Three stories worth your time today. A court is about to let a company drill two industrial waste wells two miles from Marietta, Ohio's drinking water — and the deadline for residents' lawyers to object passed five days ago. Virginia's governor has spent two months saying data centers should “pay their fair share” for the electricity they use; she now has to decide whether to sign or veto bills from her own party that would actually make them. And the Washington Post laid out just how big the AI industry has gotten — big enough that the Trump administration quietly exempted its computer hardware from the tariffs everything else has to pay, and big enough that Amazon's CEO is now publicly admitting the price of memory chips has “skyrocketed."
A magistrate at the Franklin County Court of Appeals has recommended that judges throw out the lawsuit trying to block two fracking-waste injection wells in Washington County. The wells would be drilled by a company called DeepRock Disposal Solutions. They would be built about two miles from where the City of Marietta gets its drinking water.
The wells are what the federal government calls Class II injection wells — deep holes drilled thousands of feet underground, where liquid waste from fracking is pumped into rock layers under pressure. Most of that waste is brine, the very salty water that comes back up out of fracked oil and gas wells. It can also contain heavy metals, naturally radioactive material, and chemical additives the industry treats as trade secrets. Washington County already has 17 of these wells. Bev Reed, who organizes for the Buckeye Environmental Network, the group that brought the lawsuit, told Canary Media:
> “Washington County has been forced to accept over 71 million barrels of oil and gas wastewater since 2010. How much waste can one county take before someone looks at this and says 'enough is enough'?"
The deadline for the parties to the lawsuit to object to the magistrate's recommendation was April 30 — five days ago. Three judges of the Franklin County Court of Appeals will now decide whether to accept the recommendation and dismiss the case, or reject it and let the case go on. The City of Marietta and several nearby townships have asked Gov. Mike DeWine for a three-year moratorium on any new injection wells in the county. That request was filed in March and is still waiting for an answer.
Source: Kathiann Kowalski / Canary Media, republished by Ohio Capital Journal.
For two months, Gov. Abigail Spanberger has been saying that Virginia data centers should “pay their fair share” for the electricity they use. The state's data-center sales-tax break is the largest tax incentive Virginia has — it cost the state about $1.6 billion in foregone revenue last year, and it's the reason the state's $212 billion two-year budget is currently stuck.
In April, two Democratic lawmakers tried to do something about it. Sen. Louise Lucas and Del. Destiny LeVere Bolling sponsored bills that would have shifted electricity costs off residential customers and onto the data centers themselves. Spanberger amended both bills on April 16 — taking out the part that actually shifted the costs, replacing it with softer language asking the state's utility commission to “ensure” the costs were not being subsidized, and raising the company-size cutoff so that the rules would apply to fewer companies. Both the bill sponsors and Dominion Energy said her amendments weakened the bills. On April 22, the legislature voted to reject most of her changes and sent the original versions back to her desk.
She now has to sign them or veto them. Virginia Mercury put it this way in a piece published today:
> “'Fair share' in this rhetoric has the shape of a position without its substance. It commits the governor to no dollar figure and no timeline. It permits her to be on whichever side of the debate she happens to be standing in."
The state budget deadline is July 1.
Source: Virginia Mercury (States Newsroom).
The Trump White House celebrated a number last week: U.S. business investment rose more than 10% in the first three months of this year, the biggest jump in three years. The reason was the AI buildout. Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build the warehouse-sized data centers AI runs on. Most of the equipment in those buildings — the servers, the fiber optic cables, the cooling systems — is made overseas, mostly in Taiwan.
The Washington Post laid out the scale yesterday. Earlier this year, Trump quietly carved out an exception to his global tariffs for AI hardware, citing “the needs of the United States economy.” Since then, AI imports have grown 73% — while imports of everything else grew only 3%. The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis calculated that without the AI tariff exemption, the U.S. trade deficit Trump wants to eliminate would have been about $200 billion smaller last year. Just four companies — Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft — plan to spend $700 billion this year on this buildout. That is more than those four companies plus Nvidia, Oracle, and TSMC spent over the past three years combined.
The downstream price effect is starting to show up. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told investors on the company's April 29 earnings call:
> “I think everybody knows that the cost of these components, particularly memory, has skyrocketed. We're just in a stage where there's just not enough capacity for the amount of demand."
Translation for the rest of us: if you have been wondering why a new laptop or a hard drive costs more this year, this is most of the reason.
Source: David J. Lynch / The Washington Post, May 4, 2026.
After months of pressure from residents and city-county councilors, Lebanon Utilities has backed off a plan to discharge treated wastewater from the Lebanon and LEAP industrial park into Eagle Creek Reservoir, which is part of an Indianapolis public park. The utility's general manager, Ed Basquill, told IndyStar in a May 1 interview that the discharge “will not occur within the limits of Eagle Creek Park.” Six other locations are still being considered. The LEAP industrial park in Boone County is the Indiana development heavily linked to data centers and pharmaceutical companies. Twenty-one Indianapolis city-county councilors had signed a letter against the original plan in March.
Source: Sophie Hartley / IndyStar.
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