How One Black woman Stopped a $5B Maryland data center
After saving her neighborhood from a $5 billion data center project, one Black woman is leading the fight against the polluting server farms that have been disproportionately affecting majority-Black neighborhoods since the use of AI has grown increasingly popular.
Moving with her daughter into her grandmother’s house in Landover, Maryland, after being evicted from her home, Taylor Frazier McCollum went from a new resident on the block to the community’s biggest advocate, halting the building of the data center that was set to be developed on the former site of the Landover Mall between 2026 and 2027, NPR reported.
McCollum first learned about the data center through an article in the Washington Business Journal. In an interview with the Prince George’s Sierra Club, the activist said that, driven by her care for the environment and living near the proposed site, she immediately began researching the center’s potential impact on her family and the community, and then started an online petition for folks to sign.
“I’m very passionate about the environment, and it’s something that has been instilled in me since elementary school,” she said. “My family’s from Landover. We live less than a mile away from where the data center is proposed to be and it would greatly impact us. So, I was like, I’m going to do some research; I’m going to read online as much as I can, talk to people in the community, find out if they knew about this proposal.”
Related: Fisk University Faces Backlash Over $1 Billion Data Center Development Project
Between June and August of 2025, the petition received a steady stream of signatures, with 180 people signing it, the Prince George’s Sierra Club reported. But after she made an Instagram reel in collaboration with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, that number skyrocketed to over 20,000. Soon, the project was blocked, and a moratorium was put in place.
However, McCollum’s fight is far from over. On her Facebook page, the activist often posts videos from local conference engagements in Maryland, such as the People Over Data Center summit in Baltimore, where she called out local politicians for failing to keep their word on banning data centers.
McCollum is also taking the fight nationwide, with protests in Memphis and Atlanta, NPR reported.
Speaking with the publication, she stated, “I feel like so many people are depending on this fight to be successful. Not just for myself, but even across the country, to set precedent for other people that are fighting against hyperscale data centers.”
With over 5,000 followers on the No Landover Data Instagram page, which shares updates on local and national rallies against data centers, McCollum’s fight is definitely gaining momentum.
