On August 26, 2026, Delaware governor Matt Meyer signed a bill that aims to protect electricity ratepayers as the demand for data centers drives up electricity costs. The legislation, which was sponsored by State Representative Debra Heffernan, precludes data centers from transferring expenses derived from powering their facilities onto ratepayers.
The other provisions of this policy include requiring data centers to generate their own green energy in order to mitigate their strain on Delaware’s electric grid, in addition to preventing the facilities from receiving tax credits for creating jobs. The governor explains that “Delaware is open to innovation, investment and economic growth, but growth must be responsible. It cannot come at the expense of those who live here”. This statement is corroborated by an analysis by Siemens Energy which found that a doubling of energy demand, mostly driven by the expansion of tech centers, by 2029 could cause the average wholesale electricity price to increase by 80%.
Data centers house servers and other computing hardware requisite for many large-scale services to function. The modern data center came about in the early 2000s with the birth of cloud computing—on-demand access to various computing services over the internet. The cloud infrastructure is not compact, however, and has to be housed in dedicated buildings: what we know as data centers.
According to US Data Center Map, Delaware is home to twenty-one data centers; however, only sixteen are currently operational. Of the operational facilities, they are reported to use 18.3 megawatts in energy. In proportion to its size, Delaware holds fewer data centers than the majority of states: only Maine, Vermont, Rhode Island, Puerto Rico, and Washington D.C. have fewer locations, and the latter two aren’t even states.
The majority of the data centers in Delaware—six of them, to be exact—operate for colocation purposes; essentially, companies can rent space in a third-party data center to host their servers and computing hardware instead of needing to build a location of their own. However, Delaware currently doesn’t host any neocloud facilities, which house the cloud infrastructure dedicated to train and run large-scale AI models.
While the effect of data center power usage on ratepayer prices is a ubiquitous concern, they can also carry a significant impact on the local environment. All operational facilities pose some climate risk—in fact, thirteen out of sixteen locations in Delaware have a relatively high climate risk according to the FEMA National Risk Index, which is determined by combining expected annual losses across natural hazards along with community resilience. The rest of the facilities rank as relatively moderate. Water stress is determined by comparing water supply to demand. Water stress distribution across the facilities in Delaware is moderately better compared to the climate risk: eleven locations rank medium high, and four rank high.
Although data centers have existed for decades, they have become a national—and increasingly global—concern over the past year as the rapid advancement of AI has driven demand for these facilities. Delaware, despite its small size, has not been immune to this trend. However, growing public scrutiny has prompted meaningful reforms, making it increasingly unlikely that state and local governments will overlook misconduct in the development and operation of data centers moving forward.
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