Aakash Gupta@aakashgupta
Colorado just told 1.5 million people they can't water their lawns. The state is still green-lighting AI data centers that each drink as much water as a town of 50,000 people. Reservoirs at historic lows.
One Colorado Springs utility has 95,000 acre-feet of total water access. Ten data centers are in line asking for up to 117,000. If every project gets approved, the utility has to more than double its entire water supply. None of those data centers exist yet. The inquiries already exceed what the system holds.
On March 16, Governor Polis activated Phase 2 of the state's Drought Response Plan. First time in nearly six years. Nine days later, Denver Water declared Stage 1 drought and put mandatory watering restrictions on 1.5 million customers. First time since 2013. Federal managers ranked this year's snowpack 45th out of 46 years on record.
Two days before the Denver Water vote, the only bill that would have required data centers to publicly report water use died in a Colorado Senate committee.
The state has 56 small data centers today. QTS Realty Trust is building Colorado's first hyperscale east of Denver. It qualified to build in Aurora because city code now prohibits new evaporative cooling. Denver has no equivalent rule.
A single hyperscale pulls as much water as a town of 50,000 people for cooling. The power plants behind it pull more. On-site water use across five Western states is projected at 21,600 acre-feet by 2035. Counting upstream electricity generation, it climbs to 89,700.
Xcel projects Colorado data centers will need 8.5 gigawatts by 2040. Roughly another Denver metro's worth of power.
Global AI bought 400 acres near Windsor for a campus targeting 1,000 megawatts.
Colorado's alfalfa farms used 394 billion gallons last year. The water budget was already overdrawn before the cooling towers came online.
Disclosure was the floor. The bill still died.
