The Landover Data Center Fight

Coming to a community near you

Yesterday, as a concerned Prince George’s County resident, I attended a community meeting on qualified data centers in Landover, Maryland, spurred by the recent move to consider the site of a former mall there for a new data center.

The experience was enlightening in ways I did not expect and a lot of that had to do with the format of the meeting itself. Because this is such a huge issue and because I don’t think there is a lot of good information or transparency around it, I decided to write about the experience with the caveat that I am not a reporter. I am by no means an expert on this particular fight or data centers in general. I only offer it as a personal account.

I found only a couple of news stories about this meeting, including this one from our local NBC4 station:

This report leaves a lot out about what occurred at the meeting.

What it should have included was this scene:

But I’ll get to that in a minute.

First a little background. The issue of data centers is growing right along with the AI bubble currently buoying the stock market. It is, in short, a gold rush of investments. Large tech corporations are rushing to build data centers across the United States in order to provide the computing power to expand AI. There is much talk of this being a bubble. Many of the ventures are at a very nascent stage, with no guarantee of returns that would match the amount of capital being poured into them.

Further, skeptics warn that most of the ways AI is being used is inefficient and not greatly beneficial unless you are writing a paper for school and need to clean it up a little. There are some important uses for AI, which is an amazing tool for things such as scientific research and modeling or cancer diagnosis. Often, however, sloppy, enormous data sets producing narrow answers which then need to be further refined by humans seems to be very common across AI right now, which is partly why it is so demanding on natural resources.

The demand comes from the enormous amounts of water and power to generate data centers. Until data centers came on the scene, energy usage in the U.S. had remained fairly flat since 2009. But data centers have greatly increased demand at a time when new, renewable energy projects, which had been expected to offset demand, have been cancelled by the Trump administration. Data centers also use a huge amount of water to cool down servers, water that has to be provided by local sources. If that water is then returned to the surrounding rivers and creeks, the temperature increase will create dead zones and increase chemical pollution.

Here in Maryland, both of these issues are important. Maryland PJM ratepayers are already seeing their rates rise because we are included on a grid that serves several states, including Virginia, which now has over 600 data centers.

In an Aug. 8 letter to its stakeholders (primarily electric utilities), the PJM Board stated that “PJM’s 2025 long-term load forecast shows a peak load growth of 32 GW [gigawatts] from 2024 to 2030. Of this, approximately 30 GW is projected to be from data centers.” PJM also said that the “onrush of demand has created significant upward pricing pressure and has raised future resource adequacy concerns … and there exists a large cone of uncertainty around the trajectory and amplitude of future growth.” - Dave Arndt, Maryland Matters

PJM has even warned of the potential for rolling blackouts by the summer of 2027 as a result of energy demand from data centers.

Also, any data center in Landover would heavily affect Lower Beaverdam Creek, part of the Chesapeake Watershed, which is already vulnerable and stressed, while remaining important to millions of residents in Maryland and Virginia.

And then there are the health impacts. According to a study by researchers at the University of California, Riverside, and Caltech, “training an AI model of the Llama3.1 scale can produce air pollutants equivalent to more than 10,000 round trips by car between Los Angeles and New York City. The total public health burden of U.S. data centers in 2030 is valued at up to more than $20 billion per year, double that of U.S. coal-based steelmaking and comparable to that of on-road emissions of California.”

It is slowly coming out that data centers could be made less harmful if they deploy mitigation strategies such as using renewables to power them, closed loop circuits for water (still a huge energy demand) and so on.

The problem is this: these projects are being rammed through with so little oversight, transparency, or community involvement, there is no confidence that the companies building them would feel compelled to incorporate them. Therefore, it is completely unsurprising that a community meeting over one would erupt in anger and distrust.

In the case of the Landover site, there are hardly any details available about the project. There does not seem to be an environmental impact survey in the works. Environmental impact surveys take time. But the Qualified Data Center Task Force set up in February by the County Council to study the issue seems to be working on an accelerated timeline. They are due to present recommendations to the council in November.

There is an added issue in Landover and that is the issue of environmental racism. Environmental racism is a term that describes a shameful history of harmful and polluting ventures such as landfills, freeways, and incinerators being built in low income, black and brown areas. Sadly, the idea of building a data center in densely-populated Landover would be surprising if it weren’t a majority black and brown community.

