Denver City Council to decide on one-year pause on new data centers

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]Denver's getting free water tonight, just as city council votes on whether data centers use too much water and too much power to allow them to continue being built here. Our Spencer Soicher starts us off with a look at a potential pause on data centers for 1 year.

[00:00:15]Denver has data centers and has for some time, but the ones already in the city are nothing like the data center campus under construction in the Elyria-Swansea neighborhood.

[00:00:26]>> The data center industry has been really uh obscure about this idea that we already have data centers, like they're already near us, which is true, certainly.

[00:00:37]>> Alfonso Espino is with the Globeville Elyria-Swansea Coalition, a group pushing for Denver to adopt a moratorium halting the approval of new data centers in the city for a year.

[00:00:48]>> Not only our neighborhood doesn't deserve the impact of a data center, but um no community does.

[00:00:54]>> Denver's a little bit late to the dance.

[00:00:56]>> Denver City Councilman Paul Kashmann co-sponsored the moratorium. Worried Denver doesn't have regulations in place to protect the city and its neighborhoods from the impacts of large-scale data centers. The moratorium would not stop CoreSite's data center in Elyria-Swansea, which is already under construction, but it could stop the company from building more of them on the campus. And compared to CoreSite's two current data centers in Denver, the under-construction data center is a thirsty giant. According to plan shared with Denver Water, the new data center is estimated to use 235,000 gallons of water a day. Similar records reviewed by 9 News show CoreSite's DE1 and DE2 in downtown used an average of 3,000 gallons per day combined over the past 3 years.

[00:01:44]>> Even in non-drought years, in Colorado water is precious.

[00:01:48]>> The new building, according to Denver Water, would use roughly 20 times as much water as its average industrial customer.

[00:01:55]>> There's nothing like this in the city of Denver right now. Um and what's happening over with Corsite is really transforming the scale at which these data centers are are going to now be built at.

[00:02:07]Corsite says the new building is also designed to use up to 18 MW of power, enough to power a small city. Corsite told 9 News this afternoon this moratorium is not about their data center. Councilman Cashman, who co-sponsored it, told us the moratorium was prompted by concerns from their data center. Right. AI is scary to a lot of people. These data centers are new. If it's not power, water, it'll be another argument. It'll be another concern.

[00:02:33]Right. It's They're talking about generators and they want to have a a group here. The Elyria-Swansea neighbors want to have a group here that gets together, looks at what some of the impacts are, and then going forward says, "Hey, we can have these in our neighborhoods. It's not too loud. It's not too disruptive. It's not taking too much power. It's not taking too much water. Or if it is, it's it this can't go forward." They want to look at this before they go further anymore.

[00:02:56]>> All right, Spencer. Thank you.