This article is part of our occasional series Life Under Threat, where we share the stories of families whose health has been put at risk by polluting industry, from AI data centers to “advanced recycling” plastics incinerators to oil and gas operations.
Alfonso Espino was born and raised in Elyria and Swansea, adjacent neighborhoods in northeast Denver, Colorado. The second of eight children, he grew up mostly in his grandfather’s house in Elyria, and much of his family still lives nearby. “It’s the only place we know as home,” he says. That’s why he joined the staff of the GES Coalition, a community organization serving Elyria and Swansea as well as a neighborhood called Globeville. The coalition was formed 10 years ago to protect local families in this historically exploited area. These days, the GES Coalition is fighting the encroachment of Big Tech in the form of a massive three-building, fossil-fuel-powered CoreSite data center campus. This is Alfonso’s story of resistance.
Tell Congress: Protect Families From Dangerous Data Center Air Pollution
As told to Julie Kimmel by Alfonso Espino:
I serve as a staff lead organizer for the GES Coalition, an organization that came out of our neighborhoods’ struggle against displacement and gentrification due to the Central I-70 redevelopment. Our communities are overburdened by pollution. All three of the neighborhoods that we work in are surrounded by freeways and trains. We have the BNSF railyard in Globeville and the Union Pacific Railroad yard in Elyria. These are massive operations that already bring a lot of pollution just from the trains. We also have the Suncor oil refinery just north of Swansea.
The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment reports that we’re in the 90th percentile or above for exposure to diesel emissions because of the freeways and heavy industry around us. We have the highest rates of asthma in the city. We have higher rates of cancer, and on average, we live 20 years less than the rest of the city.
Highway redevelopment is just the beginning
The I-70 redevelopment project that led to the formation of the GES Coalition was part of the Colorado Department of Transportation’s effort to “modernize” our highways. Before they redeveloped it, the portion of I-70 through Elyria and Swansea was a three-mile-long bridge that went over the community. For the redevelopment, they demolished the bridge and then brought it below grade and widened it to add toll lanes. The whole project was a 20-year process, but construction happened in five years—2018 to 2023.
This redevelopment brought billions of dollars of investment from the public sphere, and the private market followed because they knew that a lot of these areas would be revamped. Colorado State University built their extension campus, CSU Spur, here in the new National Western Center. The Brian Boulevard corridor was reconstructed and transformed from an industrial area into luxury apartments, restaurants, and shopping. The city built the A-line train to the airport as well as the end line that goes north with a stop at the National Western Center. All this has happened in the last 10 years.
Big Tech enters the fray
In late 2023, CoreSite, a subsidiary of American Tower Corporation, proposed a three-building data center campus in Elyria, a stone’s throw away from housing in the area that remains dedicated to low-income and working-class people. Our only rec center and park are right across the street from the site, and all of Elyria is within a quarter mile of the project.
Construction started on the first data center in 2024, and it’s supposed to be operational by the end of this summer. It is 180,000 square feet, just over three football fields, and would use up to 18 megawatts of energy, enough to power up to 15,000 homes. Although not yet up and running, the building is already connected to the grid and has diesel generators for backup energy. It’s a very weak grid here, so the coalition thinks the generators will be used as a main source of energy more often than not.
CoreSite will lease out this server space to other tech companies. They won’t tell us who; that’s not publicly available information. But if you look at their reports, they’re marketing to AI companies.
For the local community, this giant data center campus is another contributor to the cumulative impact of the highways, trains, and industry all around us. What’s extremely concerning is it’s not on the edges of the neighborhoods; it’s literally right next door. And it’s not just about air pollution from their diesel generators. We are concerned about the strain on the grid because a power outage could be lethal. What are people supposed to do if they can’t use their oxygen machine because of a data center-caused blackout or if they can’t turn on the heat in the winter?
A reason for hope
Last month, the Denver City Council passed a one-year moratorium on data center zoning permits and development, with an option to extend. They’re going to establish a working group to come up with policy recommendations for these facilities. The first building in the CoreSite project will likely not be impacted by the moratorium because they’ve already been issued all their permits. But it does prohibit CoreSite from moving forward on their second and third buildings for one year. And these buildings will be subject to any new rules that come out of the working group recommendations adopted by the city.
The GES Coalition is interested in figuring out ways to make this pause permanent for CoreSite and possibly even get the first building to not be allowed to go into operation.
The moratorium feels like a good first step. It wouldn’t have been as politically viable if it weren’t for the organizing that GES Coalition has done in our community. We want to push that all the way to the end. We don’t want this data center to exist right next to all the residences; we want to protect our community’s health from data center and diesel generator pollution. We’re also very hopeful because we know that through organizing we can change the world around us.
Tell Congress: Protect Families From Dangerous Data Center Air Pollution