Global AI has received unanimous approval by Weld County’s board of commissioners to build a data center in a vacant industrial building east of Windsor.
Carestream Health ran the plant for years before closing in 2024. The site remained vacant until Global AI began its search for a space to house a new data center. The proposal Weld County commissioners signed off on this month would need 65,000 gallons to fill the cooling system, plus 6,500 gallons a year to top it off, according to reporting by KUNC, a nonprofit news radio station based in Northern Colorado. The system is closed-loop and sealed, a non-negotiable condition of approval.
The Collegian contacted the Weld County communications, planning and development services and health and environment departments in addition to the Central Weld County Water District and did not receive a statement from any as of Sept. 29.
In early April, a water shortage in Weld County led to 40% of the county’s land experiencing severe drought while 38% recorded extreme drought, according to Citizen Times’ U.S. Drought Monitor database.
Larimer County, which has faced similar drought-related concerns, established a temporary moratorium on the approval and processing of data center permit applications.
The two counties are both facing drought and rely on overlapping river systems, yet they are taking different approaches to regulating a technology with environmental impacts, which United Nations scientists say are increasing in severity.
Nationally, data centers directly withdrew an estimated 17.4 billion gallons of water in 2023 for cooling alone. According to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, an environmental research nonprofit, a single large facility can draw up to 5 million gallons a day, which is comparable to a town of 10,000-50,000 people.
Water researchers are also drawing attention to the fact that direct cooling water is just a part of the larger story. Generating the electricity a data center consumes requires its own water for cooling power plants and processing fuel, and federal estimates put that indirect footprint at roughly 211 billion gallons nationally in 2023.
Scott Benton, an environmental planner for Larimer County, said that dynamic is central to how the county is writing its rules, particularly since evaporative cooling is the biggest single water draw a data center has.
“The evaporative cooling is too much water for us, for what we feel comfortable with,” Benton said. “So what we’re proposing — and it hasn’t been approved yet — is prohibiting evaporative cooling.”
A University of California, Riverside and California Institute of Technology joint analysis published this spring found the more impactful risk may not be annual totals at all, but rather peaks. Cooling demand on the hottest days can spike six to ten times higher than a facility’s average draw, and researchers estimated the country’s water utilities may need $10 billion to $58 billion in new infrastructure just to keep up with those surges.
Water quality is an additional concern. Four families near Meta’s data center in Georgia have sued the company, alleging construction and operation contaminated the well water they depend on for drinking and basic living activities, according to USA TODAY. Meta said its own studies show groundwater flowing away from the properties.
Some national research points toward air as the more consistently documented hazard. A Virginia Commonwealth University study mapping 138 data centers in Virginia found nitrogen oxide emissions rose 111% between 2015 and 2023, and carbon monoxide emissions rose 196% in the same time period. A separate analysis by the nonprofit Environmental Protection Network estimated pollution created by data centers could drive up to $20.9 billion in annual added public-health costs and roughly 1,300 premature deaths by 2028.
Noise is the newest and least understood entry on the list. The constant hum from cooling equipment, fans and generators can have potentially damaging ramifications. EESI reports thousands of servers packed together can push noise to 96 decibels, well above the 85-decibel threshold for hearing damage at long or repeated exposure.
State Sen. Cathy Kipp, who represents Larimer County, said this range and scale of potential pollutants is what concerns her.
“There is a lot of different pollution that can be caused by these,” Kipp said. “Noise pollution at high levels, noise pollution at low levels, like a constant hum and a vibration. There’s light pollution; there’s air pollution that comes with the diesel generators. … There are heat islands.”
She said the variance in resource use compounds the already existing issue surrounding water access for data centers.
“The indirect water usage is probably 15 (to) 20 times more than the direct water usage,” Kipp said. “That’s the water that’s used to create the power to run the facility.” Nationally, data centers used about 4.4% of U.S. electricity in 2023; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory projects this number could climb to 11.8% by 2030 as the resources needed for AI computing scale up.
For Kipp, the underlying problem predates any one facility.
“Climate change is causing our water situation to be permanently … changed forever,” Kipp said.
Megan Kemp, a state legislative representative with Earthjustice’s Rocky Mountain Regional Office, said Colorado’s absence of a statewide framework leaves those risks to accumulate county by county.
“These large-scale data centers are expanding rapidly and having massive impacts, and elected officials have a duty to act,” Kemp said.
Reach Maci Lesh at science@collegian.com or on social media @macileshmedia.
