Data centers and water
Data Center Water Use in Douglas County, CO
Douglas County, Colorado has 8 mapped data center facilities, including Equinix, Flexential, carrying about 45 MW of estimated power load.
Water pressure for new demandHow hard a large new water user, like a data center, would press on this county's water. It blends recent drinking-water compliance, drought, and existing industrial demand. Higher pressure means new demand competes harder with current uses. It is not a judgment about whether one should be built.
Low water pressure
Douglas County has no health violations in the last 5 years, extreme drought, low existing industrial water demand.
- Mapped facilities
- 8
- EPA + OpenStreetMap layers
- Estimated power load
- 45 MW
- IM3 Atlas capacity estimate
- Permitted discharge
- Not reported
- Clean Water Act permit fields
- DCWSI national rank
- #97
- of 318 scored counties
The operators
How many data centers are in Douglas County?
8 facilities are mapped to Douglas County, Colorado across the EPA and OpenStreetMap layers, run by operators including Equinix, Flexential. Counts reflect mapped footprint, not an operator's total fleet.
- EPA ECHO
9110-9180 - 9119-9180 COMMERCE CENTER
LITTLETON, CO
- EPA ECHO
EQUINIX LLC - DE2
Equinix · ENGLEWOOD, CO
- OpenStreetMap
Flexential Denver - Englewood
Flexential · Englewood, CO
- EPA ECHO
ONENECK IT-DENVER DATA CENTER
PARKER AREA, CO
- OpenStreetMap
OpenStreetMap data center 778989332
Englewood, CO
- EPA ECHO
QWEST CORP - ENGLEWOOD CYBER CENTER
ENGLEWOOD, CO
- EPA ECHO
VIAWEST INC - ENGLEWOOD DATA CENTER
PARKER AREA, CO
- EPA ECHO
VISA USA INC - OCCS
HIGHLANDS RANCH, CO
Supply versus demand
How much water do Douglas County data centers use?
Exact facility water draw is rarely public. As a screening proxy we compare the Clean Water Act permitted discharge mapped to these facilities against the county's entire industrial water baseline from the USGS 2020 series.
No Clean Water Act permitted discharge is reported for the mapped facilities in Douglas County. The figures below show the county's industrial water baseline for context.
- Mapped facility discharge
- Not reported
- County industrial baseline
- 1.00 Mgal/day
Model a build
Can Douglas County support more data centers?
On the water-pressure scale, Douglas County sits at 23, below the national median, so new large-load demand has more slack here than in most counties. Size a hypothetical build to see the daily draw against the county industrial baseline.
Data Center Water Budget Calculator
Estimate daily water use for a hypothetical facility in Douglas County.
Your facility would use 79.8% of this county's industrial water baseline. Verify water rights and long-term drought projections before committing.
Based on USGS 2020 water-use data and EPA-standard cooling intensity constants. Not a substitute for site-specific water rights analysis.
In context
How does Douglas County compare nationally?
- DCWSI build-out rank
- #97
- of 318 counties with a stress score
- Water pressure vs median
- +4
- national median is 19 of 100
- Share of mapped load
- 0.0%
- of 166.02 GW mapped nationally
Douglas County is one of 330 US counties with mapped data centers. See the full ranking and the interactive map in the national atlas.
Facility data combines EPA ECHO, EPA Clean Water Act permits, OpenStreetMap, and the IM3 Open Source Data Center Atlas (DOE/PNNL), geocoded to county FIPS. Capacity and water baselines come from IM3 and USGS 2020 water-use data. These are county-level screening figures, not a facility-level water-use audit. Read the full methodology.