Data centers are not a land-use controversy. They are a national security imperative, an economic lifeline, and the foundational infrastructure of the artificial intelligence age. Maryland and America must choose to build, or concede the future to those who will.

The question being debated in county council chambers, state legislative hearings, and community association meetings across Maryland right now. It sounds, on its surface, like a routine zoning dispute. Residents opposed to noise. Local officials worried about electricity. Environmental advocates raising concerns about water. The language is familiar. The framing is local. But the stakes could not be more consequential.

The question is not whether to permit a particular data center in a particular county. The real question is whether the United States of America intends to remain the world’s dominant technological power in the age of artificial intelligence. And whether Maryland intends to participate in that future or watch it pass by from a distance.

Those are not rhetorical flourishes. They are the hard reality of where we stand in 2026. The global competition for AI supremacy is well underway. The infrastructure race is not on the horizon. It has already begun. And the communities, states, and nations that build the foundational architecture of the Information Age will set the terms of the century that follows.

Data centers are that foundational architecture. Every serious analyst, every defense planner, every technology entrepreneur, every national security professional who has studied this question arrives at the same conclusion. You cannot have artificial intelligence without data centers. You cannot have cloud computing without data centers. You cannot have cybersecurity, advanced manufacturing, battlefield command systems, financial networks, or modern medicine without data centers. They are not a luxury. They are not a nuisance to be zoned away. They are the factories, the railroads, and the power plants of the digital economy.

“Virtually none of the opponents and critics of data centers realize they are proposing to concede the future to the Chinese Communists.” — Newt Gingrich, Former Speaker of the House

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich put it plainly in a social media post that should have shaken every elected official in America out of their complacency. His words capture with brutal clarity what is actually at stake in these debates. That is not hyperbole. It is a geopolitical assessment grounded in observable facts about where China is investing, how fast it is moving, and what happens to nations that fall behind in the technologies that define their era.

I have spent years working in federal information technology, navigating the complex machinery of government digital infrastructure, watching agencies wrestle with the demands of modernization while budgets strain and legacy systems creak. I have seen firsthand what it looks like when a nation’s information architecture begins to age faster than it can be renewed. The lesson I have taken from that experience is simple: the infrastructure always matters more than it appears to, until the moment it fails and suddenly it is the only thing that matters.

We are at one of those inflection points now. The decisions being made in zoning boards and state legislatures about data centers will echo for decades. Communities that get this right will attract investment, grow their tax base, and participate in the defining industries of the 21st century. Communities that get it wrong will spend years watching that opportunity pass. Maryland is, at this moment, at risk of getting it wrong. And we cannot afford to.

The AI Race Is Already Underway

It is worth pausing to understand how serious the artificial intelligence competition has become. This is not a theoretical future threat. The race is live. The investments are being made. The infrastructure is being built. The question is whether it is being built here.

China has launched a national strategy to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence by 2030. The Chinese government is not debating whether data centers serve the national interest. It is building them at a pace and scale that has alarmed serious observers across the political spectrum. According to reporting from the International Energy Agency, global electricity demand from data centers is projected to more than double by 2030, driven largely by AI workloads.[1] The nations that can generate that power and build that infrastructure will host the AI revolution. The nations that cannot, or choose not to, will be left behind.

In an April 2026 column, Gingrich warned explicitly that America is planning hundreds of new data centers and argued that leadership in AI will depend not only on software and semiconductors but also on enormous amounts of electricity.[2] His argument is strategic, not commercial. He is not making the case for any particular company or any specific facility. He is making the case that America’s technological supremacy in the decades ahead will be determined in part by the infrastructure decisions being made right now.

Gingrich has framed this explicitly as the Space Race of the 21st century. That comparison is apt. In 1961, President Kennedy committed America to reaching the Moon not because it was commercially profitable in the short term, but because losing the space race to the Soviet Union would have had profound strategic consequences. The investment in NASA, in aerospace engineering, in computing, and in advanced manufacturing that followed that commitment paid dividends for generations.

