What hasn’t risen from the ground so far in the largely rural but growing county northeast of Denver are data centers — the low-slung, warehouse-style buildings packed with the servers, storage systems and networking equipment that have become central to today’s modern economy. The centers have also been integral to the artificial intelligence boom of the last few years.
But that could soon change.
Several companies have been poking around Weld County’s approximately 4,000 square miles of land, much of it farm fields, for an opportunity to erect a data center.
“We have quite a few inquiries coming in,” said David Eisenbraun, the county’s planning director.
But data centers have run into fierce criticism in recent years for their heavy use of electric power and often-prodigious consumption of water to run and cool their operations. Concerns about their impacts on electric rates and water supplies, especially in a part of the country that’s locked in a historic drought, have lately taken center stage.
To get ahead of the issue, Weld County next month plans to update its land-use code to address any future data centers in unincorporated parts of the county. The new rules would require the industry to show it has secured an adequate power and water supply before building one of its high-tech facilities.
Weld County Commissioner Kevin Ross said data centers could provide an important source of property tax revenue, especially for a fast-growing county that doesn’t have a sales tax.
“I think it provides an economic opportunity for Weld County to diversify our economy,” he said. “I look at this as a positive impact on the community.”
The county’s code amendments propose allowing data centers in its industrially zoned areas through an administrative review by county staff. The facilities would also be able to be built in agriculturally zoned parts of Weld County, but that would require commissioner approval.
The county plans to host an informational meeting about its proposed code changes Tuesday at 6 p.m. at the Weld County Southwest Services Complex, 4209 County Road 24.5, in Firestone. It hosted another meeting Monday night in Greeley.
Data center company Global AI late last year purchased 438 acres at the dormant Kodak and Carestream Health campus near Windsor for nearly $16 million, with plans to convert an empty industrial building at the site into a data center.
Eisenbraun said Weld County has yet to receive an application from Global AI. The company did not return a request for comment.
The county’s new rules come as the Colorado General Assembly grapples with the expansion of the data center industry in the state, with the introduction of two related bills this session.
House Bill 1030, supported by the industry, would incentivize companies to comply with water and power limits in exchange for large tax breaks. Senate Bill 102 would require data centers that use more than 30 megawatts of power to draw as much of it as possible from renewable energy sources by 2031 and to pay for any changes to the power grid needed to serve the facility.
At the local level, caution has been the watchword. Last month, Larimer County extended a moratorium on accepting any new applications for data centers until late August. Also in February, Denver said it would consider placing a temporary halt on new data center projects in the city so that officials can review regulations — focusing on “responsible land, energy and water use,” along with affordability for utility ratepayers — for the facilities.
Logan County, home of Sterling in northeastern Colorado, recently adopted rules for data centers.
Data centers, Ross said, are shifting to new water-saving technologies, such as “closed-loop” systems that recirculate water throughout the building instead of having the center rely on water-heavy evaporative-cooling systems. Using a cooling tower to lower water temperature can reduce water use by up to 70%, according to the World Economic Forum.
Ross points north to Wyoming, where a $1.2 billion data center broke ground last fall in Cheyenne. New York-based Related Companies, which is behind the project, brags that it doesn’t need any water to cool its operations.
CEO Jeff Blau said the company heard neighbors’ concerns about water consumption in a part of the country
“So, we decided we will only build self-contained cooling systems that do not use water,” he said, according to a Wyoming Tribune Eaglestory on the October groundbreaking.
Ross said he and his fellow commissioners recently visited data centers in Cheyenne to get a sense of how they operate.
“The one they’re talking about near Windsor would use less water than a four-person household over a year,” he said.
The proposed Global AI site sits between Windsor and Greeley, and either city could annex it. Sean Chambers, the director of Greeley Water Utilities, said the city has “more-than-ample water supply” should the company seek to hook into the city’s water system.
“We’ve long been planning for industrial growth,” he said.
Greeley Water Utilities has enough water in its portfolio to supply a half-dozen traditional water-intensive data centers and up to 50 facilities using closed-loop cooling systems, Chambers said. The city of 115,000 gets its water from the Colorado, Laramie, Big Thompson and Cache La Poudre river basins and stores it in six mountain reservoirs.
But Chambers said every drop of water that goes to a data center is a drop that doesn’t go to another enterprise.
“It needs to be done smartly,” he said.
The same goes for the power side of the equation. Sam Taggart, a spokesman for Poudre Valley Rural Electric Association, said the utility makes sure that “growth pays for growth” rather than dumping those costs on ratepayers across the system.
Poudre Valley REA serves 58,000 customers across Weld, Larimer and Boulder counties.
“That high-load customer has to pay for the infrastructure upgrades that that demand would require,” Taggart said. “We have the lowest rates in the state and we want to keep it that way. We’ve got guardrails in place.”
The Weld County commissioners are expected to cast a final vote on the data center code changes on April 6.
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