The online pile-on surrounding anti–data center activist Taylor Frazier McCollum is shielding the officials who actually stand in the way of projects.
Social media is currently abuzz about Taylor Frazier McCollum, a Maryland resident who has emerged as the face of protests against a proposed data center on the site of a long-defunct mall in Landover, Maryland, near Washington, D.C.
In 2024, Prince George’s County approved final planning for the $5 billion Brightseat Tech Park project, which would have housed a massive hyperscale data center on the former mall site.
When she learned the development would rise roughly a mile from her home, McCollum—an unemployed single mother—began campaigning against it.
In June 2025, she started a Change.org petition opposing the data center.
That September, Prince George’s County executive Aisha Braveboy announced a temporary moratorium on processing permits for hyperscale data centers, delaying the Landover project.
Braveboy has repeatedly extended this moratorium, which is now scheduled to expire at the end of this year.
In July, the Prince George’s County Council also approved a two-year halt on approving new data centers. (The council’s moratorium covers only new projects and does not affect the Landover data center.)
“Sympathetic underdog stops big developer” is a familiar storyline in everything from movies to news coverage. McCollum certainly fit that mold in an NPR profile aired this past Saturday as well as in a Washington Post profile from January.
Perhaps because it features a photo of McCollum standing before the overgrown parking lot she’s kept intact, the NPR piece sparked online backlash, with people ridiculing her role in halting the Landover project.
She endured a torrent of criticism on social media and has since been the subject of critical articles in conservative outlets, some noting her ties to the Party of Socialism and Liberation, a fringe left-wing group with alleged financial links to the Chinese Communist Party that has campaigned against data center projects across the country.
As an activist who is deliberately trying to shape public policy, McCollum is a legitimate target for criticism. Her arguments about the data center’s impacts range from the problematic (it could pollute water) to the flimsy (it would alter the site’s aesthetics and character).
But by portraying her as the sole reason the Landover project is halted, both McCollum’s mainstream profiles and conservative critics overstate her influence in Prince George’s County’s data center backlash.
In doing so, they downplay the broader image problems that data centers face nationwide. They also let county politicians—who are the ones actively blocking the Landover project—off the hook.
It’s true that in places like California, a lone gadfly can stall multibillion-dollar ventures for years through administrative appeals and baseless environmental lawsuits. Even if people disagree with them, there are laws and processes that can allow such delays to take place.
In Prince George’s County, that isn’t the case, at least regarding the Landover project. Once it won planning approval, Braveboy found herself compelled to take extraordinary steps—issuing moratoriums to block it.
That isn’t a duty she must fulfill. It’s also not something she would likely undertake for a one-person crusade. She likely feels political pressure to curb the data center because in Maryland, like elsewhere, there is widespread anger about data centers.
A rash of questionable claims about data centers’ effects on water usage and electricity prices has spawned hundreds of moratoriums and derailed about $260 billion in projects.
With all due respect to McCollum’s initiative and organizational abilities, she isn’t the sole cause of this nationwide moral panic reaching Prince George’s. At best, she amplified a message that resonates across the country.
In fact, months before she launched her popular petition against the Landover project, the county had already decided to form a data center task force to listen to community concerns about these projects and to recommend new regulations for them.
As far back as November 2024, the county council rejected a proposal that would have streamlined further data center approvals.
Activists oppose development all the time. For them to be effective, politicians have to listen and act. They rarely respond to a single individual speaking out.
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 struggle to persuade the public that data centers are relatively harmless land uses and substantial fiscal boosters for local programs runs deeper than a lone woman who’d prefer a trampoline park to a hyperscale facility.
If you think McCollum’s arguments are misplaced, direct some critique toward the politicians who are adopting them and turning them into public policies that cost Prince George’s County billions in potential investment.
