The overgrown grass and weeds seem to stretch into the horizon on nearly 90 acres of empty land in Landover, Md. It used to be Landover Mall, but that closed in 2002, and the site has been mostly vacant since.
In 2024, the developer that built the mall won approval from county planners for a $5 billion data center campus, and word began spreading through the largely Black community nearby.
“I was like, ‘Oh, hell no,'” said Taylor Frazier McCollum, describing the moment she learned about the project. She lived less than a mile away from it. “Why would you want to bring water-polluting, diesel-generating data centers right down the street from where people live, work, play? It just didn’t make sense to me.”…