Maryland counties to data center industry: Slow down

It wasn’t long ago that Frederick County was the only county in Maryland in turmoil over data centers. Now, the battle has spilled eastward into the suburbs of Baltimore and the District of Columbia.

New development proposals are stirring fierce criticism in Baltimore, Montgomery and Prince George’s counties — along with legislative action to pause the high-tech invasion until stricter zoning and building codes can be implemented.

“What’s happening is local jurisdictions are forced to make these restrictions in a vacuum because the states and the feds are not [making regulations],” said Wala Blegay, a Prince George’s councilwoman who sponsored legislation pausing the approval of new data centers in her county last fall. “Business owners are just shopping jurisdiction to jurisdiction to get what they want.”

Maryland is home to a few dozen data centers but not many of their larger, “hyperscale” counterparts — the sprawling warehouses packed with servers that make much of today’s internet possible. Those mega-centers have come under fire from residents, environmentalists and others for their massive energy- and water-consumption needs as well as for air pollution emitted by their diesel backup generators.

“Data centers want to come to Maryland,” said Angie McCarthy, Maryland conservation advocate for the group Nature Forward. “We don’t have to negotiate as if our back is against the law, and we can fight for our environmental and community protections.”

But there’s potentially a huge cost, quite literally, to saying “no” — the possibility of missing out on tens of millions of dollars in tax revenue annually.

“There’s obviously the financial win that comes from data centers from property taxes,” said Griffin Benton, vice president of government affairs for the Maryland Building Industry Association. “If there’s a way for these counties to get a quick shot of revenue, this is one way to do it.”

Here’s where the debate stands in those three counties.

Baltimore County

The County Council voted unanimously on Feb. 2 to pause data center permitting through as late as the end of 2026. The bipartisan action also requires the county’s planning board to submit a study by Oct. 1 on how to best regulate their placement and construction.

“I’m happy that we moved forward and happy that we got other council members’ support,” said Councilman Pat Young, a Democrat and the legislation’s main sponsor, after the vote. “We want to make sure these things are done right … give our planning folks an opportunity to make some recommendations.”

The move is a reversal of the county’s stance. In August 2024, the council passed legislation creating a pathway for data center construction. The measure outlined a handful of building regulations, including noise restrictions and landscaping requirements. And it mandated that they could only be built in the southeast and southwest corners of the county, specifically east of U.S. Route 40 or south of Liberty Road — areas with high proportions of low-income and minority populations.

When the vote was taken on that legislation, Young recalled, “I was thinking, like, a 1990s data center. How big could it be?”

A lot bigger, it turns out. Local officials and residents became aware late last year of a project in the works in the Woodlawn area that would replace a vacated Social Security complex with a 42-acre, 150-megawatt data center.

The council responded with the moratorium and a separate measure repealing the 2024 regulations. No developers had officially applied to build a data center in the county prior to the pause, including in the one in Woodlawn. So, none will be moving forward anytime soon.

That’s just fine with Gunpowder Riverkeeper Theaux Le Gardeur.

“My messaging to the council is thank you,” he said. “It’s not just a high-intensity industry. It’s not just commercial. It’s really the more intensive resource needs of these sites that should prompt a different zoning code.”

Prince George’s County

The county passed a law in 2020 that fast-tracked data center approvals, allowing them to move forward in most zoning districts “by right.” That meant those projects wouldn’t require a public hearing or any specific approval by the county.

That was similar to the strategy of Loudoun County, VA. The Northern Virginia county’s by-right approach to data center approvals has helped it attract about 200 data centers, making it one of the greatest concentrations of data centers in the world, known as “Data Center Alley.”

Loudoun has since begun requiring more rigorous reviews of data center projects. And Prince George’s appears to be poised to follow suit. The county’s mood toward the projects began to sour after a developer’s proposal to transform a 90-acre former mall site in Landover into a $5 billion data center development was approved in 2024 before most neighbors were aware of it.

In September last year, a newly constituted County Council passed a six-month moratorium on data center approvals to give a county-created task force more time to study the issue. The 20-member group unveiled a 460-page report in November that laid out more than a dozen recommendations, including prohibiting data centers in environmentally sensitive areas and requiring all data centers to obtain zoning approval through the “special exception” process, guaranteeing that each receives a public hearing.

Leaders in the building and technology sectors warn, though, that additional layers of bureaucracy could cause the wave of data center development to bypass places like Prince George’s — along with millions of dollars in tax revenue. A report commissioned last year by the Maryland Tech Council found that a data center like the one proposed in Landover would generate nearly $20 million in annual revenue for the county.

“I understand regulating something, but I don’t understand overregulating to limit the growth of a certain sector,” said Tech Council CEO Kelly Schulz.

Montgomery County

Permitting is underway for a data center on the site of a former coal power plant along the Potomac River in the Dickerson community. That has led to a flurry of proposals to regulate future projects.

County Executive Marc Elrich released a raft of proposed legislative and policy recommendations in January that he said were largely based on the data center reports authored by Montgomery’s neighbors: Frederick and Prince George’s counties.

While acknowledging that data centers are “critical to our digital economy,” Elrich suggested that the county place additional air pollution and noise restrictions on backup diesel generators, require centers to supply at least 80% of their own energy and “explicitly limit” their construction to industrial zones. He also urged that the projects undergo a public hearing process for approval.

Elrich subsequently asked the County Council to enact a six-month moratorium while considering the changes, according to the Baltimore Banner.

One councilman has already drafted a bill creating a 15-member task force to study the issue and recommend policy changes within 12 months. And three other members were pushing legislation only allowing data centers in industrial zones — and then only after a public hearing. It also would set landscaping, lighting, noise and setback standards. The council plans to meet in late February to discuss the ideas.