Denver establishes a data center advisory group as the city extends its moratorium on new data center permits.

Denver's mayor and city council announced a 26-member working group of citizens and experts tasked with developing policy recommendations on data center growth, signaling that the city's current building moratorium could be extended.

The City Council approved the one-year moratorium in May following mounting opposition from residents in Denver's Elyria-Swansea neighborhood to a 600,000-square-foot data center under construction by CoreSite. Residents and advocates in Globeville and Elyria-Swansea have pointed to decades of disproportionate pollution exposure from Interstate 25 traffic, the Suncor refinery, former Superfund sites, the Purina plant, and other industrial operations.

The scrutiny over data center siting extends across the Front Range, where communities are launching their own debates about whether and how to accommodate massive proposals. Brighton's City Council approved its own one-year data center ban on Tuesday night, responding to protests against a 2.5 million square foot proposal in the northern part of the city that extends into Weld County; a council member reported that application had been withdrawn. In Weld County, opponents are circulating petitions for a public vote on a ban after commissioners rezoned land near Windsor for a large Global AI data center in an unincorporated area. Aurora, Colorado Springs, and several other municipalities are also weighing data center rezonings and potential moratoriums. Data centers that received permits in Denver before May remain unaffected by the moratorium.

"It will be Denver, not corporations, that decide if and how data centers may operate in our city," Mayor Mike Johnston said in a statement accompanying the appointments. City officials reported that more than 250 people had expressed interest in joining the panel. "This group brings together people with different perspectives to help us get this right: setting clear rules, protecting Denver's resources, and putting the interests of Denverites first," Johnston added.