Data Centers in Montgomery County: Now Is the Time to Speak Up

Data centers located near homes can create significant impacts if not carefully planned and regulated.

What is happening at the County Council?

The Council is deciding how to deploy data centers in the county. There are two proposals on the table:

1) Zoning Text Amendment (ZTA) 26-01, which would amend the zoning code to allow data centers in industrial zones. While it is a good start, it is missing many needed protections for residents. ZTA 26-01 advanced out of committee and is under consideration by the full council.

2) Bill 4-26 would form a study group to spend one year formulating policy recommendations, which would likely result in recommendations for a future ZTA. (While it did not advance out of committee in early 2026, this could change with future support).

Click START WRITING to email the Council and make your voice heard!

What are the downsides of data centers?

Data centers use prodigious amounts of energy and water and can decrease property values. They create noise, electromagnetic radiation, and low frequency hum (both audible and sub-audible) that has disrupted many communities. For more information on these concerns, see the fact sheet prepared by the Sierra Club of Delaware and a set of recommendations proposed by the County Executive to mitigate common concerns. The County executive recently held a public listening session on data center policy. In general, data centers are highly automated and create very few ongoing jobs to operate them. The equipment inside of these data centers is manufactured elsewhere around the world and the users served by these facilities would largely be outside of Montgomery County. As a result, local communities bear the environmental footprint of a data center, while enjoying few of its benefits.


What is our position?

We thank the County Executive and the Council for having already identified a number of major concerns. However we believe some topics are missing from their consideration. Given the disruption that a data center can cause to residential communities, we believe the County should pause any data center applications or deployment until it formulates and implements comprehensive data center policies. We realize data centers are different from our usual topic of cell tower deployment; many of our members feel that the topic is sufficiently adjacent (since it relates to responsible technology infrastructure in the County) that we should bring it to your attention.

We believe the following are missing from current proposals:

  • Data centers should be limited to heavy industrial zones
  • Data centers should be located at least 3 miles from residential areas
  • Data centers should not be connected to the public power grid and instead either generate their own electricity or have their own dedicated transmission lines (“bring your own generation,” or BYOG) that are buried underground
  • Data centers and their electric infrastructure should be constructed so as not to create elevated electromagnetic fields on other properties

For our full position statement, see our testimony submitted to the Council on February 25, 2026.


What is a data center?

A large warehouse style building full of computer servers. These servers power the Internet products that we use everyday, such as artificial intelligence, websites, streaming video, videoconferencing, cloud storage, social media, and more.

More resources

The Council held a public hearing on these two pieces of legislation on February 24. Here are related links:

If you’re interested in data centers, click here START WRITING to use our 1-minute tool to make your voice heard with the Council.

Want to do more?

  1. Call your councilmembers and urge them to pause deployment until our amendments are incorporated
  2. Share this page with your friends and neighbors


Click here to return to the top and then click START WRITING to email the Council