The Anne Arundel County Council voted Monday evening to impose a 15-month moratorium on data centers in the county, deviating from an initial legislative effort to ban the facilities outright.

The bill passed unanimously in an omnibus version of an ordinance originally introduced by council member Nathan Volke, a Republican who represents Pasadena. The latest edition establishes a work study group, which will look at data center best practices in other jurisdictions and make recommendations on legislation to the county executive and council members.

The new legislation is a stark departure from the ban that Volke first introduced, which sought to remove from the county code any provision for data centers — from massive hyperscale facilities to small edge data centers housing servers in office buildings.

Advocates of Fort George G. Meade, a military installation in the county and the state’s largest employer, pushed back on Volke’s proposal over concerns that it would stifle the area’s large defense contractors and booming cybersecurity industry.

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If passed, that version of the bill would have made Anne Arundel the second Maryland county to impose an outright ban, after Harford County. Instead, it joins Howard, Prince George’s and most recently Calvert County in implementing a temporary ban to further study the impacts of data centers.

The moratorium will not affect data centers that are already in development in Anne Arundel. It also won’t stop existing centers from expanding their buildings or expanding onto adjacent lots in the future.

Multiple residents expressed support for the moratorium, citing concerns about data centers’ energy and water usage.

“What concerns me isn’t only the data centers themselves, but everything that comes with them,” said Brenda Cintron of Hanover in a public comment.

She listed additional power demands, transmission substations, noise and the tax breaks available to the developers as potential issues.

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Lauren Gygax, who represents the nonprofit Chesapeake Climate Action Network, also supported the moratorium. She said her group is concerned that technology companies are pushing to develop data centers faster than government officials can regulate them.

On the other side, Kaitlin Monaghan, a director of government affairs for Microsoft, said her company started building a data center campus in the Annapolis Junction Business Park in 2020, which has generated millions in tax dollars for the county. Monaghan worried that future phases of development would be stifled during a moratorium, though she said Microsoft would support establishing a task force to develop responsible regulation.

Benjamin Wechsler of YBS Law also spoke against the moratorium on behalf of data center clients in the county.

He asked council members to make the ban “as short as possible” and potentially allow certain development projects to move forward despite the moratorium.

In response, council member Julie Hummer said that if the study group finishes its report before the 15-month period ends, the ban would lift early.

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Council member Lisa Rodvien pushed for tradespeople to be a part of the study, given that many unions have spoken in support of the centers and their ability to provide long-term construction work.

Council member Pete Smith described the county’s plight as wearing two hats: one for its large defense industry and the other for its environmental impacts. The council member said he personally has no issue with seeing data centers pop up.

“It is in my backyard,” he said of being able to see a center from his home. “And I’m saying to you it is not necessarily a bad thing.”