Prince George’s County, Maryland is staring down a budget deficit, the loss of a local Six Flags, thousands of federal job cuts, and the Washington Commanders’ departure back to D.C.
Against that economic backdrop, a $5 billion data center campus approved by county planners in 2024 looked to some officials like exactly the kind of revenue the county desperately needed.
The proposed development, covering more than 80 acres on the long-vacant site of the former Landover Mall, was scheduled to break ground sometime between 2026 and 2027.
But it never got that far, stopped in part by a 25,000-signature petition and a wave of community protests organized by a woman who did not even own a home.
Taylor Frazier McCollum was living in her grandfather’s house, less than a mile from the site, when she first heard about the data center plans and reacted with immediate opposition.
“Why would you want to bring water-polluting, diesel-generating data centers right down the street from where people live, work, play?” she said. “It just didn’t make sense to me.”
What makes her emergence as a land-use activist so striking is that she was herself housing-insecure, having been evicted from her apartment in 2024 after a waxing center where she worked cut her wages and she could no longer cover rent.
“It was difficult,” she recalled of the eviction. “Because I created the ideal life paying for us to live in this apartment and have our own space … and then to have it taken away … It felt like something that wasn’t ever going to end.”
Her petition, protests, testimony before Maryland legislators, and appearances at county meetings ultimately contributed to multiple local moratoriums on data centers throughout the county, blocking the project entirely.
Those moratoriums fit a broader national pattern: community opposition has prompted roughly 500 data center moratoriums across the United States, though estimates on that figure vary.
Staci Hartwell, a longtime local environmental activist, said she had struggled for years to generate momentum on the issue before Frazier McCollum became involved, describing her emergence as a genuine turning point.
“This is something that was happening in her neighborhood, and it was really like her awakening,” Hartwell said.
Frazier McCollum’s activism earned her the informal title of “the Landover girl” within data center opposition circles, and local media coverage turned her into a recognizable face of the movement.
With grants sourced by Hartwell and others, she has since carried her message to Black communities confronting data center expansion in Atlanta, Memphis, and even Zambia.
“I feel like so many people are depending on this fight to be successful,” she said. “Not just for myself, but even across the country, to set precedent for other people that are fighting against hyperscale data centers.”
County Council member Wanika Fisher, who supports advancing at least some data center projects, pushed back on the moratorium’s consequences at a September council meeting where Frazier McCollum appeared to request funding for her grandfather’s roof repairs.
“Our county has an economic future that we have to grapple with,” Fisher said. “I don’t see where the money is coming from. I think we have to have a real conversation. And I’m not saying that a data center is the answer, but I’m saying it’s worth the hard discussion.”
Frazier McCollum now wants a full ban on data center development in the area, and she is pitching alternative uses for the Landover site, including a sports complex, affordable housing, or heritage tourism facilities.
She acknowledges, however, that none of those alternatives would generate revenue comparable to a data center campus.
Her father, Lacy McCollum Jr., frames her fight in explicitly civil rights terms, drawing comparisons to Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X.
“We’re talking about the right to water, the right to clean air, the right to a place to live. That’s everybody’s fight, right?” he said. “People like Taylor, they jump out here so the people behind them get to make progress.”
Some supporters have encouraged her to seek elected office, though she says she wants to clear her debts, resolve outstanding traffic tickets, and secure stable housing before considering a run.
“I do have aspirations to run for something,” she said, leaving the door open for a future that, not long ago, looked very different from where she stands today.
