On August 18, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed an executive order that turns into a legal requirement exactly the kind of commitment Anthropic made voluntarily a week earlier, when we covered the Theseus joint venture here: paying for your own electrical infrastructure instead of passing the cost on to local consumers.
What changed
According to the Pennsylvania governor's office and reporting from NBC Philadelphia and Fox29, Executive Order 2026-05 creates so-called "GRID Requirements" (Responsible Infrastructure Development) that every data center proposal — including AI-focused ones — must meet to get a state permit. The requirements include: developers bringing their own power generation, meeting clean-energy standards, paying for the electrical infrastructure needed to serve their own demand, securing local community approval, and meeting environmental, water-quality, transparency, and community-engagement requirements. These commitments become legally enforceable through a "Consent Order and Agreement" — without it, a project doesn't move forward in the permitting queue.
The order also removes AI data center proposals from the state's expedited "Fast Track" permitting process, bans the use of non-disclosure agreements on these projects, and strips the sales-tax exemption from any developer that doesn't comply.
Why it matters
Until now, commitments like Anthropic's — covering 100% of local electrical infrastructure costs — were the exception, a public-relations and governance choice we flagged as unusual for the sector. Pennsylvania just turned that exception into the rule within its borders. That signals regulators in other US states, and potentially other countries, may follow the same path: legally requiring what only the most cautious vendors currently offer voluntarily.
The impact for Brazil
Brazil is in the middle of its own AI infrastructure push, with the Plano Brasileiro de Inteligência Artificial and ongoing negotiations to attract large-scale data centers — a topic we've covered here both with Theseus and with the delay of Brazil's AI bill. Pennsylvania offers a concrete regulatory model that Brazilian states and municipalities could look to: contractually requiring the data center operator to pay for its own infrastructure, banning secrecy around deal terms, and tying tax incentives to compliance with those conditions. For anyone negotiating the arrival of a data center in a Brazilian city today, these clauses are shifting from optional "best practice" toward a minimum-expectation benchmark.
Entercast's take
We said before that committing not to pass energy costs on to the local community was a governance choice, not a legal obligation in most jurisdictions. Pennsylvania shows how fast that can change: it took only a few months of growing public opposition to massive data center projects for a state to turn voluntary practice into a permitting requirement. For Brazil, the lesson is to get ahead of that regulatory bar rather than wait for it — negotiate today the same guarantees Pennsylvania just made law, before political pressure forces the issue more abruptly.