By the time Spring arrived in 2026, my Warren Lake neighbors and I had pretty much resigned ourselves to leaving our kayaks and paddleboards in the garage for the rest of the year.
The 2025-2026 winter snowpack was the lowest on record, and that statement is about as well-documented as things get. The USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service has been tracking “snow water equivalents” for over 20 years, and 2026 has been the lowest year since tracking began. You can look more closely at the data for Colorado at this site, but I’ve copied the most telling graph below.
The lack of snowpack meant that the Cache la Poudre River was running low. In Fort Collins, the ditch companies, which were described in my earlier post about irrigation ditches, had to carefully observe water rights before they could open key canals that delivered water to lakes, farms and businesses across Northern Colorado.
For many neighbors, it was the first time the mechanics of Colorado water law stopped being an abstraction and became personal. Where does our water actually come from? Who controls it? And what happens in a dry year when there isn’t enough to go around?
Those questions are about to get a lot more complicated.
Across Colorado and the broader American West, a new kind of water user is arriving — one that doesn’t grow crops, doesn’t fill swimming pools, and doesn’t show up on any city water plan written before 2020.
Data Centers.
What Are Data Centers?
Data Centers are the physical infrastructure behind artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and everything your phone does. There are extensive plans to build them in Colorado and elsewhere, at a pace that outruns public understanding, which is different than the awareness that often drives fear. The demand for computing power is also outrunning governments and regulatory frameworks.
“Data center” is a broad term that covers facilities of various scales. Most of us have been aware for years that there are “server rooms” in our office buildings, or that, when you choose a hosting service for your website, they have “server farms” used by multiple people. “Data center” is now the term used to cover all of these, as well as the newly emerging town-sized centers that everyone is talking about.
There are at least five main types of data centers: enterprise, colocation, hyperscale, edge and managed. I’ve seen other types cited, and this overview by Cisco is really helpful. For the purposes of this discussion, the table below covers the types we’ll discuss.
| Type | What It Is | Example | Size | Water Impact |
| Enterprise | A private facility owned and operated by a single organization for its own IT needs | A hospital’s or bank’s internal server facility | Small to medium | Low — usually serves one building or campus |
| Colocation (“Colo”) | A shared facility where multiple companies rent space, power, and cooling | A regional tech hub where dozens of companies house their servers | Medium to large | Moderate — shared infrastructure, varies by cooling type |
| Hyperscale | Massive facilities owned by major cloud and AI companies, built for enormous workloads | Google, Amazon, and Microsoft data centers | Very large-often 100+ acres | Potentially high — depends heavily on cooling technology |
| AI-Optimized | A newer category purpose-built for artificial intelligence computing, often using advanced liquid cooling | GlobalAI’s proposed Windsor facility (keep reading!) | Varies | Lower than traditional hyperscale if liquid-cooled |
How Much Water Do Data Centers Need?
The truth is, nobody’s sure.
Water consumption data for data centers is not reported in accordance with any specific standard. That makes it difficult to find and verify information on how much water data centers consume. Further, where they are placed (which climate zone), how well they are managed, and multiple other factors affect their water demand.
Even coming up with an average is difficult, because, as reported by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in June 2025, water consumption per unit of computing work (in kilowatt hours) can vary by a factor of more than 10,000 depending on the facility and workload.
Some companies have produced their own figures on water usage. For example, Equinix operated 268 data centers in 2024, and reported withdrawing 1.4 billion gallons of water. 85% of that was “consumed”, meaning it was not able to be reused. One can calculate from these figures that their data centers withdrew ~5.2 million gallons/year/data center.
In their 2025 Environmental report, Google reported that their Council Bluffs, Iowa data center required ~2.7 million gallons/day. That is a hyperscale facility example, and in the same report Google states that their average is to withdraw ~550,000 gallons/day/data center. Over the same period Google took measures to replenish water: 4.5 billion gallons in 2024.
That last sentence reflects a new trend. Water is now treated like carbon credits, for those familiar. If you use a lot of water, you can take measures to restore water through other activities, to offset your overall environmental impact. In Google’s case, they claim their replenishment activities covered about 64% of their freshwater consumption.
So for the purposes of this discussion, it’s useful to think about the range of what a data center could require. I decided to go with the non-partisan Environment and Energy Study Institute’s estimates:
- 110 million gallons/year for a medium data center like a co-location center. This is on par with 1000 households/year.
- 5 million gallons per day for large data centers, or 1.8 billion gallons annually. That’s equivalent to a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people.
Putting Data Center Water Demand In Perspective
I don’t really have a mental frame of reference for a number like “110 million gallons/year,” and I certainly can’t get my head around 5 million gallons per day. So I decided to build the table below to frame the numbers in a way I can grasp them.
| Water User | Estimated daily use (gallons per day) |
| City of Fort Collins | ~23 million at peak season |
| Subdivision of 500 new homes | ~750,000 |
| Collindale Golf course | ~300,000 during irrigation season |
| Typical enterprise data center | 300,000-500,000 |
| Hyperscale data center (air-cooled) | 1-5 million |
Digging a little deeper into Fort Collins, the City treats and delivers over 8 billion gallons/year. About 53% is used by residential customers, and the rest by commercial and industrial customers. Per capita, it averages out to about 100-130 gal/person/day depending upon season. Fort Collins can actually treat up to 87 million gallons each day. So if we’re only using about 25% of the treatment plant’s capacity.
