When a chip gets power all of it's registers contain random values. It's not possible to have an an initial value. It will always be random.
This is why we have reset signals, to reset registers to a known value. The reset is controlled by something off chip, and we write our code to use it.
always @(posedge clk) begin
if (reset == 1) begin // For an active high reset
data_reg = 8'b10101011;
end else begin
data_reg = next_data_reg;
end
end