Community briefing

The data center fight in Calvert County, Maryland

As of September 27, 2026, Calvert County, Maryland has a data center moratorium in force (action taken Aug 18, 2026; documented end date 2027-02-28).

Status is derived, not stored — a pause with a documented end date flips to Expired on its own — and the source is right next to the claim.

Status today

Enactedexpires 2027-02-28status
Aug 18, 2026action taken
Locallevel

Six-month pause on data center site plan applications, unanimous; effective Aug 28, 2026. No site plan applications are accepted during the pause while the commissioners consider whether to change the zoning ordinance's treatment of data centers as a permitted use. Follows Amazon's withdrawal from a build at the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant

SourceOfficial
read 2026-08-30

An expiry date is the earliest a pause could have ended — extensions are common, so confirm with the clerk before citing it.

The project on the table

AWS Calvert Technology Center — Withdrawn

Operator: Amazon (AWS) · Owner: Constellation Energy Group (parcels) · Tenant: Amazon (AWS) · Filing LLC: Amazon Data Services Inc.

Eight data center buildings (266,000-332,000 sq ft each) proposed at 1650 Calvert Cliffs Parkway on Constellation-owned parcels near the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant. AWS formally withdrew the concept site plan on Aug 4, 2026 - after first-round county review comments and before any resubmission. Timeline documented on the county's own project page.

Next: Withdrawn — confirm it is dead in the record and watch for the same site resurfacing under a new name or LLC.

Latest in the record

  • 2026-08-04 — AWS formally withdrew the Calvert Technology Center concept site plan application, per the county's project page, without resubmitting a revised plan. · source
  • 2026-07-13 — County agencies completed first-round review of the concept site plan and returned comments to AWS. · source
  • 2026-05-04 — Amazon Data Services Inc. submitted initial site plan documents; the application was formally accepted for processing May 27, 2026. · source

Full dated timeline on the project tracker.

Source. Read 2026-08-07.

Recent news

11 stories tracked since 2026-08-04 across 8 outlets. 11× Local officials are moving to pause or block the project. Most recent: “Data center moratorium to be extended in Calvert” (SoMdNews.com, 2026-09-23).

Automated news aggregation, not human-verified — follow each link to the original outlet. Part of the story tracker, 11 headlines archived.

What to do next

Build a full action pack →

Nearby in Maryland

All 21 tracked actions in Maryland are on the state page.

As of August 2026 · changes weekly — re-check before citing

Illustrative rather than exhaustive — dozens of localities churn weekly, and this tracks the ones we have read a source for. **Each row carries its own provenance.** Rows showing a verification date link to the ordinance, the enacting body's own page, or a datable report of the vote, and were read on that date. Rows marked *unverified* came from bulk compilation and have not been checked against a primary source — the locality, the year, and the status may all be off. Verify one of those with the town clerk before citing it as precedent. **Expiry is derived, not asserted.** A row with a documented end date flips to *Expired* on its own once that date passes. A time-limited moratorium whose start date was never documented keeps showing as enacted — that is a known gap, not a claim that it is still in force. Moratoriums are also routinely extended, so an expiry date is the earliest it could have ended, not proof that it did.

Part of the U.S. data center moratorium tracker — open data, CC BY 4.0.

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