So, we should be fine, right?
Therein lies the rub. Water supply in Northern Colorado (or anywhere in Colorado, really) is not as simple as turning on the tap. It is a complex system of river flows, storage reservoirs, water rights, and ditch company agreements that took more than a century to build — and that is increasingly stressed by warming temperatures, drought, and growing demand.
Data centers are one new source of that demand. New housing developments are another. Water-intensive industries, from manufacturing to food processing, are a third.
The question Fort Collins residents should be asking isn’t whether data centers are uniquely bad — it’s how any new large-scale water user fits into a regional system that is already being strained.
That bigger picture — the Colorado River, the prior appropriation system, and what Western water scarcity means for property values across the region — is a conversation we’ll be having in future posts.
For the topic at hand, let’s look at how the data center question is now playing out in our own back yard.
How Will Data Centers Affect Fort Collins?
Colorado and Data Centers
If you’re interested enough to have read this far, then it’s likely you’ve already heard or read about how our state is grappling with the data center water demand challenge. You might not realize, though, that Colorado already has 56 data centers (https://www.datacentermap.com/).
Colorado entered 2026 with two competing visions for how to handle data center development, and ended the legislative session having enacted neither.
The first, House Bill 1030, would have offered data center developers a 20-to-30-year sales and use tax exemption to attract large-scale facilities to Colorado. Fort Collins Democrat Senator Cathy Kipp was a proponent of a competing measure, Senate Bill 102. SB102 sought to impose environmental regulations on data center water and energy use before any incentives were granted.
Both bills failed, as described in this article by The Colorado Sun.
That leaves decisions largely to counties and municipalities, for now. That is now playing out in a very real way in our region, where Weld and Larimer Counties have very different feelings about data centers.
Two Counties, Two Approaches to Data Centers
In 2025, Global AI purchased 438 acres near Windsor (Weld County), with the intention of developing an AI-optimized data center. You can read more about Global AI and their announcement in this 2026 article at Data Centre Dynamics (DCD), which is emerging as a leading Data Center trade organization.
The site sits in unincorporated Weld County, squarely between the Town of Windsor and the City of Greeley. Weld County Commissioners voted to allow data centers in industrial zones as long as they meet certain conditions, including noise limits. Weld County has framed data center development as economic diversification — reducing dependence on the boom-and-bust cycles of oil and gas revenue.
The Global AI facility is projected to use roughly the equivalent of a single household’s annual water consumption, according to a statement by Weld County’s planning director, as he told CBS Colorado.
I have to admit, that seems like a dubious claim. I looked for more information on Global AI for possible reference. They have a facility in Endicott, NY, but the water consumption is not publicly disclosed. Based on its power consumption, though, it could require anywhere from 150,000-800,000 gallons/day of water.
But I also must concede that I don’t have any information to dispute the one household claim. The data center industry is developing so fast, that it’s not inconceivable that Global AI may have a novel water conservation approach.
That’s a chance that Larimer County, at the same time, was not willing to take.
Following a public hearing in February 2026, the Larimer County Board of Commissioners voted to extend a temporary moratorium on data center facilities in unincorporated areas until August 25, 2026, giving staff time to develop land use regulations addressing water consumption and power usage. The county actively solicited input through June 12, 2026.
So, why does it matter whether these counties approach this differently?
Developers working with Global AI are evaluating annexation into either Greeley or Windsor to secure water and other municipal services. Greeley draws its municipal water supply from multiple basins including the Cache la Poudre River — the same river that flows through Fort Collins before reaching Greeley downstream.
So developers may have cleared construction hurdles in Weld County, but might encounter new hurdles or delays in Larimer County, since the Global AI site may draw on water systems shared with Fort Collins and the broader Poudre basin.
Key Points About Data Centers For Fort Collins
Data Centers, to me, are like fossil fuels. We all use them, no matter how we feel about them.
But perhaps, given what we know now about how our dependency upon fossil fuels developed over the years, we have an opportunity to approach data centers differently. There are three things I think we all need to keep in mind.
1. The City can measure water usage
First, we need to have a means to verify water consumption claims, and to hold facilities accountable to limits. As we saw in several places in this blog, it’s difficult to get a handle on the numbers. However the water suppliers would be the most reliable and independent source of consumption information.
2. Engage local government on the issue
Second, concerned Fort Collins residents should follow the conversation at https://engage.larimer.gov/. It’s important that we all stay actively engaged on this topic. I’m not suggesting that one needs to take a side for or against data centers. Rather, I’m suggesting that we must contribute to the conversation in a thoughtful way that allows our communities to both benefit from data centers, while making them safe to have in our back yard.
3. It’s not just about water use, it’s also about waste water
There’s also the wastewater side of water use, which we haven’t touched yet. Data centers don’t just consume water — they discharge it. Cooling tower blowdown, water treatment reject streams, and other process effluents all require management. Federal discharge permitting applies, as it does for any industrial discharger. But whether existing frameworks are adequate for the scale and pace of data center development is an open question.
More to Come on Data Centers from the FoCo Free Agent
I plan to explore data center wastewater and similar topics in a series of posts coming soon:
- What are the wastewater implications of data centers?
- Water reuse: could data centers actually become part of the solution?
- The bigger picture: Colorado River, prior appropriation, and what Western water scarcity means for property values in communities like ours.
If you have a water-related topic, about data centers or anything else, that you’d like me to investigate please let me know!