How to Fight a Cloud
https://slate.com/technology/2026/08/ai-data-centers-protests-maryland.html
How to Fight a Cloud
Communities across the country are trying to keep data centers out. A victory in Maryland shows a blueprint—but no guarantees.
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When the Qualified Data Center Task Force for Prince George’s County, Maryland, held its fourth public meeting on a rainy morning last September, dozens of people gathered for the occasion and lined up around the block—an uncommon audience size for this government-sanctioned group. “I’d decided to host a rally prior to it, and so many people turned out,” Taylor Frazier McCollum, who lives in the town of Landover, told me. She’d been looking for some space, any space, to register her community’s concerns around a data center campus that had been proposed for their small, majority-Black town, in a plan that encompassed five buildings, 87 acres, 820 megawatts of power—and, bafflingly, little public awareness effort.
The task force meeting—featuring local elected officials, union leaders, tech-company representatives, business advocacy orgs, and a few activists—seemed like a place where residents could raise objections. But the task force had arranged the meeting in a manner where public comment was restricted to Post-it notes, on which attendees could only pen their thoughts and stick them up on whiteboards. “What we didn’t realize was that the public can watch, but there’s no talking allowed,” Michael Lavina, a protest organizer and volunteer with the local chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, told me. “Some of those people told me, ‘I live across the street from this Landover site, and I had no idea they were building this data center there.’ ”
But what the attendees couldn’t say out loud was at least conveyed by their massive presence: They would not let a data center go up without their input. Just after that mobilization, Prince George’s County Executive Aisha Braveboy halted the Landover groundbreaking and imposed a temporary pause on all new hyperscale data center permits in the area (referring specifically to computing facilities that require large amounts of land for establishment, water for cooling, and power for operation). Last month, following months of feedback and organizing actions by McCollum, Lavina, and the broader Prince George’s community, the County Council extended that permit pause for two years. That such an initiative got consistent governmental support in the second-largest county in Maryland, an already data center–dense state that was vying for even more tech infrastructure barely a year ago, is a remarkable tell as to how the A.I. tides are shifting. That it got passed in the same week that saw New York’s governor sign the country’s first-ever statewide data center moratorium—and saw capital cities like Lansing, Michigan, and Jackson, Mississippi, approve their own pauses—likewise demonstrates how widespread this popular opposition really is.
In many ways, it feels like an inflection point in which more community leaders and elected officials are listening to their concerned constituents and hitting the pause button on development for now. But an even bigger fight is at hand: whether these halts on buildouts will eventually lead to permanent bans, or whether elected officials are just kicking the clankers down the road. The saga of Prince George’s County will be a telling preview of that next battlefront.
It was hard enough even getting to this point. The Landover data center site was proposed by Lerner Enterprises, a D.C.-based real estate firm that’s operated by the family that owns the Washington Nationals and has rights to that fallow lot. After failing to persuade the FBI to site its new headquarters on that land back in 2023, the company decided to capitalize on the A.I. data center rush, announcing the following year that it would transform the demolished mall into an artificial intelligence “tech park.” The Landover plan earned the quick approval of the PGC Planning Department, which cited the region’s desperate need for tax revenue. Construction was scheduled for January 2026.
One problem was that the location is not exactly remote; the torn-down mall once served families who live in an apartment complex right next door, with a school, a hospital, and a childcare center nearby. Another was that few in Landover seemed to even know about the development plan, much less have the chance to weigh in on it.
McCollum had only heard about the tech park from a neighbor in February 2025—and immediately grew concerned, having already seen reports about big data centers’ impacts in residential Georgia, from water use to noise pollution. “I saw a video showing how noise and light pollution was affecting the people daily, and how they couldn’t sleep,” she said.
Inspired to dig up more details around the Lerner Enterprises project, McCollum found out that the firm could evade substantive public feedback, thanks to a law the PGC Council passed in 2021 designating data centers as an appropriate land use under existing zoning regulations. In a pre-ChatGPT, post-pandemic moment when PGC was looking at ways to revive economic growth without raising taxes, data centers seemed a reasonable bet: They were already a feature of the country landscape, had not yet garnered political controversy, and were not yet at consistent hyperscale size. The council thus gave the county’s Planning Department broader discretion over the approval of data center proposals so as to “fast-track” their construction.
