A budget fight in Virginia is testing whether Democrats can win at data center politics.
The Virginia General Assembly is expected to gavel in and out of Thursday’s special session without the budget deal they’d been called back to pass. The holdup: A split in the party — which holds a governing trifecta in the state — over whether to end data center tax breaks.
Some Democrats say ending the tax breaks, which have made northern Virginia into the densest concentration of data centers in the world, is a commonsense way to raise over a billion dollars for other state spending.
But other Democrats have balked, including Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who warns that reversing the tax breaks could drive away an industry that’s brought in billions of dollars for local and state coffers.
