Executive Summary

Key Figures

The nondisclosure agreements did not stop at Pennsylvania's eight, and the bill written to undo the practice is stalled in the Senate. Only five projects have made it all the way through permitting so far.

Sources: Pennsylvania Governor's Office (2026-08-18) · Spotlight PA (2026-08-19) · Virginia Mercury

Executive Order 2026-05, signed in Harrisburg on August 18, is titled as a measure protecting Pennsylvania consumers from data center impacts. Its center of gravity is a change to how the state Department of Environmental Protection reviews permits. Review now proceeds only if a developer has made a legally binding commitment to the Governor's Responsible Infrastructure Development requirements, known as GRID, and has received local approval.

GRID asks for four things. Developers must pay the full cost of new electricity generation, transmission, distribution, and other infrastructure needed to power their project without shifting costs to Pennsylvania households and businesses. They must commit to open, transparent engagement with local residents and leaders, including public meetings and notification early enough in the process to allow meaningful public input on major design decisions. They must hire and train local workers and enter into meaningful community benefit agreements that invest in schools, infrastructure, and long-term economic development. And they must meet the highest standards for environmental protection, including strict water conservation requirements.

The form of the promise is specified as well. Developers must attend a pre-application meeting with DEP and then execute a Consent Order and Agreement carrying penalties for failure to follow through. For developers who do not agree to GRID, review does not begin until every local approval has been secured and every permit application required for construction has been found compliant. The tax side tightened in parallel. The Department of Revenue is updating its Computer Data Center Equipment Exemption Program guidelines so that applicants who do not meet GRID will not receive the existing exemption.

The nondisclosure clause appears inside that list as a single line: the use of nondisclosure agreements with data center projects is not permissible. On the same day, all data center proposals came out of the state's Permit Fast Track Program, and the administration said data centers will not be considered for the program in the future.

The scale explains the timing. Over the past year, more than 100 Pennsylvania data center projects showed up in publicly sourced databases, and 58 of them engaged with DEP about permitting at some level of formality. Fifteen applied for at least one permit, and only five received all the permits needed for a first phase of development. Most of these are still paperwork, and yet local resistance has already reached a threshold. A Quinnipiac poll found that nearly three-quarters of Pennsylvanians would oppose building data centers in their community.

On August 19, the day after the order, the nonprofit newsroom Spotlight PA published a story by Kate Huangpu. Working from documents obtained through public records requests, it reported at least eight nondisclosure agreements signed by Pennsylvania officials with data center developers. The signers were township supervisors, county commissioners, and a state cabinet secretary. The counterparties were Amazon Web Services, Vantage Data Centers Management Company, and Quality Technology Services.

2.1The One Who Refused and the One Who Signed

When Talen Energy contacted Craig High, a supervisor in Anthony Township, Montour County, about rezoning, his first reaction was surprise. Major zoning decisions belong to the county, not the township. The supervisors were still willing to hear what Talen had in mind. Once a date was set, the company added a condition: the supervisors would have to sign a nondisclosure agreement in order to hold the meeting.

High refused, and the meeting never happened. "On the surface, it seemed as though it's all legitimate. But on the other hand … we're elected public officials here," he told Spotlight PA. "The premise of saying, 'Will you not tell your constituents what you're about to do?' left a major bad taste in my mouth." He learned what the company had wanted to build months later. It was a data center.

The reasoning on the other side is in the record too. Larry Padora, chair of the Schuylkill County Board of Commissioners, was also asked to sign before a meeting. He agreed after his county solicitor told both him and the company that the agreement would be reachable under the state's transparency laws anyway. "Our solicitor advised them that the NDAs are subject to Right-to-Know requests. So, like, it's pointless for having us sign it," Padora said. The meeting turned out to be a general introduction to a project planned in Kline Township, and the only confidential information he learned there was the planned end user, Amazon. Once the property was purchased and the deed recorded, everyone knew, but he did not disclose Amazon's role until the announcement.

2.2A Confidentiality Clause That Never Says What Is Confidential

Most of the documents barred officials from sharing proprietary and confidential information without specifying what fell into either category. In the agreement between Department of Community and Economic Development Secretary Rick Siger and Amazon, confidential information means anything clearly marked on its face as confidential, or anything that reasonably should be considered confidential. Melissa Melewsky, an attorney with the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association, said such nebulous language "makes compliance difficult," because officials cannot know what they have agreed to withhold.

