Should Baltimore Ban Data Center Development?

Baltimore City Council President Zeke Cohen wants to ban data center development in the city entirely. It's a bold move — and depending on which side of the debate you're on, it could be seen as either a courageous act of urban planning or a serious economic own goal.

The proposal has ignited a real conversation about what cities actually want from the infrastructure boom reshaping American real estate and energy grids. But before dismissing it as anti-progress politics or celebrating it as environmental leadership, it's worth understanding what's truly at stake.

What Zeke Cohen Is Proposing

The details emerging from Cohen's office point to a straightforward prohibition: no new data center development in Baltimore. That's not a moratorium pending further study, nor a zoning restriction limiting facilities to certain districts — it's a ban.

The fact that a major American city is even having this conversation signals something important: the data center gold rush is finally running into serious political resistance.

To understand why, you have to look at what data center development has meant for cities that embraced it aggressively. Northern Virginia — particularly Loudoun County's so-called "Data Center Alley" — absorbed so much development that it now hosts roughly 35% of the world's internet traffic. The tax revenue is enormous, but so is the strain on the electrical grid, water systems, and local land use. Dominion Energy has repeatedly warned that Virginia's data center appetite is outpacing its ability to generate and transmit power reliably.

Baltimore isn't Northern Virginia. But the pressure from developers scouting Mid-Atlantic locations for new hyperscale and colocation facilities is real, and Cohen's proposal is a preemptive strike.

What a Ban Would Mean for Baltimore's Economy

Here's where the argument gets complicated. Data centers are notoriously poor job creators relative to their footprint and power consumption. A hyperscale facility covering hundreds of thousands of square feet might employ 30 to 50 full-time workers once operational. Compare that to a manufacturing plant or logistics hub of equivalent size, and the job calculus looks pretty thin.

That said, the construction phase generates real work — electricians, HVAC technicians, structural crews — and the indirect economic effects of having major tech operators anchored in a region compound over time. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft don't just build server farms; they often expand broader operations near their infrastructure investments.

Banning data center development outright means Baltimore forecloses not just the facilities themselves, but the broader tech ecosystem relationships that tend to follow.

For a city that has spent decades trying to shed its post-industrial identity and attract knowledge economy employers, that's a painful trade-off to accept. Baltimore's unemployment rate consistently runs above the national average. Turning away any category of capital investment requires an exceptionally compelling alternative vision — and it's not yet clear that Cohen's proposal comes with one.

The Energy and Environmental Reality

The environmental case for Cohen's position is stronger than critics will admit. Data centers are ravenous electricity consumers. A single large hyperscale campus can draw 100 to 500 megawatts of power — enough to supply tens of thousands of homes. And unlike a factory that runs one or two shifts, data centers run at high utilization around the clock, 365 days a year.

Baltimore's grid, like most of the Mid-Atlantic, still depends heavily on fossil fuel generation to meet peak demand. Adding large, always-on industrial loads doesn't just raise emissions — it stresses infrastructure and can drive up electricity costs for residential customers who have no say in the matter.

The clean energy infrastructure argument cuts both ways, though. Data center operators have become some of the largest corporate purchasers of renewable energy in the country. Microsoft has committed to being carbon negative by 2030. Google has been matching its electricity consumption with renewable purchases for years. If a Baltimore data center were contractually tied to new solar or wind capacity — through a power purchase agreement that actually adds generation to the regional grid — the environmental math changes considerably.

The problem is that "we'll buy green energy" doesn't automatically mean "we'll reduce grid strain." Additionality — whether the renewable energy purchased actually represents new generation rather than just a credit shuffle — remains one of the murkiest issues in corporate sustainability. Baltimore residents are right to be skeptical of easy promises.

What the Community Is Actually Worried About

Residents pushing for the ban aren't just concerned about megawatts and carbon accounting. Several recurring themes emerge from the local debate.

First, there's the water issue. Data centers use enormous quantities of water for cooling — some facilities consuming millions of gallons annually. For a city like Baltimore, which has aging water infrastructure and ongoing concerns about affordability and access, that's a tangible resource competition.

Second, there's the land use question. Baltimore has substantial vacant and underutilized land from decades of population decline and deindustrialization. Data centers consume that land without delivering the density of jobs or community amenities that residents might reasonably expect in return. A warehouse with servers doesn't revitalize a neighborhood.

The deeper frustration is about who infrastructure serves — whether large-scale urban development policies actually benefit existing residents or simply extract value from city resources while delivering returns elsewhere.

Third, and perhaps most politically potent, is the electricity cost concern. Industrial customers typically negotiate favorable rate structures with utilities, and the costs of grid upgrades to serve large new loads often get socialized across all ratepayers. Baltimore's residential customers, many of whom are lower-income, end up subsidizing infrastructure that doesn't directly benefit them.

What Other Cities Have Figured Out

Amsterdam banned new data centers in 2019 — and then quietly lifted the ban in 2022 after negotiations with operators around water efficiency, renewable energy commitments, and waste heat recovery. The Dutch capital realized that an outright prohibition left it with no leverage; by re-engaging with developers under stricter conditions, it extracted meaningful concessions.

Singapore went further, implementing a moratorium, studying the issue rigorously, and then reopening development under a new "green lane" framework that required applicants to demonstrate specific power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratios, water usage benchmarks, and plans to utilize waste heat for district heating or industrial processes.

Ireland has taken a different path entirely — watching data centers proliferate around Dublin until they now represent roughly 20% of national electricity consumption, creating genuine grid stability concerns that regulators are still scrambling to address.

The lesson across all these cases is the same: bans without frameworks produce gridlock, while frameworks without teeth produce unchecked growth. The cities that have navigated this best used the threat of restriction as negotiating leverage, not as an endpoint.

What Baltimore Should Actually Do

An outright ban is unlikely to survive legal and political challenge intact, and even if it did, it would set a precedent that could deter other forms of industrial and tech investment that Baltimore legitimately needs.

What the city actually has, right now, is leverage. Developers want Mid-Atlantic locations. Baltimore has land, fiber connectivity, and proximity to major demand centers in D.C. and Philadelphia. That's a negotiating position, not a crisis.

The smarter play is a rigorous conditional permitting framework: minimum renewable energy additionality requirements, water usage efficiency standards, community benefit agreements that fund local workforce training and infrastructure improvements, and real utility coordination to ensure grid costs don't fall on residential ratepayers.

Cohen's instinct — that Baltimore shouldn't accept every form of development on any terms — is correct. The mechanism of an outright ban may not be. Cities that figure out how to capture the value of data center development while managing its costs will be better positioned than those that simply say no.

Baltimore has a chance to write a smarter urban development policy than most cities managed before it. Whether it takes that chance or turns a legitimate grievance into a missed opportunity is still an open question.

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