"As Staci Hartwell sees it, her community has much more to lose than to gain from the development of a massive data center.
“I don’t think it needs to be in the heart of a community that is suffering from cumulative impacts, which just happens to be a predominantly Black and brown community,” said Hartwell, a resident of Prince George’s County, MD, and strategist for the South County Environmental Justice Coalition.
Lerner Enterprises, a real estate firm operated by the family that owns the Washington Nationals, has proposed a $5 billion, 4-million-square-foot data center complex on the site of the long-demolished Landover Mall. Those plans were put on hold last September, though, after County Executive Aisha Braveboy placed a temporary halt on processing data center permits.
Hyperscale data centers are sprawling buildings that house hundreds of thousands of computer servers, often used to power global cloud and AI applications. Their meteoric proliferation in the Chesapeake Bay watershed and beyond has been accompanied by a commensurate rise in concerns over strains to public water supplies, air quality and the electric grid."