Deanna Noël, a deputy director at Public Citizen, took issue with the direction of the relationship. "When a corporation demands that elected officials sign these nondisclosure agreements as a condition of just learning what is being proposed in their community, it has inverted that relationship entirely," she said. "The official is suddenly accountable to the corporation and not to the voters and their constituents." Dave Cuillier, director of the Brechner Freedom of Information Project, named what follows. "Before you know it, we have local and state governments who are making really important decisions for the public on behalf of the public, without including the public, and that's when bad things happen."

The industry's account ran in the same story. Dan Diorio, vice president of state policy for the Data Center Coalition, said he understands the potential need for regulation here, while noting that many large business projects, from restaurants to big box retailers, use these agreements to protect competitive interest. "If your competitors know you're looking at a particular site, or others know that a certain company is looking at a site, it can affect land prices. It can affect development processes," he said. Microsoft, for its part, has already pledged to stop using nondisclosure agreements with local governments.

2.3The Legislature Moved Before the Order Did

Two bills were already in play. State Senator Tracy Pennycuick, a Republican from Montgomery County, proposed banning public agencies from signing nondisclosure agreements with data center developers outright. In Limerick Township, which she represents, a proposed 1.4 million square foot data center has been going through rezoning while the lawyer representing the project has told township supervisors he is not at liberty to disclose the potential end users.

State Representative Joe Ciresi, a Democrat from the same area, picked a different lever. His bill would amend the tax exemption so that it applies only to data centers that pledge not to use nondisclosure agreements. It passed the House 171 to 31. The margin was bipartisan, and the bill is now stalled in the Senate Finance Committee. "What I'm pushing for is not saying you can't build these facilities," Ciresi told Spotlight PA. "It is that the community is to decide whether you're going to build it, and the community is going to have all the information that they can have."

2.4Not a Pennsylvania Problem

In Virginia, someone counted the practice first. Eric Bonds, a sociology professor at the University of Mary Washington, and student Viktor Newby filed records requests with every Virginia locality they could identify that had an existing, approved, or proposed data center. Of 31 localities, 25 had nondisclosure agreements. The two added a caveat that the number may run low. One county reported that its officials had signed an agreement with a large technology firm but had not kept a copy to produce for a records request. Where no document is retained, the records request stops there.

In Louisiana, the signer was the governor himself. Documents obtained through a public records request by the Gulf States Newsroom show that Governor Jeff Landry personally executed a Mutual Non-Disclosure Agreement on April 23, 2024, on behalf of the Office of the Governor. The counterparty was Laidley LLC, the data center subsidiary of Meta Platforms. Alongside proposed terms, pricing, and financial information, the agreement states that "Confidential Information also includes the existence of this Agreement and the fact or nature of the discussions between the parties." Disclosures required by law are allowed, but only if the receiving party makes commercially reasonable efforts to limit them and seeks a protective order to block them. More than a hundred state employees have signed nondisclosure agreements with the governor's office. Cuillier, quoted earlier, reviewed this document and said the requirement to limit legally required disclosure "turns public record laws on their head." Of the clause protecting the agreement's own existence, he said it "is even more reprehensible" and "seeks to hide the fact that it is hiding information from the public."

Who uses how much power and water, and who pays for it, is a familiar argument by now. The part of Executive Order 2026-05 that got read least is not about how the burden gets divided. It is about the form in which the burden has to be written down from here on.

Operators must submit energy and water information to DEP, and the line items are spelled out: total energy consumption and total natural gas consumption for the previous calendar year, the estimated average amount of energy usage per hour during the data center's peak, total water consumption for the previous calendar year along with the maximum day demand, and any measures taken to protect the environment and the public from polluted water or air.

A separate measure sits next to it. The Shapiro administration built a publicly accessible map of every proposed project that has engaged with DEP. Residents can track where each permit stands, and the map is updated as new proposals surface. The Department of Community and Economic Development will release best practices for municipalities on zoning standards and community benefit agreements. Where terms used to vary from one township to the next, a common template moves in.

