Maryland has put in place what its governor calls among the strictest data center rules in the country: bring your own energy, pay for your own upgrades, hire local union labor, and do not override the county.
Most of the political map runs the other way — Democrats opposing data centers and Republicans welcoming them. In Maryland it is reversed. Wes Moore is the Democrat who wanted them, and the Republican challenging him has put opposition to them in his platform.
"And I believe that we get to write the rules. The data centers do not."
Moore is seven weeks from a reelection the prediction markets give him a 94 to 97% chance of winning, he governs the state that has lost more federal jobs than any other this year, and the anchors put it to him that he is mentioned repeatedly as someone who could run for president in a couple of years.
The full segment is covered here so you can skip it.
Here are the 6 arguments that matter.
👤 Guest: Wes Moore, Governor of Maryland, running for reelection in November
🎙️ Hosts: Joe Kernen, Becky Quick and Andrew Ross Sorkin, who anchor CNBC's Squawk Box
🧩 Other segments: Revathi Advaithi, CEO of Flex
📰 Published: 15 September 2026 on the Squawk Pod feed
🟢 Spotify | 🟣 Apple Podcasts | 🔗 Episode page | ⏱️ 14 min
Key Takeaways
Maryland's data center rules put every cost on the developer and the veto with the county
Bring your own power, pay for your own upgrades, hire local union workers, do not override local jurisdictions
The party lines on data centers are inverted in this race
The Republican challenging Moore introduced the legislation that brought data centers to Maryland, and now runs against them
Governors of both parties are calling Washington's AI policy confused, on Moore's account
He says he spoke to at least half a dozen current and former governors in 72 hours
Maryland has had over 31,000 people fired in a year, more than any state
Moore's answer to every ideological question is a results claim rather than a position
Violent crime down nearly 60%, over 60,000 new businesses, over $14 billion of private investment
He calls the $40 trillion debt the greatest national security issue the country has
The US now spends more servicing it than on other priorities, and governors have to balance a budget every year
1. The Race and the Results
The desk opened on the midterms, seven weeks out, and on a race the prediction markets treat as close to settled.
The anchors put the prediction markets at a 94 to 97% probability that Moore is reelected. That figure is the show's, not his.
His answer was a list of outcomes rather than a claim about the polling. He said the campaign is running hard and takes nothing for granted, and that the reason they feel good is that they focused on what people said they cared about.
On crime: violent crime in Maryland is down nearly 60%, which he called the fastest drop in the United States of America. On Baltimore specifically, "the last time the homicide rate was this low, I wasn't born yet."
On the economy he named permitting reform and regulatory reform as the tools — making it easier for businesses to grow.
The economic numbers he gave: over 60,000 new businesses inside the state, and over $14 billion of private investment that has come into Maryland.
2. Who Brought the Data Centers
The anchors set up the reversal: Moore was strongly in favor of data centers a few years ago, has moved to a more nuanced position, and is now the pro-data-center Democrat running against a Republican who opposes them.
Moore's response was that his opponent brought them in the first place. He said the Republican he is running against introduced the legislation that brought data centers to Maryland and provided all the incentives for them, before Moore was elected.
His account of what that produced is an absence of rules. "Data centers were calling their own shots." They determined where they went, what they could do, and the power increases residents saw, overriding local voice.
He said he started ringing the alarm as early as earlier this year, and that what he put in place is among the strictest set of guidelines in the country.
3. The Strictest Guidelines
Moore listed the conditions Maryland now attaches, and the list is the substance of his position.
Bring your own energy. Every data center must bring its own power.
The taxpayer pays nothing. In his words, the taxpayers were not going to pay a cent for that, and the developer pays for its own renovations.
No pollution of the air or the water.
Hire local union workers.
No overriding of local jurisdictions.
His framing of the whole package is about who holds the pen. "And I believe that we get to write the rules. The data centers do not."
What he says the rules buy is predictability rather than exclusion. He believes in critical infrastructure, but developers coming in know the state demands transparency and support for local people, and that they are entering guidelines laid out for them rather than by them.
4. Governors Against Washington
The desk raised Barack Obama's call for a ban on AI data centers, the Trump administration's opposite position, and the business view that a moratorium leaves the country behind.
Moore described the response among governors as bewilderment. "Well, I think there's a collective, honestly, just bewilderment in the way that we've been approaching AI collectively."
