Welcome & Introductions
Becky Ford — AWS Economic Development
It's great to be here in Calvert Middle School. My name is Becky Ford. I represent Amazon, AWS, on our economic development team. I have the privilege of going all over the U.S., working with communities and our subject matter experts to talk about where we locate data centers, evaluate communities, site requirements, and help us support our customers' needs.
I'm really happy to be here tonight. First and foremost, I want to thank the folks at Calvert County for helping us to pull this together, facilitating a portal where we could take in all of your questions and concerns and really make this opportunity for us to have a conversation with you possible. Thanks very much to the staff and commissioners with Calvert County.
We'd love to take a minute to also recognize some partners that are here tonight to join us. We've got representation from Maryland Tech Council, from BG&E, SMECO, and most importantly, our partners at Constellation. In addition to that, I brought along a phenomenal team of subject matter experts from Amazon Web Services. This team has the responsibility of designing our data centers and data center campuses.
Project Overview
So why are we here? We are here to talk about a potential project with Constellation Energy at a site adjacent to their existing facility here in Calvert County. We've spent a considerable amount of time in conversations with multiple members of our team and the Constellation team to find out if there's an opportunity for us to work together.
What I want everyone to know is that the reason we've not had more public engagement is that there's a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes. A lot of time that we spend evaluating requirements, looking at the state's regulations, looking at county regulations, looking at our own requirements for a site, and looking at different aspects of the property and how we would design and construct data centers.
We are at a point where we have some preliminary site plans. I know folks have seen some of this information online. But I want to reassure you that we've not submitted any site plans to the county. There are no existing agreements in place between Amazon and Calvert County. This is still very much a project. It's not a done deal. It's not signed, sealed, and delivered. It is a potential project that we are evaluating as part of our initiative to support our customer requirements.
Community Questions
As part of this process, we provided an opportunity for folks to submit questions through the county portal. As of Friday of last week, we had over 300 questions submitted to that portal. There were about 60 or 70 unique entries — like 70 folks, 300-plus questions. And as of today, we had roughly another 100 questions.
We will be making answers to those questions available on a landing page that will go live tomorrow as part of the Maryland Tech Council. The questions themselves were in large part in several categories, and the presentation tonight is designed to organize the information in those very categories: water, energy, the environment, the construction process (which also involves permitting and timeline), and benefits to the community.
What Is a Data Center?
Interestingly enough, one of the questions that was not submitted in the portal was "What is a data center?" Data centers power our everyday lives. They contain information that helps support our financial needs, process data, and provide educational opportunities for our children, our schools, and our universities. We are actively working to help support cloud services and the infrastructure associated with that. We have millions of customers all across the world and have constructed campuses in a number of states in and around this area.
Why Calvert County?
When we talk about why Calvert County, in partnership with Constellation, we have evaluated the existing opportunity in currently zoned industrial property. There will not be any rezoning required to support this project. It's all within the existing property that's zoned heavy industrial — data center use is allowed.
Data centers are not new to Maryland, not new to Calvert County. In the due diligence that we've conducted, we've been through the county ordinance and requirements. They are among the highest standards that we've seen in many of the communities where we are considering development or actively developing.
The current stage of the project — some of you have seen online or as part of public information — this particular site plan was submitted in September of 2025 as part of our wetland permitting due diligence. It shows eight buildings on the site and is reflective of what we are currently contemplating, although as we get further along in our due diligence and design work, it's likely that this picture will change and shift a little bit.
Water Usage
A lot of the questions submitted through the portal were focused on water use and concerns related to cooling water. We use water in a few key ways on our site, including potable water — sinks and toilets that employees will use in everyday activities similar to any other business — and water for cooling.
In this particular case, one of the biggest benefits of this project is that there is no new water required to cool our data centers. We'll use water from Constellation's existing process once it's been through their cooling system. It will come over to our facility and be used to cool our data centers and then it will be sent back through the same process and at the same standards that currently exist.
In regard to cooling water, 96% of the year we cool our data centers with air — free-flowing air from the outside. The other 4% of the time we'll use that cooling water to help cool down the air, and that air will cool the equipment in the data center itself.
Energy
Mike Fradette — AWS Energy Team
Electricity growth is a topic that's front of mind for all of us. We're seeing significant electricity growth globally as well as in the U.S. through many factors — whether it be electrification of industry, reshoring of manufacturing, EV adoption, as well as the digitalization of the global and U.S. economy, much of which is empowered and enabled by data centers.
Data centers require highly reliable, scalable electricity to power the servers and store the data to deliver the services that our customers use those data centers for. As we think about the electricity that we consume, we break it down into three core principles:
One, we're committed to continue paying our full share for electricity costs to power our data centers. Two, we're committed to continue to operate more efficiently. Three, we're committed to operate more sustainably.
Revenue Surplus
On the landing page that Becky referred to earlier, there's a report from E3 that looked at a portfolio of AWS data centers to evaluate the amount of revenue contributed from those data centers and the electricity spent to the utility. It determined that the overall cost of service to provide electricity to those data centers was lower than the overall revenue received. What that results in is what's called a revenue surplus.