Some local governments wrote the template first. Pima County, Arizona, went through its own ordeal with a data center that advanced while the company name and its water and power demand stayed hidden. On September 2, 2025, the Board of Supervisors adopted a new nondisclosure policy on a 4 to 1 vote. Project details must be disclosed no less than 90 days before any requested approval or vote by a county body. Agreements run 180 days by default, with extensions judged separately. A confidential list of which agreements are live goes to the supervisors quarterly. The county also created a standard template for the agreements themselves. The rule does not try to define what can be hidden. It fixes how long, and who has to know that something is being hidden.

The electricity provisions have the same grain. Mark Szybist, the governor's Special Counsel for Energy Affordability, will pursue three things with the state Public Utility Commission: protocols ensuring that data centers lose electric service before other customers when the grid is stressed, procedures charging data centers rather than other customers for the reliability backstop auctions PJM runs to meet data center demand, and protocols ensuring that data center electricity demand is accurately forecasted and transparently disclosed.

• • A ban is a single event. It ends when nobody signs the document anymore.
• • A filing requirement is an annual procedure. The same fields, in the same form, across several years and many sites, stop being a document and become a time series.
• • Comparison becomes possible. Power draw by region, maximum day water demand, employment promises, and tax abatements can sit in one table. What used to sit there was a pile of individual agreements written in different grammars.

It is more accurate not to run a step ahead here. What the order established is a duty to submit to DEP, not a schedule or format for publishing what gets submitted. The public map is a separate measure covering proposed projects and permit status, and nothing in the text says the consumption filings will be released the same way. Putting something on the record and letting anyone open it are two different stages, and only the first one is settled.

The order drew fire from both directions at once. One side says it stops short of a moratorium, and the other says a blanket prohibition goes too far.

The case for too little rests on the fact that this is not a moratorium. Megan McDonough, Pennsylvania state director of Food & Water Watch, said "the only solution to addressing AI data center's many woes is by placing a mandatory moratorium on all new data center development." New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed the country's first statewide moratorium, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott halted new data center grid connections pending an audit of the ERCOT interconnection queue. Even in New York, though, what Hochul signed was Executive Order 62 rather than a statute. It pauses permit review for facilities of 50 megawatts and up for as long as a year, and the broader bill the legislature passed at a 20 megawatt threshold remains unsigned. In Pennsylvania, lawmakers from both parties have spent months pushing a three-year moratorium under Senator Katie Muth's bill, and the executive order does not answer that demand. It also leaves the existing tax incentives in place.

Stacey Garrity, the Republican state Treasurer running against Shapiro, was sharper. Her campaign called the action gaslighting and said Shapiro "was the biggest data center cheerleader in the nation." Garrity's own position has moved as well. She welcomed the June 2025 announcement at the time and now calls for a pause on all data center development.

The case for too much comes from industry. Diorio of the Data Center Coalition called a blanket prohibition a slippery slope and proposed adjustments such as limiting how long agreements run or narrowing the topics they cover. The idea is to protect genuinely confidential material while being more upfront, as he put it, about having decided to move forward with a process.

The measure has a structural limit as well. GRID was originally offered as a voluntary standard tied to tax benefits and expedited permitting, and the House advanced it with bipartisan support, but the Republican-led Senate declined to move. The executive order is the detour around that blockage. Shapiro stressed that these GRID requirements are legally binding rather than voluntary, yet an executive order is not a statute and a future administration can undo it. Requirements carved into the tax code, as in Ciresi's bill, would take new legislation to reverse. Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman said Republicans are open to further discussions, "including considering measures to allow for moratorium decisions to be made at the local level."

Korea is at the opposite point in the cycle. On June 29, 2026, Bae Kyung-hoon, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Science and ICT, announced a plan to invest 550 trillion won in 8.4 gigawatts of AI data centers by 2029. SK takes 5 gigawatts, GS 2.4, and Naver 1, with a longer arc reaching 18.4 gigawatts and 1,000 trillion won by 2035. Siting steers away from the capital region toward Ulsan, Donghae, Sejong, and other provincial locations.

The legislative calendar is set as well. The Special Act on the Promotion of the AI Data Center Industry passed the National Assembly on May 7, 2026, was promulgated on June 9, and takes effect on March 10, 2027. The Ministry of Science and ICT convened a research group for the subordinate decrees and held its kickoff meeting on June 18. The enabling decree is being written as we speak.

