The ongoing drought and widespread water restrictions in Colorado should concern all of us, as should the proposed AI data centers in Colorado Springs and Windsor. Although companies have run centers for decades for basic storage and routing of data, today’s centers are larger in order to host file servers and networking equipment that store, process and analyze information. These capabilities are critical for expanded AI, which allows computers to do more than ever before.
Yes, data centers can provide tax revenue to a community, but depending on their size, they can use massive amounts of electricity (enough to provide power to 400,000 homes) to cool millions of gallons of water every day. That will lead to severely reduced local utility capacity and increased utility bills for homes and businesses. In addition, once built and operational, centers employ relatively few people…