Governor Mike DeWine paused new data center tax agreements in May 2026, and said in August the freeze will remain until he leaves office. A legislative committee is reviewing the program while existing contracts, some running 40 years, stay in force.
What the state actually agreed to
Between 2014 and 2018, the Kasich administration signed statewide sales tax agreements with Amazon, Meta, and Google offering 100% exemptions for up to 40 years if the companies hit investment thresholds reaching $8 billion.
In total, the state has committed at least $2.3 billion in sales-tax exemptions across its data center deals, with the Amazon, Meta, and Google agreements each valued at roughly $600 million across the 40-year term, according to state data reported by Signal Ohio and cited in coverage of Moreno’s remarks at a Columbus energy summit. State officials have said the eventual cost could run significantly higher.
The qualification bar is low. Under Ohio Revised Code Section 122.175, a project needs only a $100 million capital investment over three years and $1.5 million in annual payroll to qualify. That is the statute critics point to when they argue the subsidies buy very few permanent jobs relative to the tax savings.
The Ark Data Centers deal made the point concrete. In March 2026, the Ohio Tax Credit Authority approved a $4.5 million state sales tax break tied to Ark’s $136 million expansion in Akron and Independence — a project expected to create 10 full-time jobs.
Why a pause is not a repeal
DeWine’s moratorium stopped new applications. It did not touch the legacy contracts. And it did not stop everything already in motion: the Ohio Tax Credit Authority approved a $42.3 million sales tax exemption for Cologix Inc.’s $1.17 billion development in Delaware and Licking counties on June 1, hours before the freeze took effect, using a grandfathering provision.
That is the structural problem Ohio lawmakers now face. The largest exposure — the Amazon, Meta, and Google agreements — was locked in years ago and cannot be undone by a governor’s pause or a committee report.
Which is why Moreno, an Ohio Republican, is pointing at Washington instead. He told the Columbus summit he plans to introduce federal legislation imposing a federal tax equal to 100% of any state or local tax incentive given to a data center. States could technically still offer the breaks; the federal tax would erase the benefit for the company receiving them.
The bill has not been introduced. No text, no cosponsors, no committee referral. It is a proposal at the summit-speech stage.
Ohio is not alone, and the map is shifting
The reconsideration is regional and national at once. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker announced a two-year suspension of the state’s Data Center Investment Program starting July 1, 2026. New Jersey enacted the End Data Center Tax Credits Act in August 2026, eliminating the remaining $250 million available under the Next New Jersey Program. Minnesota repealed its sales-tax exemption for electricity used by qualified data centers, effective after June 30, 2025, according to Newsweek’s state-by-state accounting.
Virginia went a different way. Lawmakers considered ending the state’s data-center sales-and-use-tax exemption through a member-request budget amendment from Senator Danica Roem that projected roughly $1 billion in additional first-year general-fund revenue. The 2026 budget compromise kept the exemption and layered on a new tax on data-center electricity consumption.
Washington’s Senate Bill 6231 removed exemptions for replacement server equipment and ended eligibility for certain refurbished facilities. Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Texas have proposals in various stages, none yet enacted.
A broader pattern is now visible. At least 36 states offer dedicated data center incentives, but only 11 disclose which companies actually receive them, per Good Jobs First research summarised in Tech Times reporting on the widening gap between forecast and actual fiscal impact. Meanwhile, projects with publicly disclosed values of at least $156 billion were blocked or delayed during 2025 amid local opposition, moratoriums, and litigation, according to Data Center Watch’s year-end tracking.
The grid math behind the tax math
Ohio ranks fifth in the country with more than 200 data centers. AEP Ohio reported contracted data center power capacity of 17,861 megawatts in 2026, well above the utility’s historical peak demand of 8,000 to 10,500 megawatts. That gap is the source of a parallel fight over who pays for grid expansion — households and small businesses, or the hyperscale customers driving the load.
Ohio’s other Republican senator, Jon Husted, introduced the Ratepayer Protection Act in July, which would require states to consider standards for connecting large electricity users to the grid. Husted’s office has not said whether he supports Moreno’s 100% federal clawback idea.
The national load numbers add pressure. Data center load growth has tripled over the past decade and is projected to double or triple again by 2028, per Department of Energy figures. Total data center electricity use reached 176 TWh in 2023, up from 58 TWh in 2014, with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory projections for 2028 ranging from 325 to 580 TWh.
A separate wave of state and local moratoriums on new data center construction is unfolding alongside the tax-break rethink, as Governing has tracked in its running coverage of the industry’s expansion.
What Ohio residents actually see
For Ohio ratepayers and taxpayers, the near-term picture is narrow. New sales-tax exemption applications are frozen. The 2025 revenue loss of $1.57 billion — and the 2024 loss of $554.9 million — are already booked. Local governments lost an estimated $166.8 million in uncollected local sales tax revenue in 2024 from the state exemption, meaning the fiscal hole is not only in Columbus.
The legacy Amazon, Meta, and Google contracts are the part of the balance sheet Ohio cannot easily change. A federal clawback bill, if it were introduced and passed, would be the mechanism most likely to reach them. That is a large “if.” Companion federal work exists — Senator Ron Wyden’s August white paper proposes eliminating federal tax write-offs for data center construction and creating a federal gross receipts excise tax on data center operations — but neither the Moreno concept nor the Wyden framework is a bill on the floor.
What is real today: a gubernatorial pause, a legislative review, one very large annual revenue loss, and 40-year contracts that keep running. Ohio’s own tax data, more than the political speeches, is what forced the reconsideration. The bill has yet to be written.
DMNews has covered the broader question of who pays for public infrastructure decisions and how transparent those trade-offs really are, from USPS ballot handling audits to the hidden ledgers behind consumer platforms. The Ohio story fits the same pattern: the number in the annual report is what changes the politics, not the press release from a decade ago.