The AI race has the same character. The nation that builds the most advanced computing infrastructure will likely enjoy significant advantages in defense, intelligence, economic growth, and scientific research for decades to come. Countries that win the AI race will not merely be wealthier. They will be stronger, more capable of protecting their citizens, and better positioned to shape the international order. And the infrastructure of the AI race lives in data centers.

What Data Centers Actually Are

Critics of data centers frequently speak about them as if they were simply unusually large warehouses full of humming machines. That description is accurate at the level of physical description and almost completely misleading at the level of strategic significance.

A modern data center is the physical instantiation of computing power. It is where cloud services run. It is where AI models are trained. It is where financial transactions are processed. It is where military logistics systems operate. It is where intelligence agencies analyze the vast streams of signals and imagery that inform national security decisions. It is where hospitals store patient records, where electric grids manage distribution in real time, where 911 systems route emergency calls.

When you send a message, check your bank account, access a government service, or use any AI-powered application, a data center is processing that interaction. The cloud is not an abstraction. It has a physical address. It requires real estate, real power, real cooling, and real security. According to Synergy Research Group, the major cloud providers spend well over $100 billion annually on data center infrastructure and capacity,[3] and that figure is accelerating as AI demand grows.

For national security purposes, the location of that infrastructure matters enormously. Data that flows through domestically located, domestically controlled data centers is subject to American law, American courts, and American security standards. Data that flows through foreign-controlled infrastructure is not. The United States should not be cavalier about allowing critical digital infrastructure to migrate offshore or to become dependent on computing capacity that adversaries could theoretically disrupt.

Private data centers are the civilian counterpart to that national security infrastructure. They are not unrelated to the defense enterprise. They are part of the same ecosystem. The defense industrial base does not operate in isolation from the commercial technology sector. Rejecting data centers in Maryland is not a neutral act with only local consequences. It is a decision that weakens the overall fabric of American digital infrastructure.

The Economic Case Is Overwhelming

Set the national security argument aside for a moment. Even on purely economic grounds, the case for welcoming responsible data center development is almost impossible to rebut.

Consider what a single large data center campus represents. We are talking about investments ranging from hundreds of millions to several billion dollars in private capital. No taxpayer money. No government subsidy. Private companies, betting their own resources on a specific location, committing to that community for decades. According to the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, Loudoun County, Virginia, now hosts the world’s largest concentration of data centers, with over 25 million square feet of data center space and the sector contributing more than a third of the county’s total tax revenue.[4]

A third of total county tax revenue. From a single industry sector. Without adding students to the school system, without generating large volumes of commuter traffic, without requiring expanded public safety resources. That is the economic profile of data center development that opponents prefer to ignore.

“A dollar of revenue from a data center is not offset by the same level of public expenditure that a dollar of revenue from residential development requires.”

The employment picture is also more robust than critics acknowledge. Construction of a large data center supports thousands of jobs over multiple years. Electricians. Plumbers. HVAC specialists. Steel workers. Concrete contractors. Structural engineers. Civil engineers. Architects. Project managers. These are skilled tradespeople earning above-median wages, often working on projects that span years. A 2023 analysis by the Economic Policy Institute found that large data center projects generate significant indirect and induced employment effects in surrounding communities.[5] The argument that data centers do not create jobs is not just overstated. It is demonstrably false.

Then there are the permanent operational jobs: network engineers, systems administrators, cybersecurity professionals, facility managers, electrical technicians. These positions routinely pay well above local median wages. They are the kind of high-skill, high-compensation careers that every workforce development program in Maryland is trying to cultivate.

Northern Virginia did not become the world’s largest data center market by accident. It became that market because early decisions to welcome this infrastructure created an ecosystem that attracted more infrastructure, which attracted more technology companies, which attracted more talent, which attracted more investment. That self-reinforcing cycle is exactly what Maryland should be trying to replicate, not foreclose.

