Pennsylvania has thrown out the playbook that data center developers have relied on for years. Governor Josh Shapiro’s Executive Order 2026-05, signed Tuesday in Harrisburg, doesn’t just add a few conditions to the permitting process — it fundamentally reorders who holds the leverage. Before the Department of Environmental Protection will even open a permit file, a developer must sign a Consent Order and Agreement accepting the GRID Requirements and already have secured local approvals. Refuse to sign, and the state simply won’t process the application until every other regulatory hurdle is cleared, which inverts the sequencing the industry plans around. The Department of Revenue is applying the same test to the state’s sales and use tax exemption for data center equipment.
The provision with the longest reach is the ban on nondisclosure agreements for Commonwealth agencies. NDAs are the standard instrument in data center siting worldwide — they’re why residents in most host markets can’t find out a facility’s load, its water draw, or which hyperscaler is actually behind the shell company. Pennsylvania has concluded that the secrecy isn’t incidental to the deal; it’s part of what went wrong. Operators must now report annual energy and natural gas consumption, peak hourly use, total water consumption, and maximum day demand. The state also published a live map of every proposed project that has engaged with DEP, so residents can track each permit through review.
The order also sends the Special Counsel for Energy Affordability to the Public Utility Commission with three asks: recover PJM reliability backstop costs from data centers rather than other ratepayers, forecast and disclose data center demand accurately, and — most significantly — curtail data centers before any other customer when the grid is strained. PUC chairman Steve DeFrank put it bluntly: “growth should pay for growth.” That curtailment ranking turns an argument about cost into a constraint on uptime, which is the metric AI infrastructure planners care about most.
The politics here are messy. Shapiro championed a $20 billion Amazon commitment to Bucks and Luzerne counties, and now faces re-election in November. The House passed bipartisan legislation codifying GRID, but Senate Republicans declined to move it. Food & Water Watch called the order “too little, too late.” What’s striking is the volume of activity the state disclosed: more than 100 projects in public databases, 58 that have approached DEP, 15 permit applications, and five with everything needed for a first phase. Pennsylvania is not a hypothetical battleground — the pipeline is real and now subject to a rulebook that no other state has matched. Virginia’s per-kWh tax and New Jersey’s 85% power cost commitment look modest by comparison. The NDA ban alone could reshape how communities across the country negotiate with data center developers, because once one state makes secrecy untenable, the argument that it’s a necessary part of the deal gets harder to sustain everywhere else.
