On August 20, Maryland’s data center industry rented a hall and threw itself a party.
No, that’s not a joke. While Marylanders across the Old Line State push back against the rapid expansion of data centers in our communities, the industry thought it would be a good idea to celebrate.
The Maryland Tech Council called it the third annual Data Center Summit. According to notes taken by an anonymous attendee who shared them with me, Kelly Schulz, the Council’s chief executive and a former Maryland Commerce Secretary, opened with a legislative victory lap: thirty-odd data center bills compressed into a single utility measure, nothing she counted as a reactive policy left in the final text, and a lobbying operation that talks to the Public Service Commission daily. She dismissed the moratorium movement now sweeping the state as sending the wrong message to Marylanders and investors. She said Marylanders’ worries about data centers are based on misinformation.
I put each of those statements to the Maryland Tech Council in writing and asked them to confirm or correct them. They did not respond.
Residential electric bills in Maryland rose forty-four percent between 2020 and 2025, by the count of the environmental groups now asking Annapolis for a pause. Data centers are one driver of that among several, and the honest analysts say so. But telling Marylanders their worry is misinformation while your industry queues up for another gigawatt is total horseshit, and everybody holding a utility bill knows it.
Then Schulz asked the elected officials in the room to stand and be recognized. She assured the audience they were there. Not one of them stood up.
If you are not already seething, then let us talk about who was in the room. The title sponsor was Rowan Digital Infrastructure, developer of the Bauxite campus in Frederick. Catellus, the master developer of the Frederick Digital Campus formerly known as Quantum Loophole, was the “innovation sponsor.” Atmosphere Data Centers, which wants to build five of them on a retired coal plant in Dickerson, bought gold. So did Amazon. None of that is really surprising.
But here is what is: Also in the room was the Maryland Department of Commerce, with the Maryland Economic Development Corporation buying silver. Two arms of Maryland’s own government helped underwrite the room where the industry celebrated beating Maryland’s own legislature.
The deadline
Here is why any of this matters right now.
On Monday, Wes Moore has to send the United States Treasury Maryland’s list of Opportunity Zones. Moore has handed the paperwork to his housing department, but the nomination is the governor’s to make, and his name is the one on the submission. The federal deadline is September 28. Maryland has 451 eligible census tracts and may designate no more than 113 of them, which means somebody has to choose. An Opportunity Zone hands investors a break on the capital gains they pour into a designated tract. It was sold to the country as a way to move money into places the market forgot.
Charles County put Newburg and Morgantown on its list. Priority number three. The county’s own letter names the asset the nomination is built around: “the decommissioned Morgantown Generation Station.” That is the site where TeraWulf, the Bitcoin miner turned AI landlord run by Easton restaurateur Paul Prager, wants to build one of the largest data centers in the state. The campus has been described in filings and reporting as designed to draw as much as a gigawatt, fed by new gas generation raised in phases on the riverbank. The letter was copied, first on the list, to the Honorable Wes Moore, Governor of Maryland.
I’ve written twice about how this project got its early help from Annapolis: the private December letter from Moore’s environment secretary promising to fast-track TeraWulf’s permits including the gas pipeline rights-of-way, and the maxed-out checks Prager and his wife wrote the governor eleven months before it. The Opportunity Zone would be the third favor.
It is also the only one Moore still has in his hand.
What the buyer says
TeraWulf answered me. Most of what the company said was what you would expect, and then it volunteered something that was unexpected.
TeraWulf has not closed on Morgantown. Nearly two months after federal regulators approved the sale, Kerri Langlais, the company’s chief strategy officer and a member of its board of directors, told me TeraWulf “has not closed its proposed acquisition of Morgantown and does not currently own or operate the property.” The company is not announcing a closing date, a generation configuration, a campus load, or a construction schedule. Plans, she said, remain under evaluation.
She also described Secretary McIlwain’s December letter as one that “expresses support for remediation and offers to facilitate regulatory review.” When I asked her to elaborate, she told me to refer to the letter itself for the specifics of the assistance offered.
And I have. It commits the Department to “best efforts to expedite any other necessary permits and advance other relevant environmental actions, such as obtaining natural gas right-of-ways.”
The governor’s office has said, more than once, that the letter applied strictly to environmental cleanup. So I asked the governor’s office a simple question: is obtaining natural gas rights-of-way environmental cleanup? It did not answer. It did not answer whether it stands by the cleanup characterization, either.
The buyer told me to read the letter. The administration would rather I didn’t.
