Denver bans new data center construction

Denver's council vote followed months of backlash from residents of the Globeville and Elyria-Swansea neighborhoods, one of the most polluted zip codes in Colorado, where CoreSite opened a 170,000-square-foot data center adjacent to a residential park. The council acted precisely because it had approved all 50 of its existing data centers without any city-specific zoning rules, energy requirements, or water-use standards. Multiple council members publicly described that absence of regulation as their biggest governance failure.

The ban applies to any application for which data center use is the primary proposed use; facilities primarily serving telecommunications are excluded. CoreSite's DE3 facility, currently under construction, is exempt, but the company's two planned expansion buildings will be subject to whatever regulations the working group produces. The working group will include three council members, utility company representatives, union representatives, one industry representative, community advocates, and ex officio city department staff. The council may extend the moratorium beyond twelve months if the group does not complete its work in time.

Colorado's legislature killed two competing bills that would have imposed statewide environmental regulations on data centers before its session closed on May 13, leaving local governments as the only active regulators. Jefferson County commissioners imposed their own ten-month data center moratorium the day after Denver's vote. The U.S. Data Center Moratorium Tracker counted 69 active municipal moratoriums nationwide as of May 2026. Data centers house the servers that run artificial intelligence services, including large language models (LLMs) and real-time AI products; a moratorium in a city with 50 existing facilities creates a direct constraint on where those systems can expand.