By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice
Jason Green will take the hard questions. That is the pitch. The co-founder and president of Raeden says his industry has never done a good job showing up to answer for itself, so he has. “I’ve just kind of held the mantle of that,” he said. In interviews before his data center goes to the Colorado Springs City Council, he made himself available for whatever anyone wanted to throw at him.
Whether that adds up to a new way of building data centers, or a well-argued case for a project a lot of his neighbors still do not want, is the question Colorado Springs has to settle on Sept. 17.
The project
Project Taurus would put an artificial intelligence data center in the old Intel chip plant at 1565 High Tech Way, off Garden of the Gods Road on the city’s northwest side, next to the roughly 200 homes of Chelsea Glen. The site is zoned industrial. Raeden wants to retrofit the existing building rather than pour a new one, a model the company calls adaptive reuse. Raeden leases the building and does not name its client, but Green offered a partial description in an interview: a single tenant that will serve “elements of the military, the government, and security in Colorado Springs,” which he qualified as “what we’re understanding from them.”
The city Planning Department approved it on June 11, on a track that skipped a public hearing. Residents appealed. That forced a Planning Commission hearing on July 23 that ran more than 14 hours and drew hundreds of people, with more than 100 signed up to speak against the project and 13 in support. The commission denied the appeals 6-2 and attached conditions. Opponents appealed again. Now the City Council votes on Sept. 17, starting at 9 a.m. at the Pikes Peak Center.
Water
The loudest fear in a dry state is water. A large data center that cools by evaporation can pull up to 5 million gallons a day, enough for a town of tens of thousands. Industry estimates put the share of data centers worldwide relying primarily on water-based cooling at roughly 75 to 90%; among large water-cooled facilities, open-loop evaporative systems remain common.
Green says Taurus will not. The design is closed-loop, which recirculates the same water instead of evaporating it off. He says the challenges he gets on this often come from people who have read that closed-loop systems still lose water. “Closed is closed,” he said. “It’s not exposed to the air. There’s nothing evaporating.” He puts the one-time fill at about 200,000 gallons and the ongoing cooling draw at zero. The old Intel use entitled the building to draw a million gallons a day, and Green says he gave that up. “We told the city we’ll sign an agreement that we don’t want it,” he said. “I’m not going to use it anyway.”
The scale of the difference is consistent with published industry examples. Vantage Data Centers, which Green co-founded before Raeden, published a comparison: a closed-loop campus at peak uses around 22,000 gallons a day, about 65 homes’ worth, against 5 million for an evaporative campus of similar size. The caution worth keeping is that “zero” is a design claim. “Closed-loop” describes how the coolant circulates, not how the building sheds the heat; some designs still reject heat with evaporative equipment, so the label alone does not guarantee zero ongoing water. Taurus is designed to avoid that. It is a promise about how a not-yet-built system will run, not a meter reading.
Power, and the bill question
The second fear is the utility bill. Green’s answer here is narrower than the one that gets thrown around in the national data center debate, and the difference is worth pinning down.
He does not claim Taurus will lower anyone’s bill. He claims it will not touch them. Under a large-load tariff Colorado Springs Utilities built for customers over 10 megawatts, Raeden would sit on a separate billing and contract track. “What that means is that we pay for everything,” Green said. “If we need new infrastructure, we have to pay for it.” Asked what a Chelsea Glen family would see, he said, “We have zero impact whatsoever on their bills. Nothing.”
He credits the structure, not his own goodwill. Colorado Springs Utilities is a municipal nonprofit owned by the city. “By developing a large load and carving us off from the rest of the user base, they have protected the customers,” Green said. He draws the contrast with for-profit utilities in places like Ohio, where he says ratepayers can end up subsidizing the build-out. “If you go to your utility and they do not have a large load tariff or a data center tariff agreement, you probably have a problem,” he said. “In Colorado Springs, it’s not a risk at all in any way, shape, or form.”
The reassurance rides on two things holding. The tariff has to work the way it is described, and the arrangement has to be signed. As Raeden pitches it, the facility would draw 50 megawatts, and Green says that is all Colorado Springs Utilities offered him, not a number he chose. Appellants have argued the real figure is higher, pointing to earlier plan documents they say describe a larger build-out; Green calls that a misreading. Either way, the 50-megawatt ceiling is now one of the conditions the Planning Commission bolted on, so it is both the limit he was given and a limit the city can hold him to unless he returns for more.
None of it changes the pressure residents already feel. Across Xcel territory, which Colorado Springs is not part of, state regulators have modeled residential rate increases of up to 55% by 2029 compared with 2024 levels, with data centers driving much of the new demand. Green’s case is that a municipal utility and a large-load tariff wall his project off from that story. That case is sound only as far as the tariff and the contract turn out to be.
Noise, and what the city made him monitor
The neighbors’ fear of noise did not come from nowhere. A Bitcoin mine ran on the site before Raeden, with exposed fans, and Green knows he inherited its reputation. “We’re like the good boyfriend coming in after the bad boyfriend,” he said. “And they’re like, yeah, do you remember what the last guy did?”
Green is most animated on sound, because it is where he thinks fear has run furthest ahead of fact. He backs requiring a third-party sound study. He also says the specific worry driving much of the opposition is overblown. “A lot of this concern about these, quote, low-frequency noises is absolutely non-scientific,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean that you still can’t be prudent.”