There were four things TeraWulf would not discuss. I asked twice whether the company requested, encouraged or discussed the Opportunity Zone nomination with Charles County or the State of Maryland, and whether it expects the tax break to apply to its investment. Nothing. I asked twice whether its reported $100 million request for state money is still outstanding. Nothing. I asked twice who asked for the McIlwain letter. Nothing.
A company comfortable explaining that federal approval does not authorize construction found four questions they did not want to answer, and it is not a coincidence that every one of them is about public money.
What changed while nobody was looking
Federal regulators approved the sale of the plant on July 29 but what they actually approved matters. FERC weighed whether the transaction would raise power costs, decided it wouldn’t, and waved off every objection about the gas, the air, the water and the grid as “beyond the scope” of its review. The approval covers the purchase of a power plant. It does not authorize construction, new generation, or a data center.
TeraWulf does not dispute that. “Federal approval of the acquisition does not authorize construction or replace those requirements,” the company told me.
Because in Charles County, a data center still cannot legally be built. On July 21, all five county commissioners voted to withdraw the zoning amendment that would have allowed it. Data centers remain a non-permitted use. The commissioners said they would wait for the state’s data center impact report and consider hiring a consultant for a task force. Before that, the county planning commission had recommended denial twice, both times unanimously.
So the county is waiting on Annapolis. And Annapolis is late. That impact report, the one the General Assembly forced into existence by overriding Moore’s veto, was due September 1. It still is not public. I asked the governor’s office why it is late and when it will be released. They did not say.
The one deadline nobody in this story seems to have trouble meeting is the one that hands out a tax break.
The letter nobody answered
On August 27, more than sixty advocacy groups wrote Annapolis asking for a statewide pause on new data center proposals until the impacts are understood and real guardrails exist.
As of today, neither the legislature nor the governor’s office has responded to them.
None of this is trivial. Fourteen of Maryland’s twenty-four local jurisdictions have now imposed temporary bans on data center development. By the advocates’ accounting, Maryland paid $108 million in data-center-related transmission costs in 2024 alone. County after county has looked at this industry and decided to slow down. The state keeps finding new ways to speed one project up.
We have to admit something about the governor. His office says developers, not ratepayers, should carry the cost of the power their projects demand. It says proposed facilities should hire locally, protect the environment, and engage the communities around them. It says no data center should proceed without local support. Every word of that is the right answer.
But words are just words. We hear them all the time from politicians in election years on controversial topics. Wes Moore is great with words.
So what does local support look like in Charles County, if not five commissioners voting unanimously to shut the door?
I asked the governor’s office directly whether Census Tract 8512.00 will be on the list Maryland sends the Treasury, and how it squares a designation with the county’s unanimous vote. They answered neither question.
For what it is worth, they have declined to answer every question I have put to them about this site.
For the sake of transparency, it is important we mention one more thing about politicians and their words. Moore’s Republican opponent in November has come out for a statewide ban on hyperscale data centers. I am not asking anyone to vote for Dan Cox. Cox chartered buses to the Stop the Steal rally on January 6 and tweeted that Mike Pence was a traitor while the Capitol was being stormed.
I am pointing out that on this one question, a Democratic governor has left himself standing to the right of that man. You have to ask yourself why.
One acre of three hundred and forty-three
There is a cemetery on the power plant property.
It sits on the south side of the Harry Nice Bridge, overlooking the Potomac, behind a chain-link fence the plant’s owners have kept up. The state’s inventory of historic properties lists it as CH-181. One acre inside a parcel of 343. Four graves of the Maryland Lee family of Blenheim: Richard Lee, who died in 1789 in his eighty-first year; his wife Grace, who died in October of that year, in her seventy-seventh; their daughter Alice Weems, in her fortieth; and a boy named Russell Lee, seventeen years and twenty-seven days old, who died in September 1793 after a kick from a horse.
His stone calls him “the last fond hope of a respectable and a numerous and once extensive family.” Quite the burden. But considering he was the last of the seven children to die, it is possible he wrote that himself.
Historical side note: Richard Lee was the great-grandson of the appropriately named Richard Lee, the first of them to come over from England, who died in Virginia in 1664. Our Richard’s father Philip was the first to settle in Maryland: he married the daughter of a member of the governor’s council, sat in both houses of the General Assembly, and inherited a tract at Cedar Point on the Charles County shore. Richard bought out his uncle’s widow, sold the old place around 1760, and put up a square brick house with a cupola, stained glass and a walled garden just south of Newburg. He named it Blenheim, after the battle. In 1798 it was assessed higher than any other private residence in Charles County.
