A California real estate and tech firm is planning to build a data center along Garden of the Gods Road in Colorado Springs. 

Oakland, Calif., based Raeden has been working with the city for well over a year on the project, said Jason Green, the founder of Raeden. The data center will be constructed inside a former Intel microchip manufacturing plant and will be approximately 450,000 square feet, according to documents submitted to the city.

A trio of smaller buildings situated on the campus located at 1565 High Tech Way will be demolished to make way for generators and chiller units.

The city is hosting a neighborhood meeting at the Hyatt Place hotel at 503 Garden of the Gods Road from 5:30-7 p.m. on April 7.

The proposed data center will use roughly 50 megawatts of power, Green said, adding that’s half of what the building was rated to draw as a chip plant. It will be the highest-powered data center in Colorado, exceeding the Novva facility east of the Air Force Academy by 10 megawatts, according to Data Center Map.

It will use a minimal amount of water, Green said. To accomplish this, it will use an “air-cooled closed-loop system,” he said. Other systems rely on evaporating water to keep components cool, dramatically increasing their water use.

“A closed-loop system has zero exposure to the environment. None. 
So there isn’t any evaporation,” he said. “What that means is we don’t need any water. So this system is not using any of your water.”

The center will still need water for the people inside of it, he said, but this use is orders of magnitude lower than what a water-cooled data center requires.

Data centers’ water use has become an acute concern in the infamously water-parched Mountain West. The Denver City Council and mayor’s office are united in seeking a moratorium on new data center construction.

City staff in Denver are reviewing data-center-specific regulations targeting “responsible land, energy, and water use as well as zoning and affordability for ratepayers,” The Gazette reported in February. The move also comes as residents in one Denver neighborhood protest a new data center.

In Colorado Springs, Green said the newly proposed data center may support 40-100 permanent, high paying jobs when fully built out.