Concerns Build over MD Data Centers Despite Infrastructure Need

Artificial intelligence and cloud computing is resulting in increased data center construction throughout the nation.  Maryland is home to a few dozen data centers, but not the hyper-scale models that have drawn opposition for their size, noise and environmental concerns.  Jean Hardy who teaches media and information at Michigan State University says data centers raise three main issues—water, power, and land use…

“What are community benefits going to be? What are economic benefits going to be? A lot of communities were not proactively thinking, ‘What are data centers? Could they come to our communities?’ They didn’t have anything in place to understand how data centers would fit into their communities from a planning and zoning perspective.”