People spilled out of the Harford County, MD, council chambers and down the street in June. For more than 10 consecutive meetings, county residents had demanded that the council ban data center development. They got their wish.
Data centers, which enable the internet and AI, are proliferating across the nation. Now, a wave of data center pushback is sweeping the Chesapeake Bay region as distrust with the industry deepens and energy bills rise. But pauses and bans on data center development could mean some localities miss out on key financial opportunities.
“I’ve never seen a policy issue rise like this from relative obscurity to dominating the political landscape,” said Michael Sanderson, executive director of the Maryland Association of Counties.
Many communities are concerned about the centers using water to cool their servers, polluting the air with emergency diesel generators and straining the energy grid.
Data Center Watch, a research project by an AI intelligence company, found that the number of opposition groups nationwide more than doubled between October 2025 and March 2026. The company’s report also found that about $130 billion worth of data center projects were rejected between January and March of this year — about the same amount as all of 2025.
Localities across the Chesapeake region have adopted moratoriums, or temporary pauses, on data center development to research the industry’s impacts and to draft restrictions. Seventeen localities have adopted some form of moratorium lasting up to two years, with most of them in Maryland.
New York is the first in the country to adopt a statewide moratorium. On the other hand, West Virginia legislators passed a law last year prohibiting counties from limiting data center development.
Communities have been protesting projects for years, but the recent vigor is driven partially by people connecting data centers to high energy bills, Sanderson said. PJM Interconnection, the Mid-Atlantic grid operator, has found the industry is largely to blame for the significant rise in energy demand.
Brittany Baker, Maryland director with the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, said localities have noted how Loudoun County, VA, has become “overrun” with the facilities. Plus, many people have come to distrust the industry due to backdoor deals and nondisclosure agreements with local leaders.
“It’s this vacuum of information that people felt really uncomfortable with, and so when the industry is operating in that way, it really makes people upset,” Baker said.
Many data center projects in the region have fallen through after developers circumvented community input. For example, the companies QTS and Compass planned to build the Digital Gateway campus in Prince William County, VA. If it had moved forward, Manassas National Battlefield Park would have been next to 37 data centers and 14 substations across 22 million square feet.
The Oak Valley Homeowners Association, American Battlefield Trust and Coalition to Protect Prince William County were concerned about impacts to the battlefield lands, the energy grid and the nearby Occoquan Reservoir.
The county board of supervisors agreed to the project before any application was submitted. County leaders skipped public notice procedures and rushed to rezone the land. The HOA and American Battlefield Trust nonprofits filed lawsuits, and on March 31 the Virginia Court of Appeals found that the county failed to follow public notice requirements.
“That’s the irony here,” said David Duncan, president of American Battlefield Trust. “If they had done it the right way, I don’t know that we could have stopped them.”
Melissa Emmal, a resident of Calvert County, MD, first heard about a data center coming to her community when she found Amazon Web Services job listings for her area. Emails show county staff had been talking with data center developers for years before any applications were submitted.
Emmal created a petition in March calling for a moratorium. By Aug. 18, three county commissioners lost their re-election, the Amazon project was rejected, a six-month pause was enacted and Emmal’s petition reached 10,225 signatures.
Warrenton, VA, and Harford County, MD, are the only places in the Bay region that have outright banned data centers.
Warrenton Mayor Carter Nevill said the conversation around data centers needs to move away from an all-or-nothing mindset, away from vilifying neighbors who disagree and toward creating a stronger community. Now that the ban is in place, Nevill worries where the community will get tax revenue to fund deferred infrastructure maintenance. While Nevill said elected officials shouldn’t ignore people’s concerns with large data centers but still have to balance the future of their town.
“You have to look beyond the immediate outrage and look at your responsibilities to make decisions that may not be popular,” Nevill said.
Loudoun County, VA, has lowered its property tax rates and boosted public service funding over the last 10 years, according to a study funded by the tech industry. That county will vote on its own moratorium on Sept. 15.
“Moratoriums on data centers send a signal that an area is closed for business, both for data centers and for other significant economic development projects,” said Nicole Riley, director of Virginia government affairs for the Data Center Coalition.
Maryland is also facing a $3 billion “budget crisis,” according to Sanderson, and must find a way to make up losses from federal job cuts.
But Bryan Cornell, co-founder of Our Harford, said the tax revenue “is just another promise of financial prosperity.”
Cornell and co-founder Krissy Flatau pushed for a ban because they believed a moratorium would just be a pathway to more data centers.
Cornell said, “I think the bigger question that needs to be asked is, ‘Do data centers need to be built in every single county in every state in the country?’”