Virginia families are getting slammed with $11 more a month on their power bills – and Amazon did it to them.
Now DeSantis just made sure Florida is next on nobody's list.
He signed a law that forces Big Tech to cover every penny of the electricity they consume – and Floridians don't pay a dime for it.
What Virginia Families Are Living Right Now
Amazon, Google, and Microsoft turned northern Virginia into the largest data center hub on earth.
The power grid couldn't handle it.
So regulators approved a new Dominion Energy rate increase – $11 a month added to the typical residential bill – to cover grid upgrades demanded by facilities the companies themselves profit from.
Before Florida's new law, that same math could have played out in every state in America.
Virginia's State Corporation Commission finally created a new rate class requiring data centers to cover at least 85% of their contracted electricity costs – but that doesn't start until January 2027.
https://twitter.com/warDaniel47/status/2058482017512075741?s=20
Virginians are paying now.
Across seven Mid-Atlantic states, data centers shifted $4.3 billion in connection costs onto ratepayers in 2024 alone.
The numbers keep getting worse.
What DeSantis Just Did Differently
Florida's new law – SB 484 – doesn't ask data centers to pay most of their costs.
It requires them to pay all of them.
The Florida Public Service Commission must now develop rate structures ensuring every large load customer – any facility pulling 50 megawatts or more – bears its own full cost of service with no shifting to the general body of ratepayers.
Florida Power & Light already had a structure like this in place before the law passed.
Under FPL's existing framework, large customers pay 100% of the cost of any new power generation required to serve their projects.
Duke Energy's similar filing is currently under review.
https://twitter.com/CoastalCNews/status/2059953730133328004?s=20
DeSantis said it plainly at the bill signing in Lakeland: "You should not pay one more red cent for electricity because of a hyper-scale data center as an individual."
Then he went further.
"It's just not right for the most wealthy companies in the history of the world to come in and have individual Floridians or Americans subsidize these hyper-scale data centers."
What Big Tech Did When States Tried to Stop Them
Here's what you need to know about every other state that tried to handle this.
Most of them blinked.
By the end of 2025, utilities in 34 states had created special rate deals for data centers – but most of those deals still let the companies push a chunk of costs onto regular customers.
In Ohio, Big Tech companies lobbied aggressively against any rule that would make them pay their full share.
They won.
In Maryland, the state's own consumer advocate said families there could end up on the hook for $40 billion in new power lines – lines built entirely to serve data centers in northern Virginia, not a single Maryland home.
And electric bills across the mid-Atlantic didn't wait for regulators to sort it out.
They went up.
https://twitter.com/CuriosityonX/status/2060373254859096188?s=20
Average residential electricity prices jumped 27% nationally between 2019 and the end of 2025, with data center demand driving much of the increase.
Utilities filed for more than $29 billion in rate hikes in just the first half of 2025 – double what they asked for the year before.
Why This Is the Blueprint Every Red State Should Copy
Big Tech companies eventually made promises to senators investigating the problem – seven companies wrote letters pledging to cover their own costs.
There are almost no regulations that actually enforce those promises.
Florida didn't wait for promises.
DeSantis locked it into law, gave local governments authority to reject data center projects outright, and stripped the secrecy away.
Data centers had been hiding their plans behind government nondisclosure agreements – meaning the community getting a massive power-hungry facility built next door had no idea it was coming until the bulldozers showed up.
That's gone now.
Florida just proved you don't need years of regulator delays and negotiated half-measures to protect your citizens from corporate freeloading.
You write the law, you sign it, and you're done.
Every other governor in America should be reading SB 484 right now.
Sources:
- E&E News, "DeSantis signs bill aimed at regulating Florida data centers," May 2026.
- Washington Times, "Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signs bill to ensure data centers, not consumers, pay their bills," May 2026.
- WFSU News, "Gov. DeSantis has signed a bill regulating data centers in Florida," May 2026.
- American Action Forum, "Virginia's New Data Center Electricity Rate Class," January 2026.
- Inside Climate News, "Virginia Regulators Approve New Dominion Rates, Assign More Costs to Data Centers," January 2026.
- Latitude Media, "State lawmakers stand between ratepayers and data center costs," October 2025.
- San.com, "States take aim at data center electric rates," February 2026.
