By Data Center Infrastructure News & Events · Monday, October 19, 2026 · 5 min read

Maryland Candidates Trade Accusations Over TeraWulf Data Center Donations and Moratorium Timing

Original illustration created for Data Center Infrastructure News & Events.

Maryland Candidates Trade Accusations Over TeraWulf Data Center Donations and Moratorium Timing

The $24,000 Prager and his wife donated to the Moore-Miller campaign roughly ten months before an October 2025 meeting between Prager and the governor's office is now the center of a gubernatorial campaign fight over who controls data center siting in Maryland.

Cox makes the donation the issue

Republican challenger Dan Cox raised the donation and the Morgantown project directly at the Maryland Association of Counties summer conference, calling for a statewide moratorium on hyperscale data centers and characterizing the state's support for TeraWulf as a scandal, citybiz reported on August 17, 2026.

Moore rejected a full ban at the same conference, arguing instead for strict energy and infrastructure requirements paired with local control, according to citybiz.

Five guardrails, not a moratorium

On September 23, 2026, Moore signed Executive Order 01.01.2026.16, creating a Maryland Data Center Task Force and five development "guardrails," including ratepayer protection and a public transparency dashboard, according to the Office of the Governor of Maryland and reporting from myeasternshoremd.com the same day. WUSA9 reported the order applies to projects drawing 01.01 | 2026.16 or more of peak power. The order requires developers to put commitments in writing that they will not shift infrastructure costs onto ordinary utility customers, and it cites the Utility RELIEF Act of 2026 and the Next Generation Energy Act of 2025 as the existing statutory backbone for those protections.

"The data centers and corporations were the ones writing the rules. And today, that ends," Moore said while signing the order, according to WUSA9's September 23 report. Moore also said his administration would push to repeal the state's data center sales and use tax exemption in the next legislative session, myeasternshoremd.com reported.

Cox's campaign called the order an "election stunt" that followed the exposure of the $24,000 Prager donation, according to myeasternshoremd.com's September 23 coverage. Grassroots organizers in Frederick and Prince George's counties made a similar argument from the left, telling WUSA9 the framework lets existing controversial projects — TeraWulf's among them — proceed under what they termed "expedited" conditions.

What actually moved in Charles County

The guardrail fight sits on top of a permitting record that predates the executive order by months. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission authorized the ownership transfer of the Morgantown Generating Station from GenOn to TeraWulf subsidiary Chesapeake Data LLC on July 29, 2026, the Southern Maryland Chronicle reported August 2, 2026. FERC's order explicitly stated it does not yet permit data center construction or new generation, leaving grid-impact questions open. The Maryland Office of People's Counsel and a group the Chronicle identified as the Charles County Against Data Centers Coalition had formally intervened against the transfer over ratepayer cost and environmental concerns, according to that report.

Three months earlier, Public Citizen and the NAACP asked FERC to reject the acquisition outright, alleging TeraWulf had failed to disclose that Google holds a 14% ownership stake in the company, Utility Dive reported April 3, 2026. That figure comes from the advocacy groups' own FERC filing as relayed by Utility Dive; it has not been checked here against TeraWulf's SEC disclosures or any Google ownership filing. TeraWulf's plan, per that filing, calls for 500 MW of gas-fired generation paired with 500 MW of data center load, built in phases on a site that shuttered its last coal units in 2022.

TeraWulf's own first-quarter 2026 results, released May 8, describe the Morgantown site as already carrying 210 MW of grid-connected capacity with room to expand to 1 GW, using on-site generation and battery storage so the company remains, in its words, a net-positive energy supplier. That figure is the company's self-report and does not reconcile cleanly with the 500 MW gas/500 MW load split in the FERC intervenor filing; nothing in the record here clarifies whether the 1 GW ceiling is that same 500-plus-500 split or a separate figure. CEO Paul Prager told investors the project positions the company to capture accelerating AI compute demand.

Locally, Charles County commissioners voted unanimously in July 2026 to terminate a zoning amendment that would have facilitated data center development, choosing instead to wait for a state impact report due in September, Southern Maryland Newspapers reported September 16, 2026. At a rally that same week, residents said data centers would consume finite farmland and strain water and electricity supply; organizers from a group that outlet named the Charles County Coalition Against Data Centers are pushing for a three-to-five-year moratorium across Southern Maryland, according to the same report. Whether that organizer group and the FERC intervenor the Chronicle named a month earlier are the same body is not established in either report.

Not a ban, a paper trail

The executive order is not a moratorium: it is a set of written-commitment requirements layered on top of a federal approval that is already final at the ownership-transfer stage. FERC's July 29 order cleared the sale; it did not clear construction, and the task force Moore created in September has no statutory power to undo that transfer. What it can do, under the order's language, is force TeraWulf to document in writing that Charles County ratepayers will not absorb the cost of the pipeline capacity.

For counties watching from outside Maryland, the sequence is the part worth noting. A coal plant conversion got federal sign-off before state guardrails existed. A zoning vote at the county level came after the federal approval, not before it. And the campaign-finance disclosure that triggered political pressure on the governor surfaced only after the deal was already structurally in motion. Any county weighing a similar gas-to-data-center repowering now has a template for how late in the process local leverage actually arrives.