Prince George’s County Council approves 2-year data center moratorium

The Prince George’s County Council voted Tuesday to temporarily pause the development of new data centers.

The body approved a resolution that prohibits the county’s planning department from considering and approving data center applications for up to two years, or until the council enacts legislation to regulate such facilities.

“It’s important we continue to have those conversations,” council Chair Krystal Oriadha during Tuesday’s meeting. “I think this moratorium is a compromise that allows that to happen.”

Oriadha, who sponsored the resolution along with council member Tom Dernoga, said she supports a full ban on data centers. She wanted to ensure the zoning process was halted as council members continue to discuss the facilities’ potential future in the county.

Council member Tim Adams voted against the moratorium, he said, due to concerns about its duration. Other members abstained from the vote.

Residents have expressed concerns for months about data centers’ environmental and community impacts. Several of those critics attended Tuesday’s council meeting.

But multiple community members, including Alexander Austin, the president and CEO of the Prince George’s County Chamber of Commerce, asked the council to shorten the duration of the moratorium.

“You have spent an enormous amount of time studying the issue,” he said. “A two-year moratorium is too long.”

Prince George’s County is the latest jurisdiction in Maryland to pass restrictions on data centers. Montgomery and Frederick counties have recently issued six-month moratoriums on data center development. Officials in Washington County also approved a yearlong moratorium last month.

The resolution supplements an existing moratorium on processing data center permit applications put in place by County Executive Aisha Braveboy last September. That measure remains in place until Sept. 30, even though it was initially only supposed to last for a few months.

Braveboy extended the moratorium multiple times to give the council opportunities to review a report from its Qualified Data Center Task Force. The task force’s recommendations include ensuring that data centers aren’t built in residential areas, and focus on environmental protection and listening to community feedback.

The county’s task force was commissioned in early 2025 after county residents expressed outrage about a proposal to redevelop the site of the former Landover Mall into 4.1 million square feet of data centers.

Taylor Frazier McCollum, who’s fought against the proposal in Landover, said more data centers will mean worsened air quality. She’s spearheaded a petition to stop the data center, which garnered almost 24,000 signatures as of July 7.

“If they place data centers in rural and agricultural zones in the county, our ecosystem gets even more harmed,” she said.

But a number of speakers on Tuesday, most clad in neon caps and T-shirts that said “Face the Future,” testified in support of data centers. They claimed to be reciting facts and fiction about the facilities.

The group of proponents asserted that data centers do not use as much water as their opponents claim and that the economic benefits outweigh any harms.

“There is a myth that data centers are water-hungry facilities that will drain local water supplies,” one neon-shirt-wearing attendee said.

Some witnesses who spoke against data centers suggested that the group in neon gear might have been paid to testify.

“I serve on the board of Sustainable Hyattsville. I’m not being paid to speak here today,” said Greg Smith. “It would be nice to know whether other individuals who are speaking here today in favor of data centers or against them are being paid to do so.”

Oriadha echoed that sentiment: “There’s big industry,” she said. “There are paid individuals that can come out here every day to speak, and they’re paid by people that don’t live here.”

Council member Shayla Adams-Stafford’s district includes Landover, where an application to build a data center is currently on pause due to Braveboy’s executive order. She urged council members to consider a bill she’s drafting based on the task force’s recommendations that aims to address specific concerns about data centers, including environmental and energy issues.

“Since the day I’ve been elected, I have been fighting to ensure that a hyperscale data center does not come to a residential area in my district or any district across the county,” Adams-Stafford said.