beat: a proposed rulemaking implementing the Rural Broadband Protection Act, which would vet applicants for high-cost universal service support. Nothing on Lifeline, BEAD, digital equity or broadband data.
Meeting · Agenda released Oct. 22; fcc.gov would not load for us, so the contents come from Telecommunications Law Professionals, Oct. 23Nov. 3: general election. Two of five Georgia Public Service Commission seats, which all Georgia voters vote on, in the only statewide vote in this coverage area that directly selects people who decide how data center power costs are allocated. District 3 is incumbent Peter Hubbard against Fitz Johnson; District 5 is Josh Tolbert against Shelia Edwards. Also on the ballot: Danville, Salem and Radford city councils in Virginia, where data centers were the main subject of candidate forums, and a Danville special election for a House of Delegates seat. Buchanan County, Virginia holds a public hearing the same evening at 6 p.m. in Grundy on conveying a former school property to its industrial development authority for an energy project.
Election date and hearing · Georgia Public Broadcasting, Oct. 23, reporting by Jillian Magtoto and Grant Blankenship, which discloses that Georgia Power is a financial supporter of GPB; Cardinal News, Oct. 23; and Cardinal News, Oct. 23, for Buchanan CountyNov. 5: the last in-person chance to speak on the $67 billion Virginia merger. In-person hearing 2 to 5 p.m. at the State Corporation Commission courtroom, 1300 E. Main St., Richmond. A telephonic hearing runs the same day 8:30 to 11 a.m., with more on Nov. 9 and Nov. 10 from 4 to 7 p.m. Case PUR-2026-00112. The written comment deadline is reported as either Nov. 9 or Nov. 12, so treat Nov. 9 as the deadline. Old Dominion Power’s separate 23% residential rate increase request, case PUR-2026-00051, also has a Nov. 5 comment deadline and a Nov. 5 deadline to sign up to speak, with its hearing beginning Nov. 12.
Hearings and deadlines · VPM, Oct. 19, and Virginia Mercury, Oct. 20, which conflict with earlier county and television notices on the written comment date · The Old Dominion Power case from Cardinal News, Oct. 16, outside this windowNov. 12: reply comments close in the FCC’s E-Rate proceeding. Docket WC 26-133. Anyone can file, including a school board or a library board, with no lawyer and no fee. E-Rate is the discount that pays for internet at schools and libraries, and the South receives more of it than any other region of the country.
Deadline · National Law Review, Oct. 19 · The regional funding figure is from a Brattle Group study for the SHLB Coalition released Oct. 8, outside this window, putting average annual E-Rate funding from 2021 to 2025 at $999 million to the South, the largest of the four census regions; we did not read the studyNov. 17: Loudoun County takes up the data center pause it did not enact in October. Item 14p returns to the Board of Supervisors at its second November business meeting. The same day, the evidentiary hearing begins in the Virginia merger case.
Meeting and hearing · Primary source we read: the Loudoun County deferral notice, posted Oct. 20Second half of November: the next version of the federal broadband location map. South Carolina is waiting on it before opening its BEAD challenge process, which it now expects to run in 2027. Arkansas’s director has said the eligible-location lists may not arrive until November. When a state publishes its list, the challenge window runs 30 days.
Expected release · Telecompetitor, Oct. 22 · No date has been publishedNovember: three ordinances return to the bodies that sent them back. Montgomery County, Tennessee’s data center zoning goes to its Regional Planning Commission and then back to the County Commission. McCormick County, South Carolina’s Ordinance 26-06 goes to its Planning Commission. Neither has a published date. Irondale, Alabama’s council vote on its zoning ordinance is expected in December.
Expected meetings · Clarksville Now, Oct. 20, and Government Technology, Oct. 23 · The McCormick County item comes from secondary digests we could not confirm against the countyNov. 24: written briefs are due in the Appalachian Power rate case. Due to Judge Samuel Towell at the Virginia State Corporation Commission. The final order is due Jan. 15 and the earliest any rate change can take effect is March 1.
