Building data centers in Colorado: Do the economic benefits outweigh the environmental costs?

In The NOCO

In 2025, artificial intelligence gives us personalized shopping recommendations. It writes emails for us. And all those quick tasks require lightning-fast computing and huge amounts of data. Which is why tech companies like Microsoft and Amazon are building massive data centers around the country.

Some state lawmakers have proposed incentives for companies that want to build data centers in Colorado. They say the facilities will create jobs and tax revenue – and that Colorado is competing with other states for that economic boost.
But skeptics point out that data centers use enormous amounts of electricity and water, which strains power grids and water supplies.

To sort through the economic benefits and the environmental costs, we reached out to Vijay Gadepally. He's a senior scientist at MIT who researches high performance computing and artificial intelligence. He’s also the chief technology officer of an AI cloud computing company that hopes to build a data center in Colorado.

He talked with Erin O'Toole about why some people think Colorado’s a good place to build more data centers, and how they work.

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Host and Producer: Erin O'Toole
Producer: Ariel Lavery
Executive Producer: Brad Turner
Theme music by Robbie Reverb
Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions
In The NoCo is a production of KUNC News and Community Radio for Northern Colorado.