The midterm elections of 3 November 2026 produced Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress, according to The Guardian's results page, which uses Associated Press race calls. That page showed Democrats at 54 Senate seats, including two independents, a net gain of seven, with two races still uncalled, and 255 House seats, a net gain of 42, with 422 of 435 races called. The 120th Congress is due to convene on 3 January 2027. What those majorities can do with electricity demand depends less on the party labels than on a statute book that, on data center siting, is still thin.
Over the 2025 and 2026 state sessions, lawmakers introduced bills to pause or forbid new data centers in a long list of states. The National Conference of State Legislatures, in a table updated on 15 September 2026, listed moratorium measures in 16 states. TEI summed 2025 retail electricity sales to ultimate customers in those 16 states from the U.S. Energy Information Administration's Electric Power Annual Table 2.8 (sales are reported in thousand megawatthours) and divided by the U.S. total in the same table, 4,079,909 thousand megawatthours. The 16 states sold 1,169,669 thousand megawatthours, or 28.7% of national retail sales.
The table is not a list of laws in force. Six of the entries were already marked failed: Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Wisconsin. Maine's bill was marked vetoed. New York's was marked as having passed the legislature. Virginia's was marked continued. The remaining entries were listed as introduced. None was marked enacted. After the failures are removed, the other ten states in the table still accounted for 875,599 thousand megawatthours, or 21.5% of 2025 U.S. retail sales, again from Table 2.8.
The federal bills
The broadest proposal sits in Congress and has not had a floor vote. On 25 March 2026, Senator Bernard Sanders introduced S. 4214, the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act, which was read twice and referred to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a companion, H.R. 9442, on 24 June 2026, with nine original cosponsors. It was referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and, in addition, to the Committee on Foreign Affairs. The Government Publishing Office has posted the introduced text of both bills.
The two texts match on the operative rules. Construction or upgrading of a covered "artificial intelligence data center" could not commence or proceed after enactment until Congress passed one or more laws meeting a set of conditions and until a provision in those laws expressly terminated the moratorium. The conditions include federal review and approval of artificial intelligence products before release; policies so that economic gains benefit workers, including steps to prevent job displacement and to share the wealth generated by the companies; and, for any covered data center built or upgraded after the moratorium ends, five project-level tests. The project must not increase consumers' utility or electricity bills; must not exacerbate climate change or harm the environment; must be subject to approval or rejection by affected communities; must receive no government subsidy for construction, upgrading or operation; and must create union jobs with prevailing wages, registered apprenticeships and project labor agreements.
The definition is wider than a simple megawatt cutoff, and narrower than a ban on every server hall. A covered facility is the buildings and equipment on a single site or on contiguous, adjacent or otherwise connected sites, under common control, that are used for the development or operation of artificial intelligence models at scale, or that have a maximum rated power capacity or total peak power load above 20 megawatts and are designed or equipped either to deliver 20 kilowatts or more to a single server rack or to use liquid cooling at the hardware. A campus that trains large models could be covered without regard to the 20 megawatt figure. A conventional data hall below that size, without high-density racks or liquid cooling, would fall outside limb (B).
The energy content of the 20 megawatt threshold is easy to understate. A single 20 megawatt load running at a 75% annual load factor would use 20 × 8,760 × 0.75 = 131,400 megawatthours, or 131.4 gigawatthours, in a year. That is TEI's calculation, not a forecast of how any particular campus would run. Many artificial intelligence training halls aim for higher utilisation than 75%. Even at that conservative factor, one facility at the bill's size floor would use about 2.4% of Vermont's entire 2025 retail sales (5,487 thousand megawatthours on Table 2.8). Scaled across the pipeline of projects that utilities and grid operators have been studying, the federal definition would reach a large share of the load that is now driving interconnection queues.
Both bills would also direct the Secretary of Energy to publish quarterly, facility-level reports on water use, energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, wastewater and thermal output, cooling chemicals, noise, wages, jobs, land and utility agreements, and a certification that the facility has not used federal, state or local subsidies. The Secretary could issue subpoenas, require written answers, inspect sites and condition future permitting on compliance. Section 4 would require the Secretary of Commerce to prohibit the export, reexport or in-country transfer of computing infrastructure hardware, a term that includes semiconductors, integrated circuits and products that contain them, for use in a covered data center or in training or deploying artificial intelligence models at scale, to any country that lacks statutes or regulations comparable to the domestic safeguard laws, or to any person in such a country.
