It Takes More Than 1 Activist To Kill a Data Center

The online roasting of anti–data center activist Taylor Frazier McCollum is letting the politicians who are actually blocking projects off the hook.

Social media is currently abuzz about Taylor Frazier McCollum, a Maryland woman who has become the face of the protest movement against a proposed data center on the site of a long-dead mall in Landover, Maryland, near Washington, D.C. 

In 2024, Prince George's County gave final planning approval to the $5 billion Brightseat Tech Park project, which would have created a massive hyperscale data center on the site of the old mall. 

Upon hearing that the project would be built roughly a mile from her home, Frazier McCollum, an unemployed single mother, began agitating against it.  

In June 2025, she launched a Change.org petition opposing the data center. 

That September, Prince George's County executive Aisha Braveboy issued a temporary moratorium on processing hyperscale data center permits, stalling the Landover project.  

Braveboy has repeatedly extended this moratorium, which is now set to expire at the end of this year. 

In July, the Prince George's County Council also approved a two-year moratorium on approving new data centers. (The council's moratorium applies only to new projects and does not affect the Landover data center.) 

"Sympathetic underdog stops big developer" is a staple narrative in everything from Hollywood movies to news articles. Frazier McCollum definitely got that treatment in an NPR profile published this past Saturday as well as in a Washington Post profile from January. 

Perhaps because it includes an image of Frazier McCollum standing in front of the overgrown parking lot she's saved from redevelopment, the NPR profile sparked a backlash online of people dunking on Frazier McCollum for stopping the Landover project. 

She got a drubbing on social media and has since been the subject of critical articles in conservative publications, some of which have noted she's allied herself with the Party of Socialism and Liberation, a fringe left-wing group with possible financial links to the Chinese Communist Party that has agitated against data center projects across the country. 

As an activist who's consciously trying to influence public policy, Frazier McCollum is a legitimate subject of criticism. Her arguments about the proposed data center's impacts range from the wrong (it'll pollute the water) to the silly (it'll disrupt the aesthetics and character of the former mall site).

But by treating her as the reason the Landover data center project is stopped, both Frazier McCollum's mainstream press profilers and conservative critics overstate her importance to the data center backlash in Prince George's County. 

In doing so, they underplay the serious image problems that data centers have across the country. They also let county politicians, who are actually blocking the Landover project, off the hook.

It's true that in places like California, a single gadfly can hold up multibillion-dollar projects for years with administrative appeals and frivolous environmental lawsuits. Even if no one agrees with them, there are laws and processes in place that allow that to happen. 

In Prince George's County, that's not the case, at least with regard to the Landover project. Since it's received planning approval, Braveboy has had to take the extraordinary measure of issuing moratoriums to block it. 

That's not something she has to do. It's also not something she'd probably be willing to do in the service of a one-woman crusade. She likely feels pressure to block the data center because in Maryland, like everywhere else in the country, everyone is mad as hell about data centers. 

Largely erroneous arguments about data centers' impacts on water use and electricity prices have spawned hundreds of moratoriums and killed off $260 billion worth of projects. 

With all due respect to Frazier McCollum's agency and activist skills, she is not solely responsible for bringing this nationwide moral panic to Prince George's. At best, she helped amplify a message that's resonating across the country. 

Indeed, months before she launched her popular petition against the Landover project, the county had already voted to convene a data center task force to hear community concerns about these projects and recommend new regulations for them. 

As far back as November 2024, the county council rejected a proposed ordinance that would have streamlined further data center approval. 

Individual activists oppose development all the time. In order for them to have an effect, politicians have to listen to them and take action. And they normally don't do that if it's just one person talking.

Across the country, hundreds of moratoriums on data center development have been adopted. Some 13 other counties in Maryland have paused data center construction. 

The industry's problems with convincing the public that data centers are relatively innocuous land uses and major fiscal boons for local programs run deeper than just one woman who'd rather have a trampoline park than a hyperscale facility.

If you think Frazier McCollum's arguments are stupid, you should save some criticism for the politicians who are accepting them and translating them into public policies that are costing Prince George's County billions in economic investment.