Separating Fact From Fear on Noise and Water

The most common objections raised in community forums about data centers center on two concerns: noise and water consumption. Both deserve honest examination, because the honest examination almost always concludes that the concerns, while understandable, do not justify the level of opposition they are generating.

On noise, the key is context and comparison. A modern data center at its property line typically produces sound levels in the range of 45 to 60 decibels. That is comparable to a quiet conversation or the ambient noise level of a residential neighborhood on a calm day. Compare that to the sound levels that most Maryland residents already live with. Interstate highway traffic runs at 75 to 90 decibels. A lawn mower operates at 85 to 95 decibels. A leaf blower reaches 90 to 100 decibels.

Many of the same community meetings where residents express outrage about the prospect of a data center operating at 50 decibels are taking place in neighborhoods adjacent to six-lane highways producing 80 decibels of continuous traffic noise. The inconsistency is striking. The noise that is familiar is tolerated. The noise that is unfamiliar is characterized as an existential threat to quality of life.

On water, the picture is more nuanced but ultimately similar. Not all data centers use the same cooling systems. Many modern facilities employ air-cooled systems, closed-loop cooling systems, or hybrid cooling technologies that dramatically reduce water consumption compared with older industrial operations.[6] The industry has strong economic incentives to reduce water use, because water conservation also reduces operating costs.

A fair standard would evaluate data centers by the same criteria applied to comparable developments. What is the water consumption per dollar of economic value generated? What is the noise impact relative to existing ambient conditions? On every one of those measures, responsible data center development tends to compare favorably with the alternatives.

Energy: The Argument Critics Have Backward

The energy question is where the critique of data centers most frequently goes astray, because critics present the electricity consumption of these facilities as self-evidently a problem rather than examining what that demand actually does to the energy landscape.

Data centers do consume significant amounts of electricity. That is true. Large facilities can require hundreds of megawatts of power. As AI workloads intensify, those requirements are growing. What critics consistently understate is the relationship between large, predictable electricity demand and infrastructure investment. A commitment from a large data center operator to consume hundreds of megawatts of power for decades provides exactly the kind of long-term, predictable demand that justifies the capital expenditure required to upgrade transmission lines, build new substations, and modernize grid infrastructure.[7]

The grid improvements driven by data center demand do not benefit only the data centers. They benefit every ratepayer on the same transmission system. Hospitals get more reliable power. Schools get more reliable power. Small businesses get more reliable power. The investment in grid modernization that large data users catalyze flows to everyone connected to that grid.

There is also the nuclear dimension. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have all signed agreements to power data centers with nuclear energy. Small modular reactors represent a genuinely promising technology: modular construction that reduces upfront capital costs, inherent passive safety features, and the ability to scale capacity incrementally. The Department of Energy has identified SMR development as a national priority,[8] and the demand from data centers is one of the economic signals that makes private investment in this technology attractive.

The irony of the energy critique is that the communities most likely to benefit from grid modernization and new clean generation are often the same communities where opposition to data centers is strongest. The causal logic runs exactly backward from what critics assume.

The Maryland Competition Is Already Underway

The competition Maryland is engaged in is not abstract. It is immediate and it has a scorecard. Virginia is winning.

Northern Virginia has more data center capacity than any other market in the world. The Commonwealth has built an entire economic ecosystem around digital infrastructure. Pennsylvania is competing aggressively for data center investment, marketing its lower land costs, available power, and favorable regulatory environment. Ohio, North Carolina, and Texas are all actively pursuing this sector.[9] These states understand that data center investment is a form of economic development that compounds over time.

Maryland has natural advantages it is in danger of squandering. The state has significant fiber infrastructure. It sits in one of the most fiber-rich corridors in the nation, with connections to major submarine cables and federal network infrastructure. It has a highly educated workforce with deep roots in the cybersecurity and information technology industries, partly as a result of its proximity to NSA, DISA, and other federal agencies with substantial technology footprints.

