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Ohio legislators want to make Governor Mike DeWine’s pause on new data center tax exemptions permanent.
House Bill 957, introduced May 27 by Rep. Tristan Rader, D-Lakewood, would amend state law to prohibit the Ohio Tax Credit Authority from entering into any new data center tax exemption agreements after October 1, 2026. DeWine ordered the pause just days earlier, directing the Tax Credit Authority to stop accepting new exemption requests while a legislative committee studies the growth of data centers in Ohio. The bill would take that administrative pause and write it into law.
The legislation has ten co-sponsors spanning both parties — Reps. Daniel Troy, Anita Somani, Munira Abdullahi, Eric Synenberg, Veronica Sims, Darnell Brewer, Juanita Brent, Joseph Miller, Justin Pizzulli and Rachel Baker — with Pizzulli the lone Republican among them.
What the current program does
Ohio’s data center sales tax exemption allows qualifying data center operators to avoid paying sales and use taxes on computer equipment, cooling systems, electrical infrastructure and building materials used in data center construction. To qualify, a facility must invest at least $100 million over three consecutive years and pay at least $1.5 million annually in employee compensation at the site.
Data centers that have previously received exemptions under the program reported a combined capital investment of $27.2 billion in 2025 — a figure DeWine himself cited in his pause announcement as evidence of the program’s scale.
What the bill would do
HB 957 would add a hard deadline to the existing law — the Tax Credit Authority could only enter new data center exemption agreements before October 1, 2026. After that date the program would be closed to new applicants. Facilities already operating under existing agreements would not be affected.
The bill preserves all other mechanics of the existing law — the investment thresholds, the employment requirements, the annual reporting obligations and the clawback provisions allowing the state to recoup exemptions if a facility stops operating. It simply ends the pipeline of new exemptions.
The context
HB 957 goes further than DeWine’s administrative pause — replacing a temporary executive action with a permanent statutory cutoff.
Ohio’s data center boom has also drawn scrutiny for the strain it has placed on regional electricity infrastructure. The PJM grid operator declared a formal grid emergency in May as transmission lines serving the nation’s largest data center concentration repeatedly hit maximum congestion price caps, driving up capacity costs that flow through to ratepayers across 13 states including Ohio.
HB 957 has been introduced and assigned to committee. No hearing date has been set.
The full bill text can be viewed here: search-prod.lis.state.oh.us/api/v2/general_assembly_136/legislation/hb957/00_IN/pdf/