AURORA | Residents of The Reserve, a local senior housing community, and the surrounding Windler and Green Valley Ranch neighborhoods are coming together to oppose what would be Colorado’s largest data center.
Neighborhood organizers plan to have about 100 people attend Monday’s Aurora City Council meeting to voice their concerns and disagreement with the planned Trident data center, located at 23001 East 48th Ave in northeast Aurora.
Planning documents show the Trident data center will be around 860,000 square feet and located in Airport District zoning, which allows data centers as a use by right, which means the project can be approved administratively by the city without a public hearing, unless the project is requesting a variance.
While Trident is not requesting a variance, city spokesperson Jennifer Soules said the city is working with the developer, Vantage Data Centers, to schedule a community meeting, but a date has not yet been set.
A development application and site plan for the data center were first submitted in August 2025 and the project is on its third round of reviews, according to the city.
Neighborhood opposition has grown swiftly, with a local town hall on Sept. 22 drawing about 150 people, while a Change.org petition against the project has more than 2,500 signatures.
Ray Czaplewski, a resident of The Reserve whose home will be about a quarter-mile from the data center, said he found out about the project just two weeks ago from his neighbors. Czaplewski described feeling appalled and betrayed when he found out about the data center.
“We were blindsided by it,” he said. “Never in our wildest dreams would we expect our city government to be complacent with putting in a hyperscale data center literally right next to residential areas.”
Czaplewski said he has a lot of unanswered questions and he raised concerns about noise, air pollution and the toll of the facility on water and energy resources. He also disapproves of the city’s development process allowing data centers without public hearings or notification.
“The use by right categorization in the airport district is designed to be opaque,” Czaplewski said. “If we had known a year ago and knew the magnitude of this, we could have started working with Vantage.”
Czaplewski and other residents want the city to require a fourth review period to ensure all of the concerns are mitigated. Should they not be addressed, the group is considering legal action for possible damages to health and property values, Czaplewski said.
Vantage’s Misty Allen, vice president of public policy for North America, said the company is planning more community outreach as the project moves into construction, including neighborhood meetings and a public website where construction updates will be shared.
“It’s perfectly reasonable when people have questions of new developments coming into their community and it’s our commitment that we will be having open community conversations as the design for the project moves forward,” Allen said. “All of that engagement will start to kick off as the project moves forward, so we’re just at the beginning of this.”
Allen said the meetings will include subject matter experts to answer questions and connect residents to company representatives.
“We’re going to be here for the long-term, so it’s important for folks to get to know the new neighbor in town and to make sure that we have that relationship,” Allen said.
In response to concerns from the community, Allen said the facility will have setbacks which will provide at least a 350-foot buffer from homes, as well as a brick wall and water-wise landscaping surrounding the property. Aurora also restricts the noise level at data centers to the same level as other businesses, with different allowances based on zoning and time.
The data center is expected to use 334 megawatts of energy for computing capacity, which would be more than twice the state’s current largest data center — the 160 megawatt QTS facility, also in Aurora. The facility would use a closed-loop cooling system, which is less water intensive than other cooling systems, and it’s expected to have 28 emergency generators, as well as battery energy storage, Allen said.
“(The generators are) far less than what you would see in a comparable size data center because we’re using the battery storage as well,” Allen said. “We definitely took into consideration how we can be most efficient in this environment.”
Allen said Aurora attracted Vantage’s attention because of a combination of fiber connectivity, power supply and a skilled local workforce. While she said the company is still figuring out the exact number of jobs the facility will ultimately support, the project will employ roughly 1,500 people at peak construction.
The first phase of the project is scheduled to be online in the last quarter of 2028, with construction slated for completion in 2029, Allen said. The facility will be Vantage’s first data center in Colorado, though the company is headquartered in Denver.
Under an agreement with the city approved in June 2025, Vantage could receive up to $38.9 million in tax incentives over 10 years if the facility provides 50 jobs at a minimum salary level. Soules said the incentives are given annually after the company submits a report showing they meet the requirements and if they have not been met, the incentives are not paid out.
Following the 2025 city council election, the council has been less friendly to data centers and is currently considering several regulations for future facilities, including a ban on evaporative cooling systems, a moratorium on data center tax incentives and a buffer around residential areas. None of the regulations would apply to the Trident data center.
Is there opposition to growing traffic on nearby E-470 and nearby Denver International Airport’s busy final approach to runway 35 Left?
Can the facility be obscured by trees and shrubbery on man-made “hills” around its periphery?