The city did not treat that concern as settled. Among the commission’s conditions was a requirement that Raeden add dB(C) monitoring, which picks up more low-frequency sound than the standard dB(A) measure, to its noise reporting, along with the 50-megawatt cap, ten years of utility-use reporting, and one replaced plan sheet. Green calls the underlying low-frequency fear unscientific. The commission still ordered him to measure for it.
What he agreed to is unusual on its own terms. In July, Green says, Raeden signed a contract with the city, backed by a $1 million bond, obligating the company to build and run sound monitoring at the property line and publish the data publicly every month. If Raeden fails to fix a problem, he says, the city can call the bond and make the company pay for the remediation. “No data center company in the U.S. has ever done that,” Green said. He says the city first floated a three-year term and he pushed it to ten, so no one could accuse him of running out the clock. That account of who pushed for what is his, as are the contract’s terms as described here; the signed agreement is the document that would confirm them.
The rules he says he wants
Asked what regulations belong on data centers, Green named several. Mandate closed-loop cooling, he said, and a city can protect its water without killing the project. “You could mandate, for example, a minimum of a closed-loop cooling system, and you can cover the majority of data center developments and not be obstructed. You’re now protecting your water rights.”
On power, he wants the tariff structure written into the rules, with a hard line between what a data center pays and what everyone else does. “There should be a bifurcation, a clear and auditable bifurcation between the use of power for a data center and any other user in that district,” he said. “Your rate should never be impacted negatively by what I do.” He also backs requiring a third-party sound study of any project.
What he is asking cities to require largely matches the way Raeden says it already builds. A closed-loop mandate and a large-load tariff would not require Project Taurus to change those parts of its current design and utility arrangement. They would raise the floor for competitors who do not build the way he does.
What Green says the city gets
Ask Green what Colorado Springs gains and he starts with the concrete and works toward the soft. First is tax revenue, which he calls automatic. Then jobs. He waves off the complaint that a data center does not employ many people. “A hundred jobs is a lot of jobs,” he said, and he frames them as permanent, high-paying, and teaching skills that outlast any one building. “Now you have a job for life,” he said, “and in the world of concerned impermanence about certain jobs with AI, this is very different.”
The dollar figures come from an economic study Raeden commissioned from Ryan, LLC. It projects up to $286 million in sales and use tax in year one and about $1.2 million a year in property tax beginning in 2029. On jobs, the study counts 95 direct permanent operating positions and 600 direct construction jobs; its larger headline numbers, 245 permanent and 1,650 construction, are “jobs supported,” a figure that adds indirect and induced employment modeled across the region. The tax figures come with their own qualifications. Ryan did not independently verify all project assumptions, schedules, investment amounts or operational characteristics Raeden supplied; over the first five years, the study attributes $415.7 million of $450.2 million in projected sales and use taxes to the unnamed tenant rather than to Raeden; and the property-tax figure, by the study’s own caution, includes taxes tied to both the site’s existing and its new taxable value and “should not be interpreted as all net new tax revenue.” When that property-tax number surfaced at the hearing with the D11 school district’s name near it, district staff called it the speaker’s estimate, not a district projection.
Then there is the part Green clearly enjoys most. A former teacher, he talks about the data center as an anchor for local trades and schools. He describes a maintenance chain of local vendors that all have to hire, and an education push he says is already underway, including outreach to local schools and planned internships at the site. He also points to his past work helping junior colleges build data-center programs and curricula, and to a standing offer to the city’s Tech Magnet School to send his staff in to talk to students. “You have all of us,” he said he told them. How much of that materializes is a promise about the future.
Listening, and spending
On one point the record backs Green up: he changed the project in response to the people who did not want it. When Chelsea Glen residents asked him to move the backup generators away from their side of the site, he says Raeden “had to go through and completely re-engineer our entire design,” and did it. The company’s own project page documents the generator yard moving to the north side, with the building placed between the generators and the homes.
The city’s own June review credited Raeden with revising the application to deal with noise and light pollution to meet code. Green points to online sessions with Chelsea Glen leaders and a run of community meetings, some of them loud, and says he keeps showing up for the hard questions. He frames the signed agreements as the proof. “I think that we have walked the walk,” he said. He contrasts that with developers who “are now trying to buy people off” with a playground here, an endowed fund there. “We’re interested in doing that stuff too, but we want to be embedded.” On the showing-up count, the record agrees with him.
What Sept. 17 decides
Some of what Green describes is already done, by his account: the sound contract and the bond. The rest, the data center itself and the power arrangement under it, waits on the council.
The appellants are not only arguing water, noise, and rates. Their lawyer told the commission a change this large should never have qualified for a staff-level administrative approval in the first place. Residents have pressed for a pause. “A deliberate pause is needed for the city to understand how a hyperscale data center will cost the people that they’re meant to protect,” said Kate Kent, a Chelsea Glen resident and one of the lead appellants, at the hearing. That is the argument the council will weigh alongside everything Raeden has put on the table.
Green thinks he has built something other developers have not, and he is not shy about saying so. “We’re willing to stand up and lead,” he said. “If I’ve got to be the guy that’s speaking to it, that’s showing that we’re going to walk the walk.” Many of the neighbors think a 50-megawatt building belongs somewhere other than the end of their street. Both things can be true. The council gets to decide which one wins.