As of publication, the public texts are the introduced versions. Referral to committee is not enactment, and the midterm result does not move either bill out of committee by itself.
What statehouses actually did
NCSL's September table is the cleanest single inventory of the 2025-2026 moratorium bills. Delaware's SB 353 would have paused permits for data centers over 100 megawatts until January 2027. Georgia's HB 1059 would have forbidden local governments from permitting data centers until December 2028. Michigan's HB 5594 and HB 5595 would have barred local governments and the public service commission from permitting or approving new data centers until April 2027. New Jersey's AB 5482 would have imposed a six-month pause on approval, construction or tax incentives. Pennsylvania's SB 1359 and HB 2533 offered a three-year pause paired with impact studies, or a grant of authority for municipalities to prohibit data centers. South Carolina's H 5526 would have forbidden local approval until the legislature adopted a "comprehensive oversight" framework. Vermont's S 205 would have paused data centers until 2030 and required an impact study. All of those were listed as introduced.
The bills that had already failed, according to the same table, included Maryland's HB 120, a flat prohibition on construction or permitting; Minnesota's HB 4888 and SB 4298, which would have banned new permits until the public utilities commission filed a report, and at least until July 2027; New Hampshire's HB 1265, a one-year construction pause; Oklahoma's SB 1488, a pause until November 2029; South Dakota's SB 232, a one-year pause on construction or expansion; and Wisconsin's SB 1061 and AB 1099, which would have barred operation until 14 conditions were met. Virginia's HB 1515, which would prohibit final approval of new data centers until interconnection requests are fulfilled or until July 2028, was listed as continued rather than passed or failed.
Maine's LD 307, a moratorium on data centers over 20 megawatts until November 2027, is the case that reached a governor's desk and died there. NCSL marked it vetoed. New York is the case that reached passage in the legislature. NCSL listed Assembly bill 10141 and Senate bill 9144 as a one-year moratorium on data centers over 20 megawatts that had passed the legislature. The governor's own action, which is the instrument now in force, is a separate document.
New York's Executive Order 62
On 14 July 2026, Governor Kathy Hochul issued Executive Order No. 62. The order directs the Department of Public Service to prepare a generic environmental impact statement on data center construction and operation, covering energy demand, water use and quality, air quality, effects on disadvantaged communities and noise, through the large-load interconnection proceeding, Case 26-E-0045. Until DPS submits that final statement and the associated findings, the Department of Environmental Conservation is directed to hold in abeyance applications for any discretionary permit, approval, license or similar permission for the construction or expansion of a covered data center that are pending before DEC and that DEC had not determined to be complete before the date of the order. The order states that the provision does not apply to permits, approvals, licenses or similar permissions from local governments.
The order's own definition of a covered data center is a facility, or group of facilities on the same or contiguous sites, used to house servers and related equipment, with uninterruptible power, specialised cooling for high-density computing, or cybersecurity systems typical of secure digital infrastructure, that provides data storage, cloud computing or content delivery, often on a 24-hour cycle, and that consumes or can consume 50 megawatts or more. Facilities used primarily for manufacturing, research (including quantum computing or biomedical research), education (including accredited colleges and universities engaged in academic research, and the Empire AI consortium) or medical care are excluded.
The preamble records the demand that prompted the pause. As of May 2026, nearly 12 gigawatts of data center load requests were in the New York Independent System Operator interconnection queue, with more than eight gigawatts entering the queue in 2025 alone. The order states that it is the policy of New York that the cost of electric system upgrades required to serve large loads should not be paid by everyday New Yorkers, and it directs Empire State Development to post a Community Investment Framework within 60 days and DPS to consider a Grid Acceleration Fund and a Data Center Interconnection Working Group built around beneficiary-pays treatment of network upgrades and resource adequacy. DEC is to report within twelve months on whether water-withdrawal rules under 6 NYCRR Parts 601 and 602 need to change to reflect large-use customers, including data centers.
