Denver City Council has unanimously approved a one-year moratorium on new data center construction that takes effect Thursday, and the pause arrives with one project already exempted: the CoreSite facility going up in the Globeville, Elyria and Swansea neighborhoods, where residents have spent about a year opposing it.
City leaders said the exemption rests on how far that build has progressed, with completion scheduled for later this summer, and on approvals already issued to the developer, Denver7 reports. The carve-out is narrower than it first looks. Any subsequent phase of the same project would come to a halt for the duration of the moratorium, so the exemption covers the concrete already poured rather than the site.
Over the next twelve months the council will convene a task force to study the impacts of data centers and draft stronger regulations. That is the part worth watching, because the pause is a deadline for writing rules rather than a decision about them.
Regulation in Colorado is largely absent today. The city and county of Denver puts the share of Colorado municipalities with no data center specific regulations at 71 percent, which is the gap the task force has a year to close. CoreSite says nearly 50 data centers already operate in the Denver metro area, run by dozens of companies, and characterizes the moratorium as a matter for future development rather than for its own building.
Nearly 60 residents spoke during Monday night's public comment period, according to Denver7, with health effects and water use the recurring themes.
A much smaller council moved the same night. Cave City, Kentucky voted four to one to approve the first of two required readings of a moratorium that would block data center permit applications for one year, WBKO reports. The second and final reading is set for Wednesday, May 20 at 5 p.m., and the moratorium would take effect for a year if it passes.
Councilman Denny Doyle cast the only vote against, and his objection was to the framing rather than to regulation as such. Doyle said, "I obviously believe that these data centers are two-thirds good and one-third bad, and they believe obviously the opposite of this." The measure blocks permit applications rather than work already permitted, so its reach depends on what arrives at the counter during the year.
Councilmember Leticia Cline, who voted for it, framed the vote as part of a wider coordination among Kentucky towns and said she hoped that "maybe we can get a statewide moratorium and eventually get ahead of all this." A statewide measure would change the siting calculus considerably more than a municipal one, since it would remove the option of moving a project one county over.
For operators and their site selection teams, the operative detail is that Denver's exemption follows construction progress and issued approvals rather than project ownership, which means a phased campus can be split down the middle by a pause of this kind. Buyers holding capacity commitments in either market should establish which phase their contracted space sits in before assuming an existing approval carries the whole site.
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