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A Data Center Story
From a reader
Scott H attended a meeting about a possible AI data center in Denver, and sent a report. I’ve added a couple of comments at the end, including a link to why nobody should ever believe a poll from David Shor.
Our weasily city councilman, Darrell Watson, convened a community meeting last night
ostensibly to “address concerns” about a data center that’s under construction in the Globeville Elyria-Swansea (GES) neighborhood in Denver:
For those of you unfamiliar with GES, 120-140 years ago, it was the area where all the smelters, drill-making factories, etc., associated with Colorado’s extractive industries during the First Gilded Age, were located. As you have guessed, it’s residents were the day’s minorities: Irish, Eastern Europeans, etc., who lived in a shit area doing shit work. Even as they were replaced starting in the 30s and 40s with a predominately Hispanic community, the pollution and industrial activities Denver’s elites wanted were put there. It remains one of the most polluted zip codes in the US.
As you can imagine, when word got out that an extractive industry associated with the SecondGilded Age was under construction there, a data center, longtime residents started making it known until it reached a level where their city councilman, the aforementioned weasel (who none of them voted for—his constituency are the entitled white colonizer/gentrifiers who’ve flocked here in the last decade) decided he needed to appear responsive to his district and convened this community meeting.
He had a host of people on a panel, most representing various City departments but also one rep from our hated utility company, Xcel. Most notably absent was the company building the data center, CoreSite, and anybody from Mayo Mikey’s [Denver Mayor Mike Johnston’s] office.
The crowd was probably at least 300 people, so many that they had some in an overflow room and as many outside looking thru the windows into the meeting room. Darrell made sure there were cops and fire department people there for “crowd control”. It sent a message to a community that was overwhelmingly Hispanic.
Darrell opened the meeting by going into detail about how CoreSite was able to purchase the land and basically do what they wanted with it because of “old” zoning that provided “by right” rights to build something like a data center. As he put it “This never came before City Council” with a strong inference that City Council never actually knew about it.
He repeated that litany constantly; he’s clearly a proud graduate of the Lando Calirissian School of Management. [Star Wars reference: Lando says “they told me they fixed it” when the hyperdrive didn’t work.]

The crowd had questions about health, water and utility costs and the amount of bureaucratic weasel-speak, particularly by the Xcel rep, was really impressive. And that’s coming from a Club Fed employee of 38+ years, I knoweth what I see.
He proudly announced that because of CC’s “tied hands”, ie., no regulations, thus we can’t stop anything, that morning they’d implemented a ‘moratorium’:
Darrell Lando then explained that CC simply needed time to craft all this great regulation that would take care of everybody’s concerns. When Q&A started, however, it was clear that nobody up there was either going to provide specific answers to questions (like electricity rates) or talk in anything but generalities.
It also became clear when discussion got down into the local electric sub-station level, that developments of one that had originally been stated to be for affordable housing projects (that have never come to fruition) were all along slated for this data center that supposedly CC never knew about.
But then they slipped. Somebody asked why wasn’t some kind of zoning something-or-other wasn’t considered when the property was being offered for sale to CoreSite because that notification would have gone to CC. That’s when another CC person (and another of my neighbors like Darrell Lando) got up and admitted that they’d seen it but being swamped with work, didn’t act on it. To her credit, she said “That’s on me”, really the only elected official who’s taken even a scrap of ownership on this political clusterfuck.
Finally, the former CC person that Darrell Lando ousted in the last election pointed out the circular logic of what was being said, how saying CoreSite would share proprietary corporate data was a laughable concept and then stated what everybody wanted to hear: “What will trigger CC to ban future data center builds?”
No answer was ever given but we were told repeatedly how this ‘moratorium’ would allow CC to craft the greatest regulations to assuage everybody’s concerns.
The man either couldn’t or wouldn’t read the room. Again, it’s the area of his district that
overwhelmingly didn’t vote for him in 2023. As more Q&A became pissed-off statements from residents, the ‘fucks’ began to be used like commas. And when he tried to make some closing statements, the assembled masses would have none of it and started chanting “SHUT IT DOWN! SHUT IT DOWN!”
To be honest, a lot of the more nuanced aspects of the negatives surrounding data centers weren’t discussed. Instead, it was a neighborhood that for 140 years has born the brunt of the shit that Denver’s economic elites benefit from and were letting one of our more odious CC people have it with both barrels, the optics just from that perspective were awful.
How it plays out city-wide remains to be seen. My hope is somebody picks up on the massive spike in electricity bills associated with data centers. Hell, Goldman Sachs posted just last week an economic note on this and it wasn’t pretty.
Clearly, the data center advocates are working hard in Denver, and everywhere else, to bullshit about the consequences of having a data center. And guess who’s helping: David Shor, the pollster to the consultant class. Here’s a piece on him juking a poll to advocate for data centers.


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