Deadline · Cardinal News, Oct. 21 · The story gives no case numberDecember: Louisiana’s commission votes on seven more gas plants for Meta, and Dec. 31 is a wall for pandemic relief money. The Louisiana Public Service Commission’s final vote in docket 32728 is scheduled for December with no date published. Dec. 31 is the hard deadline for South Carolina’s more than 277 pandemic relief broadband projects to be spent and paid out, and Alabama’s federal broadband spending deadline is the same month.
Scheduled vote and deadlines · The Lens, Oct. 22, which is advocacy writing by a party to the litigation, and Telecompetitor, Oct. 22Jan. 13, 2027: the Virginia General Assembly convenes. Senate Bill 843, prefiled Oct. 9 by Sens. Russet Perry and Danica Roem, would bar localities and state agencies including the Department of Environmental Quality and the State Corporation Commission from approving data center siting from July 1, 2027 to July 1, 2030. It has no megawatt threshold. At least three other moratorium bills and two proposals on the sales tax exemption are expected. The merger decision is due in January, as is the Appalachian Power order.
Session date and prefiled bill · Primary source we read: the text of Senate Bill 843, which gives the Oct. 9 prefiling date on its facePeople and money
An asset manager has bid $92.5 million for the bankrupt broadband company’s network. OCM Riverstreet Holdings, an entity of Oaktree Capital Management, has entered a stalking-horse bid of $92.5 million plus assumed liabilities for RiverStreet’s assets, subject to higher bids, with CoBank providing about $20 million in debtor-in-possession financing to keep the company running through the case. A stalking-horse bid sets the floor price at an auction. The company reported assets and liabilities each in the range of $100 million to $500 million, with about $219 million owed under the prepetition CoBank facility and vendor and creditor claims exceeding $35 million.
Somebody is going to own the fiber that Virginia grant money helped build, and the bidding starts at $92.5 million. The households in nine Virginia counties waiting on that network have no seat in a bankruptcy auction and no vote on who wins it.
The question for Virginia’s Office of Broadband is whether the grant conditions follow the asset. When a grantee’s network is sold in bankruptcy, the service commitments, the build-out obligations and any low-income plan terms either transfer to the buyer or they do not, and that depends on the grant agreements and on what the court approves. A county administrator in Patrick, Henry, Franklin, Amelia, Bedford, Campbell, Charlotte, Nottoway or Pittsylvania should ask the department, in writing, whether the obligations transfer.
Coming up
The Stack permit application has no published comment deadline, and it is the biggest thing happening in Southside.
“The application asserts a negligible effect on water supply.”
Stack Infrastructure has filed thousands of pages seeking state and federal permits for 21 data center buildings, about 3,000 megawatts of mostly on-site generation and up to 7 million gallons of water a day in Pittsylvania County. Both the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers run public notice and comment processes on applications like this. We could not find a posted notice for this one, which means either it has not opened or it opened without being easy to find.
That is the single most important missing date on this beat. Zoning was approved in January, the performance agreement was signed in the spring and the permits are the last public step with a comment period attached. Both agencies will tell you the application number and whether a comment window is open if you ask them.
The water is the part that reaches across a state line, and it is the part a comment period is actually designed for. Up to 6 million of the 7 million gallons a day would come from Eden, North Carolina, with the remaining million from Danville Utilities. The application calls the effect on water supply negligible. That is the applicant’s word, and a comment period is where somebody else gets to put a different word in the record.
Still tracking. We are watching for the supplemental BEAD eligible-location lists in all nine states, and for whether any state announces its 30-day challenge window. We are watching whether Virginia recovers any of the RiverStreet grant money and whether the grant obligations transfer to whoever buys the network. We are watching the Memphis 135-day pause for a published effective date. We could find no activity this week in the Digital Equity Act litigation, where the government has said it intends to reopen the competitive grant program without the racial and ethnic minority covered population a judge struck down in July, and no news of any kind on the status of the Act’s separate capacity grant terminations. Two leads we could not confirm and are not reporting as fact: a Spartanburg County, South Carolina council vote on the Valara data center development agreement, which would be a significant tax abatement story, and whether a Tennessee Valley Authority data center rate class took effect in October across Tennessee, North Alabama, North Mississippi and part of Georgia.
What 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.