A video circulating on social media shows a bank of sprinklers running across a data center's lawn in Denver's Elyria-Swansea neighborhood. The resident who shot it, and who has not been named, said the water was coming down hard enough to leave a large pond standing on the grass. Denver's Board of Water Commissioners put the city on the first stage of drought restrictions in March, during one of the driest stretches in decades. Residents and businesses were asked to cut usage; lawns may now be watered two days a week, with the days assigned by address, and never between 10am and 6pm even on a permitted day. Roughly 1.5 million customers are complying. One large customer, on the evidence of the video, is not obviously among them.
The drought behind the rules is real and measured. The US Drought Monitor classifies the watershed Denver draws from as being in severe or extreme drought, and the Denver metro area itself as being in severe drought. The restrictions reported by Gadget Review are the mild version: from October 1, lawn watering in the city stops entirely until spring.
Which building appears in the video has not been confirmed. The likeliest candidate is a new CoreSite facility — CoreSite supplies infrastructure for cloud computing — rated at 18 megawatts across roughly 170,000 square feet. It recently began operating in Elyria-Swansea and had already provoked a broad argument about Denver's zoning rules before it opened. Which technology companies lease space there is not public. CoreSite has worked with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft on other projects.
Whether any rule was actually broken cannot be established from the footage. That would require the exact date and time it was filmed, neither of which is known. The site may also have been irrigating with recycled water — an approach that has already produced serious consequences in other cities.
Here is my problem with the story as it stands, and it is not a defense of the sprinklers. A lawn is the least significant thing a data center does with water. The meaningful number for a site like this is cooling draw, and nobody — not the city, not CoreSite, not the video — has produced it. Eighteen megawatts is a modest facility by the standards of the current buildout; it is also, precisely because it is modest, a useful test of whether Denver knows what its data centers consume at all. The video went viral because a pond on a lawn is legible in a way a cooling tower is not. The legible number and the important number are different numbers.
That gap is what the coverage keeps around. Nobody has asked how much water the facility uses to stay cold, or who its tenants are, or whether either figure was on the table when the zoning fight happened. A resident with a phone has produced more public information about this building's water use than the permitting process did.
From October 1 the ambiguity thins out: no lawn watering, no permitted days, no 6pm exception. If Denver data centers keep running sprinklers after that date, the city has not said how it would hold the owners to account — and the enforcement question is about to stop being hypothetical in roughly two weeks.