The uncle was Thomas. Thomas fathered Richard Henry Lee and Francis Lightfoot Lee, who both signed the Declaration of Independence, which made the Richard Lee buried at Morgantown their first cousin. A third brother, Henry, began the line that ran through Light Horse Harry down to Robert E. Lee, the Blenheim man’s first cousin twice removed. So these are not Robert E. Lee’s people in any close sense, and the state’s record on the cemetery notes why the branches grew apart: the Maryland Richard Lee was a staunch Loyalist while his Virginia cousins were making a revolution. The line gave Maryland three governors anyway, among them Thomas Sim Lee, who ran the state through the end of the war the man at Blenheim had opposed.
Maryland law says that when a burial site is more than fifty years old, the landowner has to consult the director of the Maryland Historical Trust before changing the markers, the remains, or the ground around them. These graves are more than two hundred and thirty years old.
I asked TeraWulf whether it knows the cemetery is there, what it intends to do about it, and whether it has consulted the Historical Trust. Kerri Langlais, the company’s chief strategy officer and a member of its board, answered that “protecting historic burial sites would be part of our planning, including compliance with applicable preservation and consultation requirements.” When I asked whether that consultation would happen before closing, after closing, or when site work is proposed, the company did not answer.
They did tell me something I hadn’t known. TeraWulf has not closed on Morgantown. Nearly two months after federal regulators approved the sale, the company says it does not own or operate the property and is not announcing a closing date. Which means the duty Maryland law puts on a landowner who wants to disturb a two-hundred-year-old grave still belongs to the company selling it.
That is the parcel Charles County has asked the governor to turn into a federal tax shelter, and that Wes Moore has five days to sign off on or leave alone.
Tell him to leave it alone. Tell him to keep the Morgantown tract off Maryland’s Opportunity Zone list until the state’s own report is public, TeraWulf’s full plan faces public review, and Charles County has said yes in the open rather than being worked around in private. Tell the Charles County commissioners that a task force is not a decision and a study is not consent. And tell your own legislators that when the session opens in January, the industry that threw itself a party in August will be waiting for them, and it will be ready.
So should we.
Reporting for this piece was made possible by Jackie Moore, who walked the ground in Newburg and found the Lee graves in the state’s own records. The best reporting in Southern Maryland right now is being done by people who live there.
Sources
Primary government records
Internal Revenue Service, guidance to states on nominating census tracts as qualified opportunity zones under the One, Big, Beautiful Bill. Establishes the September 28 federal submission deadline.
Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development, Maryland Opportunity Zones. 451 eligible tracts, up to 113 designations, county nominations due to DHCD August 7, process delegated to DHCD by the governor.
Maryland Historical Trust, Maryland Inventory of Historic Properties, CH-181, “Lee Graves at PEPCO Plant (Lee Cemetery).” Records the one-acre cemetery within the 343.68-acre parcel, the four tombstone transcriptions, and the chain-link enclosure. The file lists the property as “not evaluated” for National Register eligibility.
Maryland Historical Trust, Cemetery Laws in Maryland. Sets out the consultation duty owed to the MHT Director for burial sites more than fifty years old, which applies regardless of Register status.
Legislation
Maryland General Assembly, SB0116 (2025 Regular Session), Data Center Impact Analysis and Report. Vetoed by the governor, overridden by the General Assembly, report due September 1, 2026.
Documents obtained by The Loophole
Contemporaneous notes, Maryland Tech Council 3rd Annual Data Center Summit, August 20, 2026.
Maryland Tech Council, 3rd Annual Maryland Data Center Summit 2026 Program Book, sponsor list.
Charles County Board of County Commissioners, Opportunity Zones 2.0 recommendation letter, June 24, 2026. Census Tract 8512.00, Newburg/Morgantown, Priority #3; copied to Gov. Wes Moore. Charles County public record.
Press
Inside Climate News, “Maryland Under Pressure as Local Moratoriums Supercharge Opposition to Data Centers,” Aman Azhar, September 12, 2026. Source for the 44 percent figure, the $108 million transmission cost, and the fourteen-of-twenty-four count, each of which the piece attributes to the advocacy groups rather than to an official state finding.
The Baltimore Banner, “Feds approve sale of Potomac River power plant to data center developer,” Adam Willis, July 29, 2026.
SoMdNews, “TeraWulf gets federal approval for Morgantown plant amid data center debate.”
The Southern Maryland Chronicle, “Commissioners Pull Data Center Plan, Weigh Task Force,” July 24, 2026.
Maryland Matters, “Del. Cox Arranged Buses to Violent Trump Rally, Calls Vice President a ‘Traitor,’” Bruce DePuyt, January 7, 2021.
Previously in this series
The Loophole, “Wes Moore Put It in Writing.”
The Loophole, “Wes Moore’s Next Signature.”
