According to Nature Forward,  the longest-serving environmental organization in the greater Washington, D.C. region, the mid-Atlantic region is home to more than 200 data centers — the highest concentration in the world — and that number is expected to at least triple within the next two decades. 

Each facility consumes as much power as 50,000 homes and uses millions of gallons of water per day. Previously shuttered coal plants are reopening to meet the industry’s energy demands, new gas plants are being built, and during outages more than 6000 diesel generators keep the lights on. Ratepayers are being asked to subsidize the grid infrastructure this expansion requires. Yet the industry operates with remarkably little transparency, regulation, or public scrutiny.

Nature Forward launched the Marylanders for Data Center Reform in May 2025 to change that. The Coalition’s goal is to require the industry to reduce its energy footprint, transition to renewable resources, and limit the construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure. The first phase of that work, to which the CO2 Foundation made a modest contribution, is public awareness.

The campaign combines a digital and print communications effort with a storytelling initiative that puts human faces on the issue: residents whose wells have been depleted, communities contending with higher energy bills, and local leaders dealing with heat waves and flooding worsened by rising emissions. Virtual and in-person workshops are planned to reach activists, policymakers, and researchers in Maryland and beyond. All materials will be designed as a replicable, scalable toolkit for organizations across the country confronting the same challenge.

The project aims to reach at least 70,000 people, with priority attention to Maryland General Assembly members and leaders in the Governor’s administration. A dedicated Coalition website will serve as a central hub; the communications infrastructure built through this grant is intended to support the Coalition’s longer-term regulatory and legislative goals.

CO2 Foundation sees this project as addressing a largely overlooked but rapidly growing source of emissions and extreme weather risk. As data center development accelerates across the mid-Atlantic and beyond, the window for building public understanding and policy momentum at the state level is both timely and consequential. Nature Forward’s work to localize and humanize this issue is an important step toward the legislation, regulation, and oversight needed to put the industry on a sustainable path.