Can the county home to the NSA and US Cyber Command ban data centers?

A local lawmaker wants to keep new data centers out of Anne Arundel County — home to a multibillion dollar cybersecurity industry that relies on the increasingly controversial facilities.

Anne Arundel counts tens of thousands of public and private sector jobs centered around work performed by the National Security Agency, U.S. Cyber Command and other federal entities at Fort George G. Meade, located in the western part of the county. Those agencies see data centers as critical tools in defending the nation in an increasingly digital world.

Councilman Nathan Volke’s bill, set for a Sept. 21 public hearing, would write data centers out of the county zoning code to, he said, protect Anne Arundel’s aging energy infrastructure and utility ratepayers, who stand to see higher bills as more centers are added to the power grid.

But Councilwoman Allison Pickard, a Democrat who represents the Glen Burnie area and is running for county executive in November, said national security needs “may impact the extent to which we can regulate data centers.”

Questioning the potential effectiveness of Volke’s proposed ban, Pickard said the county is in a peculiar position due to its economic reliance on Fort Meade.

The U.S. Army base, which is running low on land to develop, serves as the county’s primary economic engine, with over 60,000 employees. Numerous defense contractors outside its gates support their work.

Volke, a Pasadena Republican, said his bill wouldn’t apply to centers built on federal land or operated by the government. He believes the changes are necessary to assuage concerns about the amount of energy consumed by data centers and their possible effects on the environment.

“Now that we know these things are causing problems everywhere they go, it’s time to pump the brakes,” Volke said.

Volke’s bill would remove designated areas where data centers can be built from the county zoning code.

It’s unclear how many such facilities already exist in the county. Anne Arundel’s Office of Planning and Zoning only lists two operational data centers and declined to disclose any information related to those involved in national security.

Other Maryland municipalities like Baltimore, Howard, Prince George’s and most recently Calvert County have enacted moratoriums to stop their development for a period of time. In June, Harford County became the first in the state to put a ban on data centers into law.

Steve Overbay, chief of the Harford County executive’s staff, said it came down to how much energy the centers require and the support of the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground, which he said did not oppose the ban due to its excess of available land.

“Once you allow these data centers to happen, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” he said.

The proposed ban

Volke’s bill defines data centers as any facility that handles “voluminous amounts” of data on computer equipment spanning more than 2,500 square feet.

While it doesn’t ban federal facilities, the current draft would preclude defense contractors from building data centers for national security, according to the county’s planning and zoning office.

The NSA and Cyber Command declined requests for comment.

Pickard said she’s collaborating with experts to better “craft enforceable legislation, rather than rush a bill through that may ultimately have little impact.”

Tim O’Ferrall, who leads the Fort Meade Alliance, a nonprofit that connects the base to the surrounding region, fears that such a ban would “handcuff the community right outside the fence line.”

“We have a lot of jobs and a lot of opportunities that are created because of the installation,” he said.

A blanket ban would harm the industries that grew the county into an “epicenter” for cybersecurity, O’Ferrall said, comparing the proposal to “cutting off our nose to spite our face.”

At least one data center already exists on the base, where available land is becoming scarce. Others sit just outside the properties to support agencies on matters of national security, he explained. Some companies already have reached out to the alliance, worried about the potential ban and that it would push jobs elsewhere.

“If they’re not able to build these,” he said, “that’s a concern.”

But Volke said his constituents fear that welcoming more data centers in the county is a slippery slope.

“If we wind up in rolling blackouts because there’s too much demand on the grid, I want to be able to say we looked at all avenues,” the councilman said.

Pausing data center construction could help the region’s infrastructure handle rising energy demands, according to David Lapp, who advocates for utility rate payers through the Maryland Office of the People’s Counsel.

He said PJM Interconnection, which manages the electric grid across the mid-Atlantic and parts of the Midwest, already is forecasting higher energy costs for Marylanders because of billion-dollar transmission projects needed to keep up with data center developments in other states.

Both Virginia and Pennsylvania are data center hubs, while the industry is still nascent in Maryland.

“Slowing down the data center growth in any particular area is going to allow more breathing time for us,” Lapp said.

More data centers

Volke’s proposal likely wouldn’t stop the expansion of an existing data center, which is already in reviews in Pickard’s district.

Harrison Street Asset Management began building the Sandy Farms Data Center in 2020 on a nearly 50-acre site at 7665 Sandy Farms Road in Severn. It finished the shell, about the size of two football fields, two years later, but plans called for more development.

It’s not clear who operates a data center there, about 3 miles from Fort Meade, although one 2023 report said Amazon was occupying a portion of the building. The company did not respond to requests for comment.

Earlier this year, private equity firm GI Partners purchased the Severn campus along with another data center shell in Laurel for about $221 million.

Oppidan, a Minnesota-based real estate firm that’s built data centers across the country for the last decade, is developing the center. In a 2025 letter to the county zoning office, consultants for the project, Kimley-Horn, said the Severn center has been operating for more than a year and an added shell is planned there “as an extension to the existing building.”

Neither GI Partners nor Oppidan responded to requests for comment.

Kelly Schulz, CEO of the Maryland Tech Council and a former Maryland commerce secretary under Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, said data centers have become a critical infrastructure in northern Anne Arundel.

Over the last 20 years, she said, developers have tried to mitigate their effects on communities through closed loop water systems and, in some cases, by supplying their own energy. Banning commercial data centers would only lead to the county missing out on new tax revenue, she added, noting that if federal agencies build their own, they won’t pay any property taxes.

“They’re still going to be built in the same grid system,” she said. “It’s happening either way, whether Anne Arundel benefits from it or not.”