Activist demolishes $5 billion AI data center in Maryland, neighbors lay siege to $16,000 data center

AI data centers have found a limit in the United States that no one had put on the map: the county council.

In Landovertwenty minutes from the center of Washingtonthere is an 87-acre lot empty for almost a quarter of a century. There was the Landover Mall, closed in 2002. Its owner, Lerner Enterprisesannounced in 2024 that it would break ground in 2026 or 2027 with Brightseat Tech Park: a campus of 5 billion dollars and even 820 megawatts of electrical consumption. County planners had already approved it; the promoter planned 53.5 million annually in local taxes and 88.6 in the state ones.

The project is dead. In June 2025, the neighbor Taylor Frazier McCollum launched a petition that exceeded 25,600 signaturesamplified by the Party for Socialism and Liberationa group that defines itself as Marxist-Leninist. The Democrat Aisha Braveboythe new executive of Prince George’s County (the elected official who governs the territory, something like a provincial president), halted development by decree in September 2025. In July 2026 the council approved a two year moratorium on hyperscale data centers. Last month the final straw arrived: Brightseat must repeat the process before the council.

And what is built in its place? Trampolines. McCollum proposed a park along the lines of Urban Air Adventure Parkwhose premises bring in an average of 3.68 million a year compared to the 53.5 that left the campus. The New York City Councilor Vickie Paladino summed it up like this: ‘Get ready for our new trampoline park economy, courtesy of the dumbest people in the history of Western civilization. The economist Jeremy Horpedahl He added that there is already an Urban Air at an exit from the ring road.

The case is not a rarity. In Suttona town in Massachusetts, residents have organized against a data center in Kraft Group valued at 16 billion dollarsaccording to The Daily Caller. The pattern is repeated in dozens of counties.

A county can knock down 5,000 million in investment with a four-minute vote. In the United States, land has always been local politics.

Others pay the bill.

The electric bill: 820 megawatts that someone has to pay

An 820 megawatt campus consumes the same amount of energy as hundreds of thousands of homes. In the US electricity market, this demand enters the capacity auctions of the regional operator – PJM Interconnection, the entity that manages the mid-Atlantic network – and translates into reinforcements of lines and rates that are also paid by the neighbors who voted against. The Department of Energy warns that the connection is ahead of the grid. The campus owner charges; We all pay for the network.

There is a second, more decisive layer: the tax base. The American county lives off property taxes, and a data center is a stable revenue machine that doesn’t send kids to school or call for clinics. Loudoun County, Virginia, raised Data Center Alley on that logic and today it supports a good part of its services with it. Prince George has done the opposite, just when the price of electricity has become one of the most important issues in the public debate.

Virginia chose to charge. Maryland has chosen to block.

Spain has the same pulse, but a different legal framework

In Spain the conflict exists, but it is resolved elsewhere. The major poles announced are in Madrid, Aragon and Cataloniaand the bottleneck is not the mayor but the network access node: the capacity that Red Eléctrica assigns to each project. The electric ones —Iberdrola, Endesa, Naturgy— they sell that energy; ACS, Ferrovial and Action they sign the work; and Merlin Properties has made data centers a leg of its heritage business.

The difference is who gets paid. The Spanish equivalent to the property tax is the IBI, and the IAE taxes the activity: Neither of them captures the value that a campus like this generates in its environment. The municipality supports the work, the noise, and the pressure on the network, and collects a fraction of what an American county collects. This imbalance explains why the debate here has focused on subsidies and employment.

Washington Logic

The paradox is that Washington You have nothing to say here. Land use is a local jurisdiction for a very American historical reason: the 1926 Supreme Court ruling in the case Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty It validated zoning ordinances and gave municipalities control over what is built. Brightseat was brought down not by a federal agency or an executive order, but by a county council with a vote.

The second piece is fiscal, and explains the coalition. For half a century the county said yes to power plants, landfills and prisons, because everyone paid their bill. Rejection appears when the community stops believing that the exchange is fair. The ‘no’ coalition in Prince George is not the Democratic Party in Congress: it is a coalition of neighbors that has understood that the electricity bill rises before the salary.

The question is whether the Loudoun model is replicable at the scale required by AI. Prince George’s moratorium expires in 2028 barring an extension, and Brightseat remains formally alive, pending a new review. For Spain, the useful reading is not the anecdote, but the mechanism: where the neighbor does not see clear compensation, the project stops.

Case File

• The case: A petition with 25,600 signatures and a two-year moratorium annul Brightseat Tech Park, a $5 billion campus in Prince George’s County, Maryland.
• Key facts: 820 megawatts of consumption, 53.5 million annually in local taxes, moratorium until 2028 and another 16,000 million project answered in Sutton (Massachusetts).
• For Spain: The pulse comes through the network access node managed by Red Eléctrica and with less municipal compensation via IBI and IAE than an American county.