“We worked with various agencies on incentivizing these centers in the county because we realized they were such an economic driver, and there were a lot of financial benefits” like tax revenue and local employment opportunities, James Hunt, acting deputy director of the PGC Planning Department, told me. “We reached out to Loudoun County in Virginia, whose budget was in the red before they started welcoming more data centers. Now they’re operating in the black.” (Loudoun recently began considering a pause on data center expansion, thanks to constant complaints from residents now disgruntled with the constant noise.)
As for the Landover proposal, Hunt insists that “we did give public notice, and the only speakers who weighed in on the project were from the town of Glenarden. It was after approval that more of the public seemed to get wind.”
That recognition came about thanks in significant part to McCollum’s efforts. Throughout 2025, she contacted her council reps, started a Change.org petition, and posted Facebook videos about the campus, warning that sizable data centers in other states had led to environmental pollution, costlier utility bills, and lower property values. This put her on the radar of the local Party for Socialism and Liberation chapter, which asked if it could include her in an Instagram reel about the Landover project. “They had a much bigger following, so I knew it would help get more signatures,” McCollum said. “But when we posted it that September, it just went viral. People posted it on TikTok. We ended up getting over 20,000 signatures.” McCollum thus became the face of the burgeoning data center backlash in Landover.
At first, this motley crew of activists took care to insist they were not against data centers writ large. “Data centers, while necessary in a digital age, are industrial facilities that demand substantial electrical power and cooling resources,” McCollum wrote in her petition. “It’s imperative that the community has a voice in such significant changes.” Likewise, Michael Lavina, who’s also a Hyattsville-based software engineer, told me he’s “not anti-tech.”
“I build A.I. applications, I like Netflix, and I think networks of data centers have value,” he said. To Lavina, however, hyperscale campuses like the Landover park are not comparable to a standard Maryland data center that may consume a few dozen megawatts of power at most. “We’re talking about two different pieces of technology,” he added. “I’ve heard officials say, ‘We had data centers before,’ And I’m like, ‘Landover would be bigger than any of the others.’ ”
The skepticism also extended beyond data centers, factoring in previous economic development promises that never quite lived up. “People approached us to say, ‘They promised the same with the MGM Casino, that it would get built here and solve all our problems with revenue. All I see is traffic, roads are still unbuilt, and I’m still having an affordability crisis,’ ” Lavina said.
These messages seemed to get through to the PGC government. After McCollum’s video gained widespread attention, Braveboy issued a six-month pause on data center permits by executive order, calling the government’s 2021 decision to fast-track data center approval “a huge mistake,” because “residents have a stake in where these data centers are located.” She still praised computing facilities themselves as a “really good economic tool” and noted that the Qualified Data Center Task Force was working to outline recommendations on how PGC should approach hyperscale centers going forward.
“The
council wanted to get more insight and information on data centers,
because they were being told by constituents about their impacts to
water quality, noise, air, other pollutants,” said Hunt, explaining how
the task force came to be. The group also included members like County
Council member Wala Blegay, who was elected after the 2021 fast-track
legislation passed and had joined other newer, younger local lawmakers
in largely voting against incentives for Big Business. “We have a lot of
development throughout this county. Frankly, not every development in
this county is quality,” she told Maryland Matters early in her tenure.
When it came to hyperscale data centers, Blegay likewise emphasized the need for countywide standards instead of deciding key matters, such as clean vs. dirty energy sources, on a project-by-project basis.
Such a sympathetic ear on the task force allowed for activists to push for an extra meeting in October; McCollum made sure to spread the word and ensure an even bigger community turnout. Yet again, they found their voices stymied, their input limited to Post-it notes. (Hunt explained that the task force made a decision not to change the usual format of their meetings.) “We were able to get almost 500 people to that meeting, and they still would not let us say anything. One person decided to start demanding that we speak, banging on the tables, and the rest of the room erupted in the same chant,” McCollum said. “That finally gave some of us the opportunity to address the crowd.” It also gave them a spotlight on local news.
“I think the community outpouring really got officials to change their mind because they have not seen something of this magnitude done in Prince George’s County,” said McCollum. “At least in my lifetime, I haven’t seen so many people organize for one effort.” Government representatives finally appeared to understand the depth of opposition. Council member Jolene Ivey, who’d originally favored the fast-track legislation, came out against the Landover proposal and told the Maryland Daily Record that she supported “strict guidelines” on data center approvals. The task force released a final report.
