# Act 548 (2025) Act 548 of the 2025 Arkansas General Assembly is the **data-center qualification statute** that **lowered the investment threshold from $500M to $100M** for state sales-tax-exemption-eligible data-center projects. The statute amends and supersedes earlier framework from Act 758 of 2023 (the "Data Center Sales Tax Incentive" referenced in the [[April 2026 FAQ Project Stratus|April 2026 Project Stratus FAQ]]). Together, Act 758 of 2023 and Act 548 of 2025 established the modern Arkansas qualified-data-center incentive regime, of which the [[2025-04 Conway City Council Approves Project Stratus MOU|Project Stratus MOU]]'s 65% / 30-year property-tax abatement is a project-level implementation. ## How it appears in the corpus - **[[April 2026 FAQ Project Stratus|FAQ Q1]]**: "After Arkansas passed a Data Center Sales Tax Incentive in 2023, national interest spiked." This is the 2023 predecessor; Act 548 of 2025 amended the framework. - **[[April 2026 FAQ Project Stratus|FAQ Q8]]**: "Yes. The 50 jobs and $1 billion investment mirrors the minimum requirement for the state sales tax incentive." The $1 billion figure here is project-specific (the announced Forgelight investment), not the statutory minimum (which Act 548 set at $100M). - The wiki's `Home.md` references "the Act 548 tax-exemption framework" as the foundational statute that drove the data-center buildout investigation. ## Stakeholders - [[Arkansas Economic Development Commission]] (AEDC) — administers the qualification certification process. - Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration (DFA) — administers the sales-tax exemption operationally. - Hyperscale developers — beneficiaries of the sales-tax exemption. - Arkansas General Assembly — adopted Act 548 of 2025 lowering the threshold. ## Timeline - **2023** — Act 758 of 2023 adopted the original Arkansas Data Center Sales Tax Incentive at a $500M investment threshold. - **2025** — Act 548 of 2025 lowered the threshold to $100M and amended the qualification criteria. - **2025-04-01** — Project Stratus MOU references the incentive structure implicitly (the 50-job / $1B project scale aligns with Act 758/Act 548 minimums). ## Notes The Conway Project Stratus MOU's 50 jobs and $1 billion announced investment numbers are described in the [[April 2026 FAQ Project Stratus|FAQ Q8]] as "[mirroring] the minimum requirement for the state sales tax incentive" — implying the project is sized to clear the statutory floor. Per FAQ Q9, "If the company failed to meet the minimum requirement for the state sales tax incentive, they would be subject to sales tax on their electricity. The project would not survive those conditions." The incentive is therefore project-load-bearing: the project is sized to qualify, and would not be economically viable without the exemption. This wiki has not yet ingested the AEDC FOIA productions that would document Act 548-qualification certifications for specific projects (including Forgelight Ventures, [[AVAIO Digital Partners|AVAIO]], [[Willowbend Capital, LLC]], [[Google LLC|Google]] via Altitude Capital, etc.). The AEDC FOIA is open as of the FOIA-2026-126 ingest; see `Home.md` for current FOIA status. The wiki has not separately archived the Act 548 statute text as a Tier-2 record. A follow-on web-archive of the bill text from arkleg.state.ar.us is warranted — both for Act 548 of 2025 and Act 758 of 2023. The relationship between Act 548 (statewide sales-tax exemption on electricity) and the Conway-specific Act 9 IRB (local property-tax abatement) is that **they stack**: a data center can be both Act 548-qualified (for state sales-tax exemption on electricity) and Act 9-financed (for local property-tax exemption). The combination is the architecture of the Project Stratus financial-incentive stack. The [[April 2026 FAQ Project Stratus|FAQ]] confirms both are in play for Project Stratus.