Summary
California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed seven laws requiring greater reporting on data-center water and electricity use and setting requirements for grid, water-supply and land-use impacts. The package assigns proposed infrastructure-upgrade costs to data centers and gives local communities more information about projects.
California Governor Gavin Newsom signed seven laws on September 21, 2026, creating new reporting and cost-allocation requirements for data centers. The package covers electricity, water and land use, and is intended to give local governments and communities more information before proposed projects are approved.
The laws require data centers to report relevant water and electricity information and address the infrastructure costs associated with their demand. The governor’s office said the measures are designed to prevent those costs from being shifted to ordinary electricity customers while preserving room for continued investment in computing infrastructure.
What the new laws change
Electricity and grid infrastructure
The legislation requires data centers to pay their share of grid-update costs. It also aims to prevent those expenses from being shifted to low-income customers and other ratepayers.
Under the package, data centers must comply with California energy-procurement requirements, bring new clean-energy supply onto the grid and pay for required upgrades. These provisions connect approval and operation of large computing facilities with the additional generation and grid capacity needed to serve them.
Data centers contain computing equipment that can require substantial, continuous electricity supply. Grid upgrades can include changes needed to connect a facility and serve its demand; the laws place those upgrade costs on the data center rather than on electricity customers generally.
Water planning and supply
Proposed data centers must provide local governments and water suppliers with information about water use, available supply, efficiency and drought planning. If upgrades are needed to provide water for a project, the data center would be responsible for paying for them.
The reporting requirement gives local authorities information to consider alongside the project’s expected economic benefits and its effect on local water planning. It also ties data-center development to the capacity of the relevant water system and to drought-related planning.
Land use and environmental review
The new laws make data centers ineligible for blanket environmental exemptions. Before judicial streamlining can be approved, a project must demonstrate that it will not shift costs to ratepayers and will meet state standards for energy, water and fuel consumption.
That changes the land-use framework described by the governor’s office from one based on broad exemptions to one requiring project-specific demonstrations about resource use and costs.
The seven-bill package
The signed legislation consists of:
- AB 1577, by Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, on data-center reporting;
- AB 2383, by Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur, on electricity and data centers;
- AB 2469, by Assemblymember Diane Papan, on data-center water-use disclosures;
- AB 2619, by Assemblymember Diane Papan, on water resources and data centers;
- SB 886, by Senators Steve Padilla and Jerry McNerney, known as the California Technology Innovation and Ratepayer Protection Act;
- SB 887, by Senator Steve Padilla, concerning the California Environmental Quality Act, environmental leadership development projects, data centers and geothermal power plant projects; and
- SB 1168, by Senator Jerry McNerney, on data-center rate structures.
Together, the measures give communities more information about proposed facilities and establish that projects must account for the electricity, water and land-use systems they rely on. The announcement describes the policy requirements but does not provide projected statewide water or electricity savings.