Such turnabouts among pro–data center politicians aren’t limited to PGC. In Michigan, where Gov. Gretchen Whitmer controversially appeared for a data center groundbreaking alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, outright data center opponents have won Democratic primaries; for her part, Whitmer has come to demand concessions from data center builders, including commitments to covering energy costs and employing people within the Mitten. In deep-red Utah, state Senate President Stuart Adams was ousted from his longtime district by a GOP primary challenger who’d opposed a Kevin O’Leary–sponsored A.I. campus that Adams helped initially approve. (His belated requests for O’Leary to reduce the planned acreage taken up by the data center clearly weren’t enough, and came much too late.) Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who’s running for a fourth term, had boasted last year about planning more Google data centers than any other state; this week, he sent a letter to his electricity regulators instructing them to pause approvals on new centers until they can complete a thorough energy audit.
Other A.I.-boosting politicians have begun adapting their messages to the times—albeit with some caveats. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a techno-optimistic moderate Democrat, passed an executive order pausing hyperscale permits for a year after the Legislature sent an anti-data-center bill to her desk. While Hochul’s action has been celebrated, it’s not lost on anyone that she sidestepped a bill with more aggressive data center constraints, including renewable energy sourcing requirements, from New York lawmakers. State Sen. Liz Kruger, a co-sponsor of that measure, wrote to me that it “has clearer and stronger requirements to protect ratepayers, water resources, clean air, the climate, and grid reliability, as well as community input” than the executive order. She still referred to the governor’s action as a “good first step.”
Meanwhile, activists like McCollum have expanded their focus to opposing all hyperscale data centers, taking Lavina’s perspective that bigger facilities are not worth the potential economic payoff. But as the PGC moratorium bill neared a council vote, these activists were soon facing opposition from locals like Ursula Franklin, former program manager for the Pride Center of Maryland, who’d show up to county meetings and anti–data center rallies with countering messages of their own. “They’re everywhere in the U.S. and other countries, and we have to know technology is going to move forward,” Franklin told a local ABC7 station. “Why not bring something to the county that can be long-lasting?” Franklin added that she wasn’t against a moratorium, but very much wanted to ensure it was temporary, not permanent.
That clash of both public and governmental priorities meant that the final two-year moratorium came with some inconvenient carveouts. “There’s a clause that if the county passes a reform bill that has some regulation on data centers, then this ban is lifted,” Lavina explained. That may already be on the way, via a newly introduced council amendment that would allow bigger data centers to be sited in rural and agricultural areas instead of residential corners—a move the organizers oppose.
Plus, Lavina and McCollum and the community members they organized don’t just want hyperscale centers out of all PGC land; they also want the Landover proposal to be killed for good. “The county executive order that paused the Landover park expires on Sept. 30, and if it’s not renewed, Lerner can go ahead and build because they got the permits before this moratorium was passed,” said Lavina. In other words, the mall site that launched the entire movement could see the tech park go ahead if the county executive fails to follow her own rhetoric, even if the two-year moratorium otherwise lasts.
The Prince George’s County moratorium is thus a testament to how community resistance can hold elected officials to account—but also a note of caution. It’s one thing to impose a pause for a period of time. It’s another to actually make use of that time and figure out where to go next. So far, only one American city—Monterey Park, California—has passed a permanent data center ban of the kind McCollum would prefer; it’s unlikely that too many other municipalities, which generally need to maintain balanced budgets, will go so far. New moratoriums rarely tend to address extant data center projects, as seen in Landover’s case, and are even fuzzier when it comes to future policy. If data centers will continue to be permitted down the line, how big can they be, where will they get built, what sorts of tax and revenue and community benefits will be arranged, where will the power come from, and who will be on the hook for that cost? And what happens if a developer comes in and starts a project anyway, only to ultimately back out? For now, politicians of all ideological stripes in just about every state—Wisconsin, Oregon, Florida—are seeing favorability boosts from rhetorical data center opposition. But the details will be all the more important, as activists may not be pacified by temporary measures. It’s so meaningful to them that many are risking arrest.
In McCollum’s case, she’s now taking this fight to a higher authority that could stop all of this once and for all, if it wants to: the Maryland Legislature. “The next step is to take this momentum and work toward a statewide ban,” she said. “I want people to know that data centers aren’t just going to come to their backyard.”
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