Denver’s City Council declared a moratorium this week on the city’s proliferating data centers amid mounting public fears — largely unfounded but stoked by activist groups. 

Just down the road in Colorado Springs, meanwhile, plans have been unveiled for a large data center that, ironically, moots all the same fears that have been raised in Denver — and that are being recycled incessantly around the country. 

Oft-cited concerns about data center water and power use as well as noise? Not a problem at Colorado Springs’ proposed Project Taurus. The same goes for calls for transparency surrounding data center startup and operation. 

It turns out the center, slated to open in a decades-old, former Intel chip plant, will use at most half the electricity the site originally was rated to draw. It also will pay a large-load tariff to Colorado Springs Utilities, a separate assessment ensuring other ratepayers won’t be affected. Its use of water, needed to cool extensive IT infrastructure, is limited by a closed-loop system that stops evaporation. Fill it once, and it’s done, and it’s the industry trend. Noise? Only 49dBA. As far as transparency, the project’s developers have convened concerned citizens in community meetings to sound out sentiments and answer questions.

How could the elected leaders in Colorado’s largest city overreact the way they did to public panic — when a textbook case that could allay their fears is pending just 67 miles away? 

Probably for the same reason posts on your favorite social media platform seem to regurgitate the doomsaying about data centers — drawing ample likes and thumbs-up — despite the absence of actual doom. Meaning, data centers appear to be the new political football.

Indeed, the hysteria was hatched in the political sphere, as the editorial board of our sister publication, The Washington Examiner, observed last week. The crusade was spawned and propagated, The Examiner notes, on the political left. It’s a go-to for avowed socialists such as Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. And it’s a surefire fundraiser for national activist groups such as Indivisible, the Sierra Club and Americans for Financial Reform. 

Since then, however, the fears have spread like wildfire across Middle America and now cut across party lines. The Examiner cites the latest Gallup poll showing 71% of Americans oppose data centers in their communities. 

And yet, the fears have yet to bear fruit — and appear to be the stuff of urban mythology. As The Examiner also points out, a  2026 Institute for Energy Research analysis found the price of electricity in the 10 states with the heaviest presence of data centers averaged 14.46 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2025, practically the same as the 14.39 cents average in the other 40 states. As for the widely presumed impact on jobs by the artificial intelligence that data centers support, Yale’s Budget Lab found no statistically or economically significant effect of AI on employment or wages.

The reality is that data centers are opening nationwide because they are essential to AI as well as to incoming quantum computing. It represents the latest and most dynamic stage yet of the Digital Age. Which means data centers not only provide economic development for any community — contributing to the tax base, among other benefits — but they also sustain AI development and use, on which we increasingly rely.

The general public is being misguided, to be sure. But it hardly can be blamed when its political leadership bows to prevailing political winds instead of standing up for the facts.