The city of Colorado Springs is hosting a neighborhood meeting at the Hyatt Place hotel, 503 Garden of the Gods Road, from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Tuesday to discuss a California company’s plan to build a data center along Garden of the Gods Road. 

Oakland, Calif., based Raeden, a real estate and tech firm, has been working with the city for well over a year on the project, said Jason Green, the founder of Raeden. The proposed data center would be constructed inside a former Intel microchip manufacturing plant and 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 would be demolished to make way for generators and chiller units.

The proposed data center would use roughly 50 megawatts of power per day, Green said, adding that’s half of what the building was rated to draw as a chip plant. It would 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 would use a minimal amount of water, Green said. To accomplish this, an “air-cooled closed-loop system” would be used, 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.”

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