Activist stopped $5B data center — and her proposed idea for vacant lot has critics jumping mad

With the help of revolutionary communists, a Maryland activist appears to have successfully killed a major data center development in her area.

When asked what she would instead like to see built in the 87-acre wasteland, Taylor Frazier McCollum proposed a bouncy park.

How it started

Landover Mall was once a 1.3 million-square-foot structure in Landover, Maryland, southeast of Washington, D.C. It was long home to three department stores, numerous high-end retailers, and various amenities.

'Let's all get ready for our new trampoline park economy.'

To the chagrin of some locals, the mall forever closed its doors in May 2002 and was demolished a few years later.

Despite efforts by owner Lerner Enterprises to develop the property — there was talk about potentially using the property for a new FBI headquarters — the fenced-in and overgrown site of the former mall has sat vacant for nearly 25 years.

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Robert A. Reeder/the Washington Post/Getty Images

Lerner Enterprises revealed in 2024, however, that ground was set to break in 2026 or 2027 on a new data center campus called Brightseat Tech Park. The data center campus would represent around $5 billion in capital investment and accommodate up to 820 megawatts of power consumption

Lerner told the Washington Business Journal at the time that Brightseat Tech Park, which had secured the approval of county planners, was projected to generate $53.5 million in annual local tax revenue and $88.6 million in state tax revenue once established.

How it's going

It turns out that Prince George's County won't be getting its state-of-the-art money-making campus after Taylor Frazier McCollum and the revolutionary Marxist-Leninist Party for Socialism and Liberation campaigned heavily against it.

McCollum started a petition in June 2025, "urging Lerner Enterprises and Prince George's County to halt the construction plans and open a platform for meaningful engagement with Landover residents."

Her petition, which received over 25,600 signatures and prompted protests, suggested that the data-center complex would "not only disrupt the visual landscape of our neighborhood but also bring along potential environmental and socio-economic impacts that the residents were never consulted about."

"I was like, 'Oh hell no,'" McCollum told NPR. "Why would you want to bring water-polluting, diesel-generating data centers right down the street from where people live, work, play? It just didn't make sense to me."

The Party for Socialism and Liberation, a communist group that has defended Hamas terrorism, amplified McCollum's protest and framed the manufactured controversy in racial terms. The group also claimed that "under capitalism, AI and data centers become weapons of exploitation and greed."

Prince George’s County Executive Aisha Braveboy, a Democrat who assumed office the same month that McCollum's petition went live, temporarily paused development on the data center via executive order in September 2025.

In July 2026, the Prince George's County Council approved a two-year moratorium on new hyperscale data centers in the county. While this resolution didn't apply to Brightseat Tech Park, which already cleared the approval stages paused by the moratorium, the council passed legislation last month requiring Brightseat to undergo review again by the county council, effectively killing the project, according to Council Member Shayla Adams-Stafford, WTOP reported.

McCollum told Fox News, "We did just lose Six Flags so I think that this would be a great site to bring some like Urban Air park or American Dream-type facility — you know, just something that's bigger and broader and can serve all the residents of Prince George's County and not just benefit the ones that can get a job at a data center."

Urban Air Adventure Park is a chain of trampoline and indoor-amusement parks. According to the AI advisory platform Franzy, the average gross revenue per location is $3.68 million.

American Dream is a shopping mall and entertainment complex in New Jersey.

New York City Councilwoman Vickie Paladino (R) was among the many critics who mocked McCollum's proposed alternatives.

"Let's all get ready for our new trampoline park economy, courtesy of the dumbest people in the history of western civilization," wrote Paladino.

Jeremy Horpedahl, an associate professor of economics at the University of Central Arkansas, also noted that "there's already an Urban Air Trampoline Park just one exit away on the Beltway."

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