Federal Data Center Rule Expires September 30 With No Replacement. States Are Filling the Vacuum.

The Federal Rule That's Dying

The Office of Management and Budget's Memorandum M-25-03, the implementation guidance for the Federal Data Center Enhancement Act, expires September 30, 2026. No replacement is planned, according to Wired and Crypto Briefing.

The rule set the standards federal agencies had to meet for how they run, optimize, and measure their data centers: energy efficiency, consolidation, reporting. When it goes, those requirements go with it.

The Trump administration's OMB has not issued any guidance on how agencies should handle the transition or continue reporting after the sunset date. This silence is notable. According to a GSA employee who spoke to Wired on condition of anonymity, this situation is genuinely unprecedented. "Never in the history of data center policies has a policy expired without another one having been painstakingly worked on for three years behind the scenes," the employee told Wired.

Wired also reports that the three senators who originally sponsored the FDCEA have not announced plans to renew or replace it.

What the Rule Actually Covered — and What It Didn't

The expiring OMB guidance applied to federal government data centers, not private-sector facilities. As Crypto Briefing points out, no legally binding federal energy efficiency standards have ever applied to commercial data centers — crypto miners, hyperscale cloud operators, or anyone else in the private market.

So the direct regulatory impact of the sunset on industry is, technically, limited. The expiration doesn't strip away rules that private operators were ever bound by.

The Trump administration issued an executive order on July 23, 2025, accelerating permitting for data centers requiring more than 100 megawatts of new electrical load or investments exceeding $500 million, according to Crypto Briefing. Letting federal standards expire while fast-tracking large builds is a consistent posture. The administration is clearly betting on private-sector and state-level governance over federal oversight.

The federal government managing its own IT infrastructure efficiently is different from regulating private industry, and the FDCEA was always a narrow internal-management tool. Letting an outdated standard expire rather than rubber-stamping a bureaucratic renewal isn't automatically negligence.

The GSA employee's concern carries weight as well. With federal agencies rapidly adopting AI tools, demand for government-managed or government-contracted data infrastructure is growing, not shrinking. No standard at all isn't a policy. It's an absence.

States Are Moving Fast, and in Every Direction

With Washington stepping back, states have moved aggressively. More than 300 data center-related bills were introduced across 30 states in just the first six weeks of 2026, according to Crypto Briefing.

As of June 2026, 14 states have considered or are actively considering moratoriums on new data center construction, according to the Rockefeller Institute of Government, which published a policy update on June 10. The list includes Georgia, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Virginia, among others.

Maine's legislature passed a moratorium (LD 307) on data centers larger than 20 megawatts, but Governor Janet Mills vetoed it on April 24, 2026. She opposed not the moratorium in principle, but the bill's lack of an exemption for an active redevelopment project at the former Androscoggin Mill in the Town of Jay, according to the Rockefeller Institute.

North Carolina is taking a different route. Governor Josh Stein, a Democrat, proposed on June 15 phasing out the state's data center tax exemptions entirely by the end of 2032, according to WHQR and the NC Newsroom. North Carolina currently offers sales and use tax exemptions on construction costs, electricity, HVAC equipment, and hardware and software for data centers that invest at least $75 million over five years. There's no sunset date on those breaks under current law.

Stein's proposal would end the electricity exemption by December 31, 2026, close the application window for the broader sales tax exemption at the same date, and fully repeal all remaining exemptions at the end of 2032. "It is unfair for taxpayers to be subsidizing data centers' energy use," Stein wrote in a statement. "We can welcome innovation and give businesses certainty without requiring taxpayers to bankroll in perpetuity an industry with trillions of dollars already backing it."

For context: Georgia and South Carolina's exemptions are scheduled to expire in 2032. Virginia's current expiration date is 2035.

The Patchwork Problem

The Electric Power Research Institute estimates data centers could consume at least 9 percent of U.S. electricity by 2030. A Gallup poll from May 2026 found more than 70 percent of Americans oppose data center construction in their own communities.

Public sentiment is driving the state-level activity. The result, as Crypto Briefing notes, is a regulatory landscape where a facility fully compliant in Texas could face legal barriers in New York. For operators planning facilities that take years and hundreds of millions of dollars to build, that kind of state-by-state fragmentation creates real planning risk, regardless of what federal rules say or don't say.

The open question as of June 15, 2026: whether any of the senators who sponsored the FDCEA will move legislation to establish a successor framework before September 30, or whether the federal government will enter the AI infrastructure build-out era with no enforceable standards for its own data centers at all.