Baltimore AI Data Center Boom Strains Grid, Sparks Cost and Outage Concerns

A data center housed in a six-story, ornate building a few blocks from Lexington Market currently occupies more than 150,000 square feet and "uses enough electricity to power a city roughly the size of Dundalk, Maryland," according to reporting on the facility; the company that runs it announced in 2024 it would triple the center’s capacity over the next few years to meet demand from the artificial intelligence industry.

That growing load has coincided with concrete reliability incidents. About 4,000 BGE customers in Howard County lost electric service for 30 minutes in August after an infrastructure issue forced Maryland generation plants offline, an outage activists cite as the kind of event that could become more common if demand from data centers keeps rising.

At the state level, Maryland’s generation fleet has shifted dramatically since 2018: the state has retired 6,000 megawatts of power production and added only 1,600 megawatts, a gap observers have framed against the scale of local data centers. One account described the 6,000 megawatts retired as "75 times the amount of the Baltimore data center," underscoring the mismatch between capacity withdrawals and new large loads.

The regional grid operator that covers Maryland says the state does not have enough infrastructure to meet rising energy needs while Maryland relies on other states for roughly 40 percent of its annual electricity. The grid managed by PJM Interconnection serves about 67 million people across 13 states, and that broader footprint factors into decisions over where costs for new demand should fall.

The consumer impact is already visible: Maryland ranked 13th in the U.S. for residential electricity prices as of October 2025, and average residential prices in the state rose about 18 percent between October 2024 and October 2025. Modeling cited by advocates suggests a much larger regional bill if allocation rules do not change: households across the PJM region could collectively pay an additional $163 billion through 2033, with an average family facing roughly $70 more per month by 2028. "Over the last two years, load growth from data centers has contributed to billions of dollars in excess capacity costs that are being paid by ratepayers across the PJM region. And it has also pushed PJM close to falling below the reliability standards," said state Sen. Katie Fry Hester, D-District 9.

Policy options are in active dispute. "PJM members rejected a dozen proposals Wednesday that would rein in the growth of data centers and protect consumers from footing the bill," according to reporting on the regional process, and PJM had been expected to decide in December whether large tech companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft should bear new costs or whether those expenses would fall to customers. "Our main proposal is to require data centers to bring their own capacity," said David Lapp with the Office of the People's Counsel. "And that means bringing their own generation, perhaps in combination with the capability to reduce their power needs at peak times, including a reliability [...]"

With a high-profile Baltimore facility planning a major expansion, a history of generation retirements, an August outage affecting thousands, and regional decisions unresolved, Baltimore faces a series of choices about whether to force data centers to internalize costs, accelerate new generation, or accept higher bills and tighter reliability. Lawmakers and regulators pressing PJM for protections say the coming policy outcomes will determine who ultimately pays.