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For almost six months, I followed the money behind the largest data center campus in Maryland — going up right now on the old Eastalco site in Adamstown. I expected a local development story. What I found was a Texas private-equity firm and a consortium anchored by the sovereign wealth funds of Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, and Singapore, buying critical American infrastructure and building it on Frederick County farmland. I found a county that doubled its data-center zone over the objection of its own planners — after the developers who stood to profit had funded the majority that voted yes. I found 21,000 neighbors who gathered signatures in the dead of winter to put it to a vote, and a consortium of global capital that went to court and got that vote thrown out on a technicality last week. And I found the bill the rest of us pay: power bills projected up as much as $70 a month, five million gallons of water a day in the middle of a drought, and 99 diesel generators permitted within a thousand feet of Carroll Manor Elementary. It's all here, sourced line by line. The referendum is dead. The fight is not. Please read it, and share it with someone in MD-06 before Tuesday.

For almost six months, I followed the money behind the largest data center campus in Maryland — going up right now on the old Eastalco site in Adamstown. I expected a local development story. What I found was a Texas private-equity firm and a consortium anchored by the sovereign wealth funds of Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, and Singapore, buying critical American infrastructure and building it on Frederick County farmland. I found a county that doubled its data-center zone over the objection of its own planners — after the developers who stood to profit had funded the majority that voted yes. I found 21,000 neighbors who gathered signatures in the dead of winter to put it to a vote, and a consortium of global capital that went to court and got that vote thrown out on a technicality last week. And I found the bill the rest of us pay: power bills projected up as much as $70 a month, five million gallons of water a day in the middle of a drought, and 99 diesel generators permitted within a thousand feet of Carroll Manor Elementary. It's all here, sourced line by line. The referendum is dead. The fight is not. Please read it, and share it with someone in MD-06 before Tuesday.