Perspective: Data centers — not what you think

On Sept. 17, the City Council in Colorado Springs sat through a raucous special hearing on Project Taurus that ran late into the night. There were shouting matches, a speaker with a megaphone and four arrests. When it was over, the council voted 7 to 2 to put the whole thing off until April 13, 2027, one week after the city’s next election.

Councils and county commissions all over Colorado are making the same choice. And just like in football, nobody ever wins by punting.

Project Taurus would turn an old Intel plant on the city’s northwest side into a 50-megawatt data center. The building is already there, and the site has been industrial for decades. The project followed the city’s own process. Staff approved it. The Planning Commission heard the appeals and voted 6 to 2 to uphold the approval. None of that mattered once the hearing room filled up. The council picked the one option that required nobody to cast a hard vote before an election.

Colorado Springs is not an outlier. Many Colorado communities have enacted, proposed or seriously debated a data center moratorium this year.

Denver adopted a one-year pause in May. Boulder, Larimer and Jefferson counties followed. Broomfield did as well, for a full 18 months, as did Thornton, Commerce City, Loveland and Arvada. Out west, Grand Junction and Mesa County both acted.

In El Paso County, Monument and Palmer Lake have their own pauses. Woodland Park, Lochbuie, Mead, Dacono and Lafayette, then the rural counties: Saguache, Delta, Archuleta, Rio Grande and Logan, plus the towns of South Fork, Buena Vista and Hudson. Longmont skipped the pause entirely and banned hyperscale data centers outright.

Kiowa and Phillips counties passed moratoriums that have already expired, which tells you how fast this spread. Some of these bans have come and gone while other towns are still voting on theirs.

Then there is the next wave. Colorado Springs voters may face a ballot measure that would ban new data centers for four years. Fruita, Northglenn and Johnstown are discussing moratoriums, Moffat County has tabled one for a hearing and Costilla County has asked its planners to look at drafting one. Aurora, Fort Collins and Colorado Springs get the headlines, but this is not a three-city story. It’s all across the state.

In August, Aurora council took up a moratorium and Mayor Mike Coffman cast the deciding vote against it. Then Coffman visited the Trident site, a large Vantage project near a new subdivision and changed his mind. He came back in October pushing an indefinite pause on new applications. On Oct. 26, the council met past midnight and the moratorium died without debate. Coffman says he will bring it back on Nov. 9. Trident is already approved, so the pause would not stop the one project that made everybody angry.

Fort Collins tells the same story from the other direction. The city’s land-use code does not define “data center” at all, so there is no standard to meet. On Oct. 6, the council directed staff to stop accepting applications and on Oct. 20, it voted unanimously on first reading for a six-month moratorium covering data centers built as a primary use and accessory facilities over 10 megawatts.

Part of the problem is that most people picture the wrong building: a giant artificial intelligence (AI) training campus in a cornfield, drinking a river of water and humming loud enough to rattle windows. A few of those exist, but they are not most of what gets built. Goldman Sachs has estimated that AI accounts for roughly 14% of data center power use. Cloud computing takes about 54%, and old-fashioned enterprise computing, the payroll systems and databases companies have run for decades, takes about 32%. Colorado’s data centers are mostly modest facilities in the Denver metro area.

The CoreSite data center going up in north Denver, all 18 megawatts of it, is being built for telecom and e-commerce traffic, not to train chatbots.

There is no official tally of Colorado’s data centers by workload, and anyone who quotes you an exact Colorado percentage for AI versus cloud is just making it up.

What the directories show is a state with somewhere between 56 and 68 facilities, depending on who is counting, most of them small and not one operating hyperscale campus of 100 megawatts or more. The state’s first such hyperscale facility, in Aurora, is still under construction. The largest data center running in Colorado today is a 40-megawatt colocation campus in Colorado Springs. The names on the buildings are the unglamorous backbone of the internet: CoreSite, Flexential, Databank, Iron Mountain, H5, Novva.

So what actually runs through these buildings? Nearly everything you did today. The show you streamed last night. Your bank balance. Your medical records, your kid’s school portal, the card reader at the coffee shop. This is critical infrastructure in the plainest sense, and when it goes down, modern life stops.

If people want the point at full volume, it’s coming quickly. Grand Theft Auto VI comes out on Nov. 19. There is no disc. Even the copy sold at GameStop is just a download code. Rockstar, the creator of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, moved preloading to Nov. 10 because the file runs up to 212 gigabytes, and millions of people will pull it down at once. Every download and every patch after it, moves through data centers. Plenty of people cheering moratoriums at these hearings will go home, stream a show and start that download the minute it opens.

It is a blind spot. The internet feels weightless because the buildings that carry the weight sit somewhere else. A moratorium is a vote to keep them outside of Colorado.

Yes, data centers use real power. A badly sited one can be a genuine nuisance, and ratepayers are correct to ask who pays when a huge new customer plugs into the grid.

Colorado already has working answers to most of that, and Project Taurus is proof. Colorado Springs Utilities has a large load tariff, the first of its kind in the state and it hands out no discounts. The developer pays for its own infrastructure, pays full cost for power, is billed on its full contracted load for 10 years whether it uses it or not and posts 36 months of collateral. Taurus uses closed-loop cooling, and the developer has put up a $1 million bond tied to noise performance. Those are terms a city can tighten. Every legitimate complaint has a version that can be written into a land use code.

The moratorium movement tells capital to go somewhere else, and capital listens. Flexential is headquartered in the Denver area. It recently moved a planned project from Colorado to Georgia. Eight data center companies are headquartered in the state, and none has built its largest facility here. Project Taurus alone claims 600 union construction jobs and 60 to 100 permanent jobs plus more than $1 million a year in property taxes once it is running. Take a developer’s numbers with the usual grain of salt. Then ask what a city gets from a vacant Intel plant instead. It gets nothing.

Taurus played by the rules on the books. The zoning allowed it. Staff approved it. The Planning Commission upheld it after a full hearing. If that is still not enough to get a project built, the code is decoration and the real rule is that whoever shouts longest wins. No company deciding where to put its next hundred million dollars misses that lesson.

Colorado does not have to choose between being a doormat and being closed. Write the rules. Make large customers pay their full power costs and post collateral. Require closed-loop cooling. Set real setbacks from homes and schools, measure the noise and fine whoever blows past the limits. Skip the open-ended tax giveaways. When a project meets the standard, let it build.

A state that does that gets the tax base, the jobs and the infrastructure its residents use every day. A state that keeps hitting pause gets the same internet usage and none of the investment. The servers will sit in Iowa or Wyoming or Georgia, and Coloradans will use them anyway. The only question a moratorium actually answers is who gets paid. City by city, Colorado is answering: somebody else.

Vanessa Rutledge is a senior fellow in emerging technology atIndependence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.