FREDERICK, Md. — A big hurdle standing in the way of a controversial data center development in southern Frederick County was swept away Thursday.
Maryland Governor Wes Moore signed a bill exempting data centers from existing regulations on the fleet of massive diesel generators needed for backup power.
Moore said he aims to “supercharge” the data center industry’s expansion into Maryland.
The scale of what’s coming is stunning to skeptics and critics in Frederick County in light of the environmental controversies now plaguing data centers in Northern Virginia.
Quantum Loophole has begun development of a 2100 former Aluminum smelting site near Adamstown in Frederick County.
Rich Paul-Hus, co-founder of Quantum Loophole said the entry of the industry to Maryland would be transformational to the state and county by injecting up to $100 billion in new economic activity, and the tax revenue that comes with it, in the coming years.
Paul-Hus said the Quantum Loophole development could host all the existing data center capacity currently online in Northern Virginia.
He explained that what will distinguish Quantum Loophole from Northern Virginia’s data center industry, is master planning on what he calls an "ECO-scale".
“We're planting a million trees on that site over the next five to seven years as part of that 600-acre nature reserve," Paul-Hus said.
"You won't know that that massive data center industrial development has happened. You're on the other side of the trees, it will simply look like a forest off to your left. And it'll act as a carbon sink."
The Quantum Loophole property near Adamstown is redeveloping the former Alcoa aluminum smelting site in Southern Frederick which has suffered previous environmental contamination.
At 2100 acres, the property is larger than the Newark International Airport. Buildings and roads will cover an area three times the size of the National Mall or more. Six hundred acres will be preserved as a natural buffer.
Paul-Hus said his there is currently 1 trillion dollars of investment deployed around the world for data center development, and a significant portion of that money will be spent in the DC region in the next five years.
"Northern Virginia is the global epicenter for the data center industry, or basically the global epicenter of the internet. Maryland just so happens to be proximate to that. 20 miles away from the center of the internet is our site," Paul-Hus said.
"We're almost the northern bookend end of this massive regional market that's going to evolve from south of Manassas now all the way up into Maryland."
Key to the project is a 41-mile fiber-optic tunnel already under construction by Quantum Loophole under the Potomac and Monocacy rivers that will link the Frederick County site to Northern Virginia data complexes which will meet the data transmission speeds required for integration.
In April, releases of life-choking bentonite drilling mud into waterways leading to the Potomac and Monocacy resulted in environmental citations and correction notices from the Maryland Department of Environment.
Hus-Paul said the releases were unintentional and he welcomes the scrutiny.
“What happened there was a breakdown in process that we need to learn from and do better,” he said.
Quantum Loophole will also consume a gigawatt of electricity, which is roughly 30% of all the power needed to supply the 100,000 households currently in Frederick County.
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