Staci Hartwell of the South County Environmental Justice Coalition in Prince George’s County, MD, said a data center at the former Landover Mall is out of step with the community.
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.
In Prince George’s County, the debate over data centers has an added dimension: worries that the industry will worsen health and environmental problems in communities already overtaxed by them.
“There needs to be a look at what impacts have happened to a community and make sure that data centers don’t add to that burden,” said Sacoby Wilson, director of the University of Maryland’s Center for Community Engagement, Environmental Justice and Health (CEEJH).
Last November, a 20-member county task force released a report designed to be the last word on data center planning within the suburban DC jurisdiction. But it wasn’t. In March, the NAACP’s national office and CEEJH published a “counter report,” a full-throated denunciation of what they considered to be the county report’s failure to address environmental justice.
Nearly 90% of Prince George’s 960,000 residents identify as people of color, and 60% identify as Black. Compared to the rest of Maryland, the county has a higher percentage of people living in poverty and without health-care coverage. The county, meanwhile, has a history of “clustering” industrial facilities in marginalized communities, such as the predominately Black community of Brandywine, according to the report.
Wilson, a Bowie resident, fears that, given the county’s proximity to DC, it will join a growing list of what he calls “digital sacrifice zones”—– communities that are “used to host the negative externalities” of data centers but “don’t see the benefits from them.”
The counter report highlights the vicinity around the proposed Landover data center as a prime example. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Environmental Justice Index, which integrates environmental exposures and health indicators, gives the adjacent census tracts a score of 0.86 on a scale of 1, putting the area into the highest burden category.
Landover isn’t alone. Nationwide, data center pollution could lead to 600,000 asthma cases and 1,300 deaths by 2028 under a “high-growth scenario,” according to an analysis led by researchers at the University of California Riverside. That would equate to more than $20 billion in public health burden nationwide — a 213% increase from the 2023 level. The study has
That pain wouldn’t be equally distributed. People with lower incomes are in line to bear the brunt. All 10 counties with the projected highest data center-related health costs in 2030 have lower median income levels than the national median, the study noted.
“This substantial disparity highlights the need to carefully examine local and regional health impacts to support more responsible computing and data center siting,” the authors wrote.
The paper suggests that Prince George’s County is already paying a high price from hyperscale data centers, even though the county has none within its borders yet. That’s because it’s downwind of Northern Virginia, home to a large concentration of such facilities known as Data Center Alley.
The research team’s modeling showed that if Virginia’s diesel-powered backup generators emit pollutants at 10% of their permitted level, Prince George’s would incur $9 million in annual health burdens. That was the third-highest total after Maryland’s Montgomery County at $20 million and Virginia’s Fairfax County at $19 million.
Prince George’s data center report was based on eight meetings held from May through November 2025 in which subject matter experts shared insights on how to manage data center growth. There were also four community meetings, which drew a combined 600 attendees, officials say.
The county report states that the task force considered the positive and negative consequences of data centers and concluded that the “economic and community benefits” would outweigh the potential downsides, such as higher electricity bills.
Braveboy’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment. Representatives of Lerner Enterprises also didn’t respond.
The main body of the county report mentions the term “environmental justice” three times in its 89 pages. It is mentioned as one of the discussion topics during a June 11, 2025, task force meeting, in a description of another community’s data center ordinance and as part of the name of Hartwell’s organization. She was a member of the task force.
As the task force process unfolded, though, Hartwell said, “I became increasingly concerned that core environmental justice issues were not being fully addressed within either the structure of the task force or the recommendations that ultimately emerged from it.”
County Councilwoman Wala Blegay, another task force member, said that environmental justice was brought up at the meetings, but there wasn’t enough time to give it the attention it deserved. She and other members determined that more science needs to be conducted on data centers’ health consequences before conclusions can be drawn.
Blegay said she is not in favor of the Landover data center moving forward. “It’s too close to people’s homes, and we don’t know the impacts,” she added. “I just want people to know we aren’t going to make a decision and completely disregard the community.”
Abre’ Conner, director of the NAACP’s Center for Environmental and Climate Justice, said that what’s happening in Prince George’s County demonstrates that local elected leaders in many parts of the country aren’t listening to what their citizens are saying, especially those in vulnerable communities.
“What we were seeing from local, elected and appointed individuals,” she said during a data center webinar in May, “was to say, ‘We’re going to move forward,’ despite what community members were saying.”