“Maryland has natural advantages it is in danger of squandering. If Maryland imposes moratoriums or hostile regulatory environments, the investment does not disappear. It moves to Virginia.”

None of that matters if Maryland makes itself inhospitable to the investment that would put those advantages to work. The fiber that runs through Maryland does not require Maryland data centers. Signals route around obstacles. Investment routes around obstacles. If Maryland imposes moratoriums, establishes hostile regulatory environments, or allows local opposition to indefinitely delay projects, the investment does not disappear. It moves to Virginia, or Pennsylvania, or somewhere else that wants it.

The choice Maryland faces is not between having data centers and not having data centers. The world will have data centers. AI will be developed. Cloud services will expand. The choice is whether Maryland participates in that future as a builder and a beneficiary or watches from the outside as a consumer of infrastructure built and taxed somewhere else.

A Conservative Case for Building

I want to address something that has been lurking beneath the surface of this debate in Maryland and deserves to be said directly: there is a strain of opposition to data centers in conservative communities that styles itself as pro-community, pro-taxpayer, and pro-environment. Some of it is well-meaning. Some of it is being organized by interests that use conservative-sounding language while pursuing agendas that have nothing to do with conservative principles.

The Republican tradition in America is the tradition of Lincoln and the transcontinental railroad. It is the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt and the infrastructure investment that built the American West. It is the tradition of Eisenhower and the Interstate Highway System. It is the tradition of Reagan and the belief that economic growth creates opportunity, that private investment serves the public good, and that America succeeds when it leads.

Ronald Reagan understood something that some of today’s self-described conservatives seem to have forgotten: the enemy of economic growth is not development. The enemy of economic growth is stagnation. Reagan did not make his career opposing construction projects. He made his career opposing government overreach, excessive regulation, and the bureaucratic obstacles that prevent private investment from creating jobs, expanding opportunity, and growing the economy.

Opposition to data centers, when it comes from the right, often represents exactly the kind of reflexive NIMBYism that Reagan would have recognized as a form of regulatory capture. That is not conservatism. Conservatism believes in private enterprise. It believes in economic growth as the foundation of prosperity. It believes in national strength, which increasingly depends on technological leadership. Every one of those conservative principles points toward welcoming responsible data center development, not opposing it.

Gingrich understands this. His framing of the data center debate as a question of national strategic competition with China is not partisan rhetoric. It is an accurate description of the stakes. Republicans who style themselves as foreign policy hawks and national security conservatives while opposing data center development in their communities have not thought through the logical consistency of their position.

What Responsible Policy Actually Looks Like

None of this is an argument for ignoring community concerns or for rubber-stamping every data center proposal regardless of its specifics. Responsible governance requires thoughtful oversight. It requires enforceable noise standards. It requires careful attention to water resources. It requires adequate infrastructure planning. It requires meaningful engagement with affected communities.

What it does not require is blanket opposition, reflexive moratoriums, or the treatment of data centers as categorically different from other industrial and commercial development in ways that the facts do not support.

Good policy in this area would establish clear standards: specific noise limits at property lines, measured and enforced. Clear water use requirements with mandatory efficiency standards and reporting. Transparent power demand assessments integrated with utility planning processes. Reasonable community engagement timelines that provide genuine input without creating indefinite delay as a de facto veto.

States and localities that develop clear, consistent, and rational regulatory frameworks for data center development will attract more investment than those that operate through uncertainty and political opposition. Investment flows toward predictability. Maryland’s General Assembly and local governments have an opportunity to establish Maryland as a model for responsible digital infrastructure governance.[10]

The Lesson of History

Americans have been here before. Not with data centers specifically, but with the infrastructure revolutions that reshaped the nation and defined the eras in which they occurred.

When the railroads were being built in the 19th century, there were communities that opposed them. Concerns about noise, about land disruption, about the influx of workers, about change. Some of those concerns were legitimate. Some were not. But history has been unambiguous in its judgment of the communities and regions that embraced rail connections versus those that did not. The ones that welcomed the railroad became economic centers. The ones that did not were often bypassed entirely.

