Data center developers must deepen collaboration with power companies to secure electricity, with power acquisition becoming the critical bottleneck.

An energy mogul with a restaurant empire on Maryland's Eastern Shore had his eyes on a power plant.

To get it, he needed Gov. Wes Moore's help.

Last fall, months before the public heard about his plans, Paul Prager and his company TeraWulf held a series of meetings with top Moore administration officials to discuss an idea to buy an old coal plant on the Potomac River and reboot it to power what could be Maryland's largest data center. It's a plan he promised would bring environmental remediation, jobs and much-needed reinforcement for the regional power grid.

By early December, Prager almost had what he wanted: a letter outlining the Moore administration's support.

"chi chi - I need that letter asap!!!" read the subject line of a Dec. 11 message to Chichi Nyagah-Nash, Moore's deputy chief of staff. Prager dropped a link to a Washington Post article about his investments to transform his adopted home, the Eastern Shore town of Easton, into a ritzy destination.

An administration official responded hours later with a one-page document that offered to expedite permits for TeraWulf — including those needed for natural gas pipelines — for the plant, Charles County's Morgantown Generating Station. The letter was signed by the state's top environmental regulator.

Government negotiations with developers often happen behind closed doors, but these exchanges, obtained by The Baltimore Banner through a records request, offer a rare window into how deals get done. They also reveal how a wealthy and politically connected businessman won the governor's endorsement for his controversial foray into Maryland data centers — even as key questions about the proposed development's impact remain unanswered.

TeraWulf's track record with projects of this scale is short. The company, which was founded in 2021, has historically made most of its money mining Bitcoin.

In statements, both Moore's office and TeraWulf played down the state's support for natural gas connections to the contaminated site. They said the state endorsement applied strictly to environmental cleanup at Morgantown, which burned coal for more than half a century before its owners retired its boilers in 2022.

Moore spokeswoman Rhyan Lake called it "very common for any business attraction process to include confidential discussions between the company, state, and local government prior to a public announcement."

"The TeraWulf project is not receiving and will not receive any special treatment or consideration," Lake said.

But some say Moore's letter looks like a backroom deal. Last year, Prager and his wife gave the maximum contribution amount to the governor's reelection campaign, and opponents say the letter promises permits for the TeraWulf venture without any public vetting.

"It's what Donald Trump does every day, but we didn't expect Moore to do it," said Tyson Slocum, energy program director for the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. Slocum has opposed the TeraWulf purchase before federal regulators and has called the Moore administration's endorsement "pay to play," arguing that Prager's campaign donations earned him favorable treatment from the governor.

It's not clear why Prager was in such a hurry to get the state's support, but the letter may have proven important for securing his deal to buy Morgantown. Prager suggested as much at a tech conference in March.

TeraWulf approached the Moore administration with a pitch to support the region's struggling power grid and a "desperate" Maryland county, but only if the state gave him permits to fire up the plant with gas, he said.

"They said, 'Yup, you're in,'" Prager said. "In writing. They did this in writing before we would close."

As America's appetite for computing power and artificial intelligence grows, data centers have become big business. Large-scale proposals such as TeraWulf's have sparked backlash from Calvert County to the Washington suburbs, where residents fear the impact of these sprawling server warehouses on everything from their water supply to their energy costs.

In Maryland, though, the industry remains in its infancy, and Moore has said that the state can attract responsible developers without the downsides of Northern Virginia's data center alley. He has stressed a need for data centers that bring local jobs, prioritize clean power and pay for their electricity needs.

Prager's vision for Morgantown is ambitious.

Powering his proposed facility, called Chesapeake Data Campus, would require more energy than all of Baltimore. Along with a gigawatt of natural gas generation, TeraWulf aims to connect Morgantown to a giant battery — a configuration the company says will allow it to feed surplus power into the grid.

Calendar invitations show that Prager and Moore met at the start of October. In the months that followed, Prager pushed the governor's office to put its support for his project into writing, lamenting on Nov. 25 that he had "now lost two weeks." Days later, he wrote Nyagah-Nash a one-word subject line: "please."

Prager had another ask: that the state appropriate $100 million for his project. But on Dec. 1, Moore's office told Prager that the state couldn't afford it.

Instead, Nyagah-Nash proposed an alternative, which Prager received 10 days later.

In a one-page letter, Maryland Secretary of the Environment Serena McIlwain pledged to speed TeraWulf's application to a state cleanup program and offer "best efforts to expedite any other necessary permits," including rights-of-way to hook up Morgantown to natural gas.

In a statement, TeraWulf Vice President Kerri Langlais said [article text cuts off here in the source provided]