From rising utility bills to strained water systems, Marylanders are absorbing the costs of an industry that promises tax revenue but delivers infrastructure stress — and politicians across the spectrum are finally saying enough.
By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
The question was never whether Maryland wanted data centers. The state answered that years ago — with tax breaks, streamlined permitting, and a governor who promised to “supercharge” the industry. The question now is who pays when the bill comes due.
The answer, increasingly, is you.
Maryland has 41 data centers operating today, with three more already in the pipeline and more proposed across Prince George’s County, Frederick County, Montgomery County, and Southern Maryland. State officials have marketed the industry as a fiscal windfall — a tax-revenue engine that fills budget holes without raising rates. What they have been slower to advertise is the other side of the ledger: the water demand, the grid strain, the diesel generators, the land consumption, and the infrastructure costs that flow not to the companies building these facilities, but to the ratepayers and taxpayers who were here first.
Now, in the span of a single week, politicians spanning the full ideological spectrum have said publicly what many Maryland residents have been saying in county meetings for months: enough.
A System Already Under Stress
The timing of the political backlash is not accidental. It follows years of rising utility costs that have left Maryland families paying significantly more for electricity and water than they were just a few years ago — before the data center boom accelerated. The Maryland Freedom Caucus has documented a 44 percent increase in utility costs since 2020, a figure it has placed squarely at the intersection of state climate mandates and surging industrial demand.
The water picture is equally stark. WSSC Water, which serves more than 1.8 million residents in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, is managing a system riddled with aging infrastructure, hundreds of annual water main breaks, unresolved billing disputes, and tens of millions of dollars in sewage spill liability — even as the same service area is being targeted for some of the most intensive data center development in the Mid-Atlantic region. Data centers require enormous volumes of water for cooling, and that demand does not negotiate with a century-old pipe grid.
Meanwhile, Baker’s announcement cited a Washington Post investigation published the same day, finding that Virginia data centers — Maryland’s neighbor and the largest data center market in the world — are connected to more than 10,000 diesel generators, with pollution from those generators potentially worsening respiratory and cardiovascular conditions across the region. Maryland is not Virginia. But it is building in the same direction.
The Subsidy Nobody Talks About
The conventional framing of the data center debate focuses on tax incentives — the breaks and credits that states offer to attract corporate investment. Those are real. Maryland opened that door in 2020 under Republican Governor Larry Hogan with bipartisan support, and Governor Wes Moore accelerated the approach in 2024 with the Critical Infrastructure Streamlining Act, which prioritized deregulation and expedited permitting for the industry.
But the larger subsidy is structural, and it is largely invisible in the public debate. Data centers consume water and power at industrial scale. The infrastructure that delivers that water and power — the pipes, the transmission lines, the treatment facilities, the substations — was built and is maintained by ratepayers and taxpayers. When a data center comes online and begins drawing hundreds of thousands of gallons of water per day, it does not write a check to WSSC for the marginal cost of capacity it is consuming. When a cluster of facilities begins stressing the regional grid, it is not the companies that fund the upgrades to handle the load — it is the customers of BGE, Pepco, and Potomac Edison.
This is the core argument Congressman Andy Harris and the Maryland Freedom Caucus have been making for months: data centers should generate their own power, not pass the cost to consumers. It is framed as a ratepayer protection argument. But strip away the partisan language, and it is the same structural complaint that Democratic congressional candidate Rushern Baker made in a press release dated May 28 — that the burden of the industry is falling on the people who live nearby, not on the companies writing the press releases about economic development.
“Data centers are raising energy bills, straining infrastructure, threatening our environment, raising legitimate public health concerns, and changing communities across Maryland. Families deserve leaders who are willing to stand up to powerful tech and corporate interests — not candidates whose campaigns are being bankrolled by them.”
— Rushern Baker, candidate for Maryland’s 5th Congressional District, May 28, 2026
Baker, the former Prince George’s County Executive, is running in a race where crypto-aligned outside groups have already spent more than $3 million supporting his opponent, Adrian Boafo — who, Baker noted, works as a federal lobbyist for Oracle Corporation and has appeared on federal lobbying disclosures involving data center and cloud infrastructure issues. The political economy of the 5th District race is, in miniature, the political economy of the data center debate statewide: one side has money, and the other side has votes.
The Spectrum Speaks
The political convergence around this issue in the past week is remarkable enough to be its own story. On May 26, the Ellis/Andrews Green Party campaign for governor called for a statewide ban on new data center permitting and construction — the most aggressive policy position taken by any candidate for statewide office. On May 28, Baker’s congressional campaign called for an immediate moratorium and challenged every candidate in the MD-05 race to do the same. And for months preceding both, the Maryland Freedom Caucus has been running a multi-state legislative coalition demanding that the industry stop offloading its infrastructure costs onto consumers.
“Moratoriums are not enough. A one-, two-, or three-year moratorium starts with the assumption that we want this industry here and that we just need more time to figure out how to regulate its practices. We believe this is the wrong assumption.”
