Approximately 100 Colorado Springs residents braved golf ball-sized hail on the steps of City Hall to protest against a proposed data center Tuesday afternoon. Earlier this month, Colorado Springs administratively approved the 50-megawatt AI data center proposed by California-based developer Raeden. The project will be housed in a former Intel microchip manufacturing plant that was previously home to a Bitcoin mining operation near Garden of the Gods Road. The project has elicited widespread concern from residents and activists — who have raised concerns about noise, water consumption, and utility rates — during a series of community meetings.
“The use is permitted within the zone district that this building is a part of,” explained Planning Department staff member Austin Cooper during an April 7 community meeting. “It’s an administrative review, which means that if they address all of the city’s comments, both technical and otherwise, it would get approved.”
Since the approval, Colorado Springs has received five complete appeals of the decision.
Emily Sledge, who helped write one of the appeals, took issue with the city’s process. “We came here today because we all share concern regarding this data center, approved to be built out at the former Intel chip processing center,” she said during the intermittent rain and hail. “We may be divided in how we see AI, with some of us using it daily to build our businesses or meal plans, while others of us loathe how AI is stealing jobs and intellectual property. But we’re not putting AI on trial with our appeal. We are protesting, what we believe is an inadequate and legally questionable approval process for the placement of a data center in our backyard near Garden of the Gods.”
Sledge’s first concern is over the amount of power to be used by the facility. “The issue is that the city approved it administratively without fully analyzing the scale of what the applicant’s own internal documents describe, as a facility that could use as much power as available,” she said. “Potentially up to 300 megawatts of critical power and 420 megawatts of gross power. This would be 600% of the 50 megawatts of power [Raeden co-founder and COO Jason Green] publicly claims it would be.”
Sledge explains the points in her appeal. Sean Beedle.
Zuri Horowitz, a former Democratic congressional candidate and leader of No Data Center COS, raised concerns about the impacts on Colorado Springs Utilities ratepayers. “The city approved this project without any studies looking at the actual costs required to sustain this business,” she said. “There aren’t any publicly available studies to look at whether the upfront financial benefits to the city aren’t a costly bomb down the line. Now they are proposing a nuclear power plant in the city, in a city with five military installations, while hiking up rates for solar users, and the previously implemented five to nine double utility rates for all of us.”
Sen. Larry Liston (R-Colorado Springs) has a solution for concerns about data centers and water usage. “Just so you people know, all nuclear plants do not require water,” he said during a May 19 El Paso County Republican Women meeting. “Liquid helium is coming into vogue, and molten salt reactors — they use no water, little or no water. It’s scare tactics by the environmentalists to want to eviscerate and do away with data centers. We need data centers, there will be data centers and they can be powered by nuclear energy that require little or no water.”
Not all Republicans support data centers. “How many of you here are really excited about that new AI data center that they’re trying to put over at Garden of the Gods?” asked El Paso County Commissioner candidate Lindsay Moore during the May Republican Women meeting. “The thing that you really need to know about those AI data centers is that they use our water. Huge, huge, massive amounts of water. There are other data centers already planned for El Paso County. So if you don’t already know that, you need to put this on your radar. El Paso County commissioners, their real job is to steward your land, your water, and your taxpayer resources well, so you need to see county commissioners from that perspective. We are your stewards, and do you want somebody in that seat who is going to steward you well with biblical principles and understand that anything that comes across our board, we’re going to look through a biblical lens and we see, ‘Does this hurt you or make your life better? Does this steward your resources and keep more money in your pocket or does it do the opposite?’”
Joining No Data Center COS in their appeal of the data center approval is Integrity Matters, a conservative group that has been involved in opposing multi-family and affordable housing projects in Colorado Springs. “For months, we have been working alongside residents of Chelsea Glen and Kissing Camels to get the scientific proof that no harm will be inflicted on the nearby humans and wildlife in whose habitat Raeden is trying to profit,” notes Integrity Matters’ website. “We have been unhappy with the sound studies and remain unconvinced by the data. We have requested that data be provided and were surprised that this administrative approval occurred without it. We have also asked for a term sheet that includes explicit sound monitoring stations, standards for the noise generating machines on site, the generators and chillers, that will be in covenants that go with the land and include neighbors having seats on the voting committee that governs such safety controls. We have not received that either.”
Concern over the impact of data centers has drawn the attention of federal legislators. This week, U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans (R-CO) introduced the Ratepayer Protection, which proposes standards for states and their Public Utility Commissions (PUC) when connecting large-load customers, such as data centers and hyperscalers, to the grid, to implement specific measures that ensure other community members do not pay for the related costs of building new power generation, transmission lines, and other upgrades that these customers require.
“As America races to lead the world in AI, we must build the energy infrastructure needed to support this innovation, and stay ahead of competitors like Communist China,” said Evans in a news release. “But Colorado families, farmers, and small businesses should not be forced to cover the costs of new power generation driven by these developments. The Ratepayer Protection Act is a bipartisan, commonsense solution that protects everyday Americans and ensures our nation can continue to win the AI race.”
“They’re afraid the AI might misgender someone.”
Previously, Evans mocked Democrats for their concern about AI development. “What Democrats in this particular area are scared of is AI, and they’re afraid that AI is going to discriminate against all of the different artificial divisions that Democrats love to force into our society,” said Evans during a February appearance on Ryan Schuling Live.
“They’re afraid the AI might misgender someone or do some other sort of action like that. And so they’ve passed this incredibly onerous regulatory framework here in Colorado, that’s just incredibly damaging to be able to grow and develop and innovate something like AI.”
“Heatmap” correspondent Matthew Zeitlin was critical of the proposed legislation in a recent column. “Evans, Castor, Guthrie, and the rest appear to be acting not out of hostility towards the AI industry, but rather from a desire to protect it from public backlash fed by rising electricity prices,” he wrote. “In summary, the Ratepayer Protection Act will ask state regulators to consider an approach to data center cost allocation that may not capture all of their costs and will likely do little to arrest the fundamental drivers of higher electricity costs. And if prices continue to rise, the big data center developers may be able to point to the Ratepayer Protection Act and say, ‘Well, it wasn’t me.’”
Former Colorado Springs City Councilor Tim Leigh weighed in on the concerns over the data center during his June 16 appearance on the Richard Randall show. “There’s already 13 data centers in Colorado Springs operating in the city limits and not creating any problem,” he said. “Truth be told, I don’t know that any of those issues are going to be realized. If you think at a really high level, there’s land, and it goes into a community by annexation. And when it’s annexed, then it becomes part of a master plan. And then the master plan breaks things down into zones. And then when it gets zoned, people build stuff and it gets approved, and so what’s happened. All that process is that the Project Taurus project was administratively approved because of all the previous approval, so it’s part of this planning and zoning process. It’s part the law of Colorado Springs. I would be surprised if the administrative approval is overturned because I’m not sure that there’s a real legitimate right to appeal that process by law, but you can certainly appeal it by policy — politically — just by crying out that you don’t want that data center to be there. My guess is that you’re going to have a lot of protesters that say, ‘No, we don’t want the data center,’ but I think it’s probably a fool’s errand and I think it will be approved.”
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