This is an excellent video about how Elon Musk targeted such a community to build a massive data center in Memphis, Tennessee.

It was clear that many Landover residents at this community meeting felt that the Data Center Task Force had been keeping them in the dark and that their council members and local leaders had failed them.

They also believed the meeting they had come to in order to voice their concerns would be in a townhall-style format, the norm for these kinds of meetings.

What greeted participants, however, was a format more suited for an issue like, say, brainstorming about a mixed-use facility or new green space. The session was run by a what I believed was a private firm who would then organize the results in a report for the task force. We were told to sit at tables which were covered with large pieces of paper and post-it notes. The plan was for facilitators to guide participants in filling the sheets of paper with notes about their concerns. However, the real goal was to get residents to list a concern and then provide a mitigation idea as well. So, if you wanted to voice that you were concerned about, say, air pollution, you were instructed to provide an idea about what would make you feel better about that. Of course, the majority of the participants seemed to think the “mitigation” would be “Don’t Build It!”

Another sheet was even more blatantly leading, asking residents to offer what they thought the benefits of a data center would be. Our table simply filled up the “wildcard” section with post-its saying “no benefits.”

The present council members, Krystal Oriadha and Wala Blegay, defended their decision on the format by saying that it would give everyone a voice, rather than letting “20 people” stand up and talk. I was seated at a table where several people argued with the council members and finally pressured them to convert to a hybrid format. We would first do the table exercise and then allow a townhall-style section where people could get up and speak if they wanted. This long scene and then a long-winded explanation by the organizers took up the first hour of what supposed to be a two-hour meeting. What happened in reality is, that this format and the way the meeting was handled resulted in even more distrust from a community that was already extremely unhappy about the entire venture. The council members continued to argue at length that some people are too shy to speak up in a forum like that.

I am not buying this argument. If they wanted to get the opinion of every resident who showed up at the meeting, they could have handed everyone who walked in the door an anonymous survey and no one would need to know who wrote it. They could have also asked about mitigation strategies in such a survey. I believe this would have allowed them to get a much more accurate assessment of the views of the community which could then be collated in a scientific way and presented to the council.

Further, I believe a townhall format is so much more revealing for everyone in attendance. When people were finally allowed to line up and talk you could see that a great many people in that room had tremendous knowledge about the issue and had important and real questions about not only the plan but the process behind it.

One woman, who works in public health, brought up the issue of ER wait times in the area which are already extremely high. With a rise in respiratory issues such as asthma and COPD expected from a new data center, those wait times would certainly increase, depriving residents of care.

Another resident brought up the fact that Virginia alone has more data centers than all of China, asking, essentially, what are we doing here? (I later looked it up and that statement is true, by the way.)

The issue of health impacts and pollution came up again and again as well as accusations of a lack of transparency and care for the community. Even if some of those mitigation strategies could be included in any data center plan, I doubt any residents at this point would trust that they could have a part in determining that. It was abundantly clear that the participants overwhelmingly wanted no data center at all.

I had attended this meeting hoping to learn more about the issue and how the local government is proceeding on it. One would hope it would be with care and concern for constituents, first and foremost alongside complete transparency. What I saw and what I believe is becoming a common pattern with data center projects, is a local government that is listening more to investors than to the community. They see quick money and they are rushing ahead without truly studying and considering the issue and its consequences.

In America, for far too long, we have been plagued with short-term thinking. Leaders across the board have been too willing to rush into things looking only at the next election cycle or the next year’s budget without considering what will be left behind for future generations. That kind of thinking has left behind wrecked communities, polluted and exhausted natural resources, and health outcomes for Americans that lag shamefully behind other advanced economies.

But.

There is a rising recalibration happening all across the country with a huge amount of energy behind it, which was evident by the grassroots activism on display at this meeting. People are fed up with billionaires taking more than their fair share and giving nothing but ruin back. I think every politician, Republican and Democrat, local and national, should sit up and pay attention if they want to stay in office.

If you live in Prince George’s County, there will be two more meetings before the task force gives recommendations to the council. The next one will be Wednesday, October 29, 2025 11:00am at the M-NCPPC Largo Headquarters on 1616 McCormick Drive.