—Andy Ellis, Green Party candidate for governor
A recent Gallup poll found that seven in ten Americans oppose data center construction in their communities, with opposition particularly intense among Democrats. That is not a fringe position. That is a supermajority waiting for political leadership to catch up.
What is striking about the convergence is not just that it exists, but what it reveals about the current approach. Governor Moore and the Democratic legislative majority have, session after session, chosen the industry’s preferred posture. In 2025, Moore vetoed a bill that would have commissioned a study of data center impacts — not regulated them, not taxed them, not restricted them, but simply studied them. He also vetoed legislation that would have created a statewide plan to manage data center energy usage. The 2026 legislative session produced what the Ellis campaign accurately described as suggestions for voluntary industry actions.
Voluntary. In an industry that has demonstrated, by its own behavior in county after county, that it will take what it is not explicitly prevented from taking.
The Policy Menu
The debate has produced at least four distinct policy approaches, each with real trade-offs that Maryland voters deserve to understand clearly.
Data Center Policy Options — Where Maryland Stands
| Approach | Who Supports It | What It Does | What It Doesn’t Address |
|---|---|---|---|
| Outright Ban | Ellis/Andrews (Green Party) | Stops new construction entirely; resets the negotiating baseline; prevents further infrastructure burden | Does not address existing facilities; politically non-viable at state level under current leadership; doesn’t resolve cost-shifting for centers already operating |
| Moratorium | Rushern Baker (MD-05 Democratic candidate) | Pauses new permits; creates time for impact assessment and policy development; responds to immediate community pressure | Concedes industry is welcome eventually; gives industry time to regroup; does not address existing cost-shifting; subject to future reversal |
| Cost-Shifting Mandates | Maryland Freedom Caucus / Andy Harris | Requires industry to fund its own power generation and infrastructure upgrades proportional to demand; protects ratepayers directly | Does not limit land use, visual impact, or water consumption; depends on enforcement mechanisms; industry will lobby aggressively against meaningful standards |
| Stronger Local Control | Community coalitions statewide | Allows counties to ban or restrict data centers based on local conditions; prevents one-size-fits-all state override | Creates county-vs-county competition that industry can exploit; Moore’s track record suggests Annapolis would preempt local authority if it becomes an obstacle |
None of these approaches is without cost. A ban forfeits tax revenue and may accelerate data center construction in neighboring states without resolving the regional grid and air quality issues that don’t respect state lines. A moratorium without a clear endpoint is a delay, not a decision. Cost-shifting mandates are only as strong as the political will to enforce them against an industry with substantial lobbying resources. And local control is vulnerable to exactly the kind of state preemption Moore has already demonstrated he is willing to use.
What is not a serious option — though it has been the functional policy of the Moore administration — is welcoming the industry unconditionally while hoping that voluntary commitments and study commissions will manage the consequences. That approach has produced the situation Maryland is in now: 41 data centers, a stressed water system, a strained grid, communities fighting facility-by-facility for basic protections, and a governor who vetoed the bill that would have told us how bad it actually is.
Who Bears the Cost of the AI Boom?
The data center question is, at its core, a question about who benefits from the artificial intelligence economy and who pays for it. The companies building these facilities — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and a growing roster of crypto and AI infrastructure operators — are among the most profitable enterprises in human history. The people living near their facilities in Prince George’s County, Frederick County, and Southern Maryland are not. The people paying higher utility bills to subsidize grid capacity that primarily serves industrial customers are not.
Maryland has made a bet that attracting the infrastructure of the AI economy will translate into broad prosperity. That bet is not inherently wrong. But it is a bet being made with other people’s money — ratepayer dollars, water system capacity, air quality, farmland, and the character of communities that did not vote on the terms of the transaction.
A Gallup supermajority says they oppose this in their backyard. A Green Party candidate says ban it. A Democratic congressional candidate says pause it. The Freedom Caucus says make the industry pay for it. Governor Moore says supercharge it.
One of those positions belongs to the man currently running Maryland. The rest belong to the people who live there.
Editor’s Note — Maryland Bay News has previously reported on WSSC Water’s infrastructure failures and data center water demand in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties. That reporting is available at mdbaynews.com.
Sources: Rushern Baker for Congress press release, May 28, 2026; Ellis/Andrews Green Party campaign press release, May 26, 2026; Maryland Freedom Caucus energy affordability statements and press releases, February–May 2026; Maryland Banner reporting on PJM grid and data center power demand, October 2025; WMAR2 and Fox Baltimore reporting on Freedom Caucus energy legislation, February 2026; Maryland Matters coverage of Moore energy policy and data center legislation; Wikipedia, Maryland Freedom Caucus; MDBayNews, “Maryland’s Water System Is Breaking Down. Now Come the Data Centers,” May 26, 2026; Gallup polling on data center community opposition, cited in Baker press release, May 2026; Washington Post, “Data centers boom, Virginians breathe exhaust of 10,000 diesel generators,” May 28, 2026 (cited in Baker press release)
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