He put a number and a window on his own canvassing. Over the past 72 hours he had been on the horn with at least half a dozen current and former governors, Democrats and Republicans, who are concerned and confused by what they are hearing from Washington.
He is not against the technology. He said AI can be used for real transformation in health care and education, and that his state is using it — but that there have to be guardrails and a clear understanding of what is happening.
His conclusion is that the administration is the outlier. "It just feels like at this point, the Trump administration is on an island on this where everyone else is calling for more involvement and more transparency." He put governors and tech leaders on the same side of that line.
5. The Presidential Question
The anchors asked when he would decide about running for president, and then worked the question from several directions.
He gave the countdown rather than an answer. "Well, I know I've got 40, 49 days and a wake up until my reelection. And I am laser focused on that."
What he would commit to is being in the conversation, which he was careful to separate from running. He said Maryland will be part of the conversation next year, and that this does not mean running for higher office.
His claim to that standing is damage plus response. No state has been more affected by the Trump administration: over 31,000 people fired in a year, more than any state in the country; billions of dollars taken away; not a single dollar of federal disaster relief; hundreds of thousands of people kicked off health care.
Against that he set the state's own actions — utility relief, a service year option for every high school graduate, which he described as the first in the country and as a jobs guarantee for young people, and a middle-class tax cut.
On Kamala Harris, after an anchor raised Gavin Newsom saying he would not run if she did, Moore said he had not seen it. His position was that "there is nobody who's earned the right to make her own decision more than Vice President Harris," that she has earned the right to run if she chooses, and that how that affects other people's thinking is on them.
Asked whether he would stand aside for her, he answered with his own history. When he ran for governor — the first office he ever ran for — who else was getting in was not a factor, and he repeated that it was not part of his calculation.
He redirected the question to prices twice. People are trying to work out why gas prices have exploded, and he said he had spoken two days earlier to people who got to the grocery store checkout and had to put things back.
6. Results, Not Ideology
An anchor asked where he sits relative to the energy on the left of his party, around the Democratic Socialists of America and candidates the desk called more radical than him.
His first answer was that it is not what he hears from voters. He said the question feels like a Washington game about which part of the party or which silo someone belongs to, and that the people he meets in Maryland are asking who is going to help them.
Pressed to name a view, he declined the list while reciting it — defunding the police, getting rid of the presidency, abolishing the Senate, getting rid of prisons, open borders — and said he was not going to go into them.
The anchors did not let it go, pointing to John Fetterman as a Democrat willing to buck trends and to Chuck Schumer as a leader who says nothing, and telling Moore repeatedly that the middle lane is wide open for him.
Asked directly whether prisons should be closed, he said no.
His answer to the whole line of questioning is an appeal to his own record, and he made it twice. Historic investments in local law enforcement, in community violence interrupters, in prosecuting violent crimes, and in people returning home from incarceration — followed by "we have amongst the fastest drop in violent crime anywhere in the United States of America."
"So I just I don't govern on ideology. I govern on results."
Bonus Insights
The anchor who raised the debt introduced it as a question for a former Wall Street professional, noting that Moore has worked on Wall Street and saying nobody is talking about how $40 trillion gets attacked.
Moore's answer was the strongest claim he made all segment. "It is the greatest national security issue we have as a country." He described an unbelievable ability to keep spending while pretending it will not come back, and said the country now spends more servicing its debt than on other things.
His argument for governors as the fix is procedural. He balances a budget every year, and he said the last national administration that could actually balance a budget was one staffed by former governors, because balancing is something governors do annually.
An anchor's own view, offered rather than asked, was that a second Kamala Harris candidacy would be a gift to Republicans, and that Gavin Newsom should have said he would run rather than stand aside.
The desk pushed the point that Moore's actions already answer the ideological question, and he agreed with that reading before returning to the results argument.
Moore's bottom line is that the fight over AI data centers is about who sets the terms rather than whether they get built — in Maryland the developer brings its own power, pays its own costs and cannot overrule the county — and that the governors of both parties now see themselves as shut out of a federal AI policy they do not understand.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
State of Maryland (Moore's record: violent crime down nearly 60%, over 60,000 new businesses, over $14 billion of private investment, and the country's strictest data center guidelines)
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