data centers

The City of Denver along with other Colorado and Idaho counties have passed moratoriums on data center development. Cheyenne, Wyoming, opted to speed ahead.

A proposed workforce housing development in Cheyenne goes before Laramie County commissioners and the public on June 2. Iron Guard Workforce Housing wants to build up to 800 modular housing units that could house up to 5,600 people.

During the pause, city staff would have studied five questions: the impacts of data centers on the environment, electricity rates, the power grid, water usage, and any other factors related to the health, safety, and welfare of Cheyenne’s residents.

A proposed ordinance would require city staff to study data center impacts like electricity usage, electricity tariffs, closed-loop cooling systems, groundwater and agricultural impacts, and land value.

"Fuel costs for gas-fired generation for the entire operational length of the project need to be clearly factored into the decision process," one co-author said.

The U.S. already has about 3,000 data centers — and that number is expected to grow quickly in the coming years. A new report finds much of that growth is shifting away from cities and into rural areas, including in the Mountain West.

The Data Center Water Transparency Amendments require server farm developers to provide an estimate of future water use.

As data centers rapidly expand across the Mountain West, researchers say a key question is getting harder to answer: how much water are they actually using?

Wind and solar power are rapidly expanding across the Mountain West, with some states now generating a significant share of their electricity from renewable sources, according to a new report from Climate Central, a nonpartisan research group.

Non-residential construction jobs are up, partly due to new data centers. But the number of people opting to enter the workforce is decreasing.