Security Land and Development LLC Data Center, Woodlawn, Maryland

The data center Security Land and Development Co. has proposed at 1500 Woodlawn Drive in Woodlawn, Baltimore County, Maryland, would go on the site that housed the Social Security Administration's headquarters and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services until 2023. The complex once brought over 10,000 employees to Woodlawn each workday.

A dedicated Social Security data center ran on the site from 1980 to 2010, drawing five megawatts, 1.2 of them from solar, before it was turned into office space. The proposal now is a 42 acre, 150 megawatt data center, thirty times the power the old government data center used.

Security Land and Development Co. is the property's long-time owner. Deed records from 2003 name the 1500 Woodlawn Limited Partnership, Harry W Rogers III, William A Rodgers, W Dale Hess and Regency Affiliates Inc, and the limited partnership's registration expired in 2023.

Information about the company online is extremely limited, and Nature Forward suggests it may be seeking permits in order to sell the land ready to build, a process known as land entitlement, rather than build itself. The plan includes giving five acres to BGE for an electrical substation.

Construction is estimated at about 1,000 temporary jobs, and the finished data center would need fewer than 100 permanent staff. Nature Forward counts Woodlawn as an overburdened and underserved community: it is between 77 and 79 percent non-white, with a median household income of $82,466 against $91,768 for the county, and almost a fifth of residents have limited English.

It already carries higher than average exposure to fine particulate matter, ozone and road traffic. At a neighborhood meeting on December 2, 2025, hosted by state senator Charles Sydnor III, residents asked about water use, house prices and utility bills, and got no clear answers.

On Monday, February 2, 2026 the Baltimore County Council voted unanimously for a freeze on data center permits introduced by councilman Pat Young, whose westside district includes the Woodlawn site, and co-sponsored by his six colleagues. It blocked permits until the Planning Board studied data centers' environmental and economic impacts, expiring 90 days after the council received the study and no later than January 1, 2027.

"A year and a half ago, when someone said data center, what we thought in our minds did not include what we found out now: the impact on infrastructure, the impact on water, the impact on power," Young said. "It makes sense for a moratorium, in my opinion."

No permit had been filed for the Woodlawn site before the vote. The developer's lawyer, Christopher Mudd, had told the council the week before that his client was nearing an agreement with a data center operator to back the project, and joined others in asking for a shorter moratorium.

The pause has since been extended. In September 2026 the council unanimously passed a bill extending the county's data center moratorium through the end of 2027, after the Planning Board approved a study recommending that data centers be kept off agricultural land and at least 750 feet from homes, and that proposals in communities the state classifies as overburdened or underserved get case-by-case review by an administrative law judge.

At least six new council members will take office after the November 3 election, and council member David Marks said the county wants to see what the Maryland General Assembly does first.