The exemptions under discussion form a mirror image of Pennsylvania. Operators meeting certain conditions can run multiple permits through the ministry as a single window, and a deemed-approval rule treats a permit as granted if the relevant agencies raise no objection within a set period. Building or expanding below a certain scale outside the capital region, or converting an existing data center to AI use, exempts a project from the power grid impact assessment.

One number is missing from the announcement. Investment, capacity, and location were repeated often, but permanent headcount appears in none of the press releases. Oh Min-gyu, research director at the labor institute Haebang, worked backward from Meta's own disclosures in Pressian. Meta's 5 gigawatt Richland Parish campus carries a 50 billion dollar investment, 7,500 workers at peak construction, and roughly 1,000 permanent operational jobs. That is about 200 per gigawatt, and across Meta's recently started sites above 1 gigawatt the range runs 200 to 300. Applying the same ratio to 8.4 gigawatts puts permanent employment somewhere around 1,700.

The next question is what form that number gets written in. When Meta first announced the Richland Parish project in December 2024, the figures were 500 direct jobs and more than 1,000 indirect jobs, for over 1,500 in total. The 2026 version says the project will support approximately 1,000 operational jobs. In between, the investment grew fivefold from 10 billion dollars to 50 billion, the employment figure went down, and the direct versus indirect split disappeared from the sentence. The same promise about the same project, written twice, and there is no way to lay the two sentences side by side. Without a form, the numbers survive but the comparison does not.

Opposite directions alone do not make either side right. The two starting points differ. Pennsylvania is slowing down after more than 100 proposals piled in, and Korea is speeding up while most of its projects have yet to break ground. One thing does line up: both are writing their implementing rules at the same moment.

5.1Maybe No One Has Asked Yet

No Korean reporting has established whether nondisclosure agreements are in use between local governments and developers here. There is therefore no basis for asserting that they are. In Pennsylvania, though, it was not regulation that exposed eight of them either. It was a handful of records requests. Nobody having asked yet and nothing being there are not the same fact.

The more practical question sits in the decree now being drafted. The published discussion so far covers one-stop permitting, the deemed-approval rule, provincial special zones, and electricity exemptions. Nothing in it establishes that operators will report power use, water use, and actual permanent employment on a regular cycle, or in what form those results will be kept. Recording provisions, unlike permitting exemptions, are hard to bolt on later. Without a first year of data, there is no baseline to compare against.

The instrument is not unfamiliar to the government. The Ministry of Science and ICT has already said it will publish information about substations with spare capacity on the 345 kilovolt network in order to steer siting away from the capital region. Disclosing information to move a market is already in the policy toolkit. Moving that same tool one notch over, toward actual energy and water performance, is the substance of what Pennsylvania just did.

The full text of the order and the GRID requirements are available from the Pennsylvania Governor's Office announcement, and the contents of the eight nondisclosure agreements are in the Spotlight PA report.

Pebblous Data Communication Team
August 21, 2026

Government Sources

• 1.Office of Governor Josh Shapiro. (2026). "Governor Shapiro Signs Executive Order on Data Center Development in PA." Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Governor's Newsroom, Aug. 18, 2026.

Investigative & News Reporting

• 2.The Philadelphia Inquirer. (2026). "Gov. Josh Shapiro signs executive order restricting data center development in Pennsylvania." Aug. 18, 2026.
• 3.Downard, W. (2026). "Pennsylvania governor signs data center executive order. Critics say it falls short." Route Fifty (syndicated from Pennsylvania Capital-Star), Aug. 19, 2026.
• 4.Huangpu, K. (2026). "Why PA data centers want public officials to sign NDAs." Spotlight PA, Aug. 19, 2026.
• 5.Bonds, E. & Newby, V. (2025). "Data centers, non-disclosure agreements and democracy." Virginia Mercury, Apr. 30, 2025.
• 6.Gulf States Newsroom. (2026). "Gov. Jeff Landry personally signed an NDA with Meta. Here's what it says." WWNO, Jul. 24, 2026.

Korean Sources

• 7.Oh, M. (2026). "550조 들여 1700명 고용 창출? 메가 프로젝트인가 메가 블랙홀인가" [₩550 Trillion for 1,700 Jobs? Megaproject or Mega Black Hole]. Pressian Inside Economy, Aug. 18, 2026.