That revenue surplus can be used by the utility to reinvest back into the electricity grid, to harden the electricity grid, to digitalize and modernize it. Or it can go against existing and future fixed costs that existing ratepayers are already bearing.
Grid Infrastructure
At this particular site, we've been working very closely with our stakeholders — Baltimore Gas and Electric, Constellation, SMECO — to ensure that we study and ensure that this facility can be served reliably but will not negatively impact the surrounding community. Utilities as well as the regional transmission operator need to go through very long study processes, sometimes in the order of years, to assess the ability to both serve existing load as well as the net new load before they allow that load to interconnect to the grid.
This campus is unique in that it's located directly adjacent to an existing nuclear power facility. It's cross-cut by three different extra-high-voltage transmission lines, which provides a good opportunity for a data center to come in and secure highly reliable, scalable power.
At this particular site, we will be building our step-down infrastructure to take high-voltage power, step it down to a voltage that we can actually use and consume within our data centers, and we'll be owning and operating that infrastructure. We also need to make a long-term revenue commitment to the transmission operator — in this scenario, BG&E — where we will have to pay for transmission-related costs regardless of if our load shows up. So if a megawatt never spins, we are still contributing to existing and future transmission-related costs that come to us and not to other ratepayers.
The particular land is within SMECO service territory, which is a local cooperative. When a load shows up within a cooperative's territory, that load becomes a member of that cooperative in the same way that an individual residential or business customer is a member. The difference is, because data centers have a significantly large load, it's expected that they will be contributing millions of dollars annually to existing fixed costs that currently are borne by those membership customers. That provides a net benefit by offsetting those costs.
Efficiency & Sustainability
We measure our efficiency via a metric called PUE, or Power Utilization Effectiveness. It says: for every kilowatt hour of electricity you consume, how efficiently are you converting that into compute power? Globally, we're at a 1.15 PUE, which is 25% more efficient than the industry standard of 1.58. That means for the same amount of compute, an Amazon facility is going to consume 25% less energy than the industry standard.
Of the electricity that we do consume, we're committed to continue driving carbon-free energy into the grid. We have a 2040 net-zero carbon pledge across all of Amazon, inclusive of AWS. In pursuit of that pledge, we've become the largest corporate purchaser of renewables for the past five years. We've executed over 700 solar and wind power projects representing over 40 gigawatts of net new renewable energy capacity.
We're going beyond solar and wind — investing billions of dollars into batteries, nuclear, and small-scale modular reactors. In fact, the largest Maryland-based solar project recently came online on a reclaimed coal mine that Amazon enabled and is the offtaker of.
Environment & Sustainability
Becky Ford
Our intent is to be as cognizant and as committed to the environment and sustainability as Constellation has been for 50-plus years here in Calvert County. If we were to move forward with this project, not only would we have the regulatory framework for permitting through the state of Maryland, but we would meet or exceed environmental standards for all permitting requirements — including air, water, and wetlands.
There are a lot of questions about transparency. The water cooling requirements, for example, are monitored daily through Constellation's existing water withdrawal permit and wastewater discharge. We will continue to abide by those requirements and folks will have access to all of the compliance and monitoring information through that process. Public meetings that are required for state-level permits will also be part of our process going forward.
Site Design & Construction
We received a lot of questions about site design and construction. Our site design process is still underway — it's not complete. We don't have final designs or renderings to share today. However, this location was chosen based on proximity to energy requirements, the ability to reuse water, and access to a skilled and available workforce. We have folks here today that can talk more about different aspects of our design, including sound and light concerns that were expressed by folks in the question-and-answer period.
Workforce & Jobs
Workforce development is a core part of our investment in communities. We work with organizations like College of Southern Maryland, high schools, and community colleges to provide programming for the skills that are necessary to construct, operate, and maintain data centers.
This project, based on the site plan, is likely to create at least 250 new jobs — and that does not count the construction phase, where there will be thousands of construction workers involved. The folks that we hire are typically in the $80,000 to $100,000 pay range. We'll be providing workforce training opportunities for data center operations, construction trades, and fiber optic trades.
Types of jobs include engineers, fiber optics technicians, fusion splicing, line workers, as well as technicians and engineering operations roles.
Community Benefits
To date, we have had a number of conversations with folks in and around the community to understand what priorities are. We understand that open space, recreation, and water opportunities are important to the community. Going forward, our team will listen and develop a plan to help support folks in the community, including STEM education, tech upskilling, environmental stewardship, and employee engagement.
We do not have any agreements for tax abatements or incentives related to this project. The project will be associated with new real property tax, business personal property tax on equipment, as well as wage taxes from employees and new jobs.
We estimate, based on information in a recent state study, that this project would be equivalent to the tax revenue received by the top two employers in the community right now — likely tens of millions of dollars in new tax revenue to support things like capital improvements, fire and emergency services, roads, and transportation networks.
Closing
As we close, I want to give everyone the opportunity to ask questions and find out more information across the hall. We hope that we've given you a good perspective: no negative impact to county expenditures, no new public utilities required to support this project, and new tax revenue generated from the real property and personal property improvements. Thank you very much.