The 50 megawatt threshold in the order is two and a half times the 20 megawatt figure in S. 4214. The order also leaves local permitting untouched. A town or county that wants to approve a campus can still do so on its own authorities. What is paused is a slice of state environmental permission for facilities of 50 megawatts or more whose DEC applications were not already complete on 14 July.
The load the bills are trying to slow
EIA's Short-Term Energy Outlook for November 2026, with modeling completed on 5 November, puts U.S. electricity consumption at 4,216 billion kilowatthours in 2025 and forecasts 4,306 billion in 2026 and 4,371 billion in 2027. That is an increase of 90 billion kilowatthours this year and 65 billion next year, on TEI's subtraction of the annual totals in Table 7a. Sales to ultimate customers rise from 4,080 billion kilowatthours in 2025 to 4,171 billion in 2026 and 4,231 billion in 2027. Commercial sales, the category that includes much of the load billed for computing campuses, rise from 1,503 billion kilowatthours in 2025 to 1,557 billion in 2026 and 1,600 billion in 2027, an increase of 54 billion this year and 43 billion the next.
The STEO table does not isolate data centers as a line item. In a January 2026 press release on an earlier edition of the outlook, EIA said the strongest four-year stretch of U.S. electricity demand growth since 2000 was "fueled by data centers" and "driven largely by increasing demand from large computing facilities, including data centers." The November numbers are the current short-term path against which any pause would be measured. A federal moratorium that actually stopped covered construction and upgrades would not erase the 4,216 billion kilowatthours already consumed in 2025. It would change how much of the 90 billion and 65 billion increments arrive on schedule, and how much is deferred, rerouted to states without pauses, or supplied behind the meter.
State-level sales already show where the commercial increment is landing. Virginia's commercial sales rose from 78,711 thousand megawatthours in 2024 to 86,624 thousand in 2025, an increase of 7,913 thousand megawatthours, or 10.1%. Ohio's commercial sales rose 13.6%, from 50,814 thousand megawatthours to 57,727 thousand. Oregon's commercial sales rose 20.7%, from 24,662 thousand megawatthours to 29,769 thousand. Texas's commercial sales rose 6.4%, from 164,233 thousand megawatthours to 174,683 thousand. Those percentages are TEI calculations from Table 2.8. EIA notes that, starting in 2023, many of the changes in industrial and commercial retail sales reflect improved reporting of data center and cryptocurrency mining operations, so part of a year-to-year jump can be reclassification rather than new servers. The note cuts both ways. It means the commercial line is a better, if still imperfect, place to look for computing load, and it means no one should treat every extra megawatthour as a new campus.
What the election changes, and what it does not
A Democratic House and Senate can bring S. 4214 or H.R. 9442 up if the relevant committees choose to. The bills as written would pause a large fraction of new high-density computing load nationwide until Congress also passed a separate, detailed body of artificial intelligence and labor law and then voted to lift the pause. That is a higher bar than a time-limited state moratorium. It is also a different instrument from New York's order, which holds specified state environmental permits while an impact statement is written and leaves local permits alone.
If the federal bills stay in committee, the near-term U.S. demand path remains the one in the November STEO, modified by whatever governors and legislatures do in 2027. Several of the incoming governors in large power-consuming states campaigned on pauses, tax-break limits or conditions that would make new campuses pay their own interconnection and energy costs. Those pledges are a separate question from the statutes reviewed here, and they will be tested when the new governors take office in January. Failed bills in six states show that a moratorium can lose even in a session that was full of them. Vetoed LD 307 shows that passage is not the same as law. Executive Order 62 shows that a governor can create a statewide pause without a signed statute, within the limits of existing permitting authority.
Local fights will continue under any of those outcomes. They are not counted in the NCSL table and they do not appear as a 2026 statewide ballot measure that itself enacted a construction ban. The load, meanwhile, is already in the interconnection queues. New York's order puts a number on one of them: nearly 12 gigawatts of data center requests in the NYISO queue as of May 2026. Other regional operators have published their own large-load figures over the past two years. A pause changes when those requests can be built. It does not, by itself, remove them from the queue or from the forecast.
State canvasses are still being certified in the days after 3 November. The new Congress convenes on 3 January 2027.