The same pattern recurred with electrification. With the interstate highways. With telecommunications infrastructure. With the internet backbone. Every time transformative infrastructure came along, there were voices urging caution, voices warning of disruption, voices speaking for established interests that feared change. And every time, the communities that chose to build outperformed those that chose to wait.

Tony Snow, the great broadcaster and press secretary who understood both the power of storytelling and the importance of clear principle, used to say that the facts deserve to be heard and the argument deserves to be made straight. The straight argument here is simple: data centers are to the Information Age what railroads were to the Industrial Age. The communities that build them will prosper. The ones that block them will wonder, a generation hence, what happened to the future they thought was coming.

America won the Space Race because we chose to compete. We committed resources. We built infrastructure. We accepted the disruption that comes with ambitious construction projects in service of a larger strategic goal. We understood that national leadership is not handed to you. It is built, literally and figuratively, through investment, through risk-taking, through the willingness to embrace what is new rather than cling to what is comfortable.

The Choice Before Maryland

Let me be direct about what I believe is at stake in Maryland right now.

Maryland has the assets to compete for the data center industry. It has the location, the fiber, the talent, and the institutional relationships. What it lacks, at the moment, is the political will to make the straightforward case that welcoming responsible data center development is good for Maryland taxpayers, good for Maryland workers, and good for American national security.

The opponents of this development are organized. They are vocal. They have learned to speak the language of environmental concern and community protection, and they deploy it effectively in public meetings and legislative testimony. But their position, stripped of its rhetorical packaging, amounts to this: Maryland should decline billions of dollars in private investment, thousands of construction jobs, sustained high-paying permanent employment, and substantial new tax revenue for local governments and school systems, because some residents find the facilities aesthetically displeasing and worry about noise levels that are lower than the highway that runs past their subdivision.

That is not a serious policy position. It is a preference for the status quo dressed up as civic virtue. And in a world where China is building the infrastructure of the AI age as fast as its engineers can pour concrete, it is a preference we cannot afford.

The AI race is the Space Race of our era. Data centers are the launch pads. The question is whether America, and whether Maryland, intends to compete. History will record the answer. Let us make sure it is the right one.

ENDNOTES

[1]  International Energy Agency, Electricity 2024: Analysis and Forecast to 2026. https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-2024

[2]  Newt Gingrich, ‘The Gingrich Letter: Data Centers and the AI Race,’ June 2026. https://www.gingrich360.net/p/ai-national-security-and-the-global

[3]  Synergy Research Group, Cloud Infrastructure Spending Report, 2026. https://www.srgresearch.com/articles/genai-helps-drive-quarterly-cloud-revenues-to-119-billion-as-growth-rate-jumped-yet-again-in-q4

[4]  Virginia Economic Development Partnership, Northern Virginia Data Center Report, 2025. https://www.vedp.org/industry/data-centers

[5]  Economic Policy Institute, Data Center Economic Impact Analysis, 2023. https://www.epi.org

[6]  Uptime Institute, Global Data Center Survey: Water and Cooling, 2024. https://uptimeinstitute.com/resources/research-and-reports

[7]  U.S. Department of Energy, Data Centers and the Grid: Reliability and Investment, 2024. https://www.energy.gov/eere/buildings/data-centers-and-servers

[8]  U.S. Department of Energy, Advanced Small Modular Reactors, 2024. https://www.energy.gov/ne/advanced-small-modular-reactors-smrs

[9]  Data Center Frontier, State-by-State Data Center Investment Rankings, 2025. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-u-s-states-with-the-most-data-centers-in-2025/

[10]  Maryland Department of Commerce, Technology and Data Infrastructure Policy Framework, 2025. https://doit.maryland.gov/About-DoIT/Documents/Maryland-Information-Technology-Master-Plan-2025.pdf

Dwight Patel is a Senior Tech Policy Analyst, Senior UI/UX and Web Modernization Leader, and a contributor to Direct Line News.