Aurora is the one Front Range city still taking data center applications, and its permit record shows what that is worth.

Why Aurora is where the Denver metro actually builds

Aurora is the third largest city in Colorado and it sits east of Denver, on flat land, between Interstate 70 and Denver International Airport. That geography is the market. Denver proper ran out of usable industrial land decades ago, and what it has left is old buildings on small lots. Aurora has the acreage, the E-470 frontage and the substation room, and it is served by Xcel Energy like most of the metro.

It is also the jurisdiction that said yes. Colorado's only data center above 100 MW is in Aurora, on Gun Club Road, and it is still being built out. The buildings that get described in the trade press as Denver campuses are almost all here, on the other side of the county line, in Arapahoe and Adams counties rather than the City and County of Denver.

The regulatory split hardened in 2026. Denver City Council voted to stop accepting data center zoning and site development applications from 21 May 2026 for a year. Aurora's council took up its own six month pause on 10 August 2026 and voted it down 6 to 5, with the mayor casting the deciding vote, then passed a resolution directing the city manager to come back within 35 days with data center standards instead. Applications keep being accepted while that work happens.

What Aurora's own permit record shows

This is the part of the market that is documented rather than announced. Aurora publishes its building permits and its active development applications as public map layers, so the filings can be read directly instead of taken from a press release. We collect and track them. Below is what the record holds, read on 14 August 2026.

Three things in that table are worth more than the individual rows. The megawatt figures are the city's own words on the permit, not an estimate: Aurora's clerks record fit outs as "22.5MW TFO" and "60MW TENANT FIT OUT", which is rare and useful, because almost no jurisdiction publishes a capacity figure at all. The declared values track a campus being built in stages rather than at once. And the newest filing in the whole set landed on 13 August 2026, one day before this page was written, which tells you the pipeline here is live rather than historic.

Read from the City of Aurora's own published permit and development layers, which the city exposes through its public building permit map. A declared value is what the applicant wrote on the application. It is a construction cost estimate for the work described, not a valuation of the finished building and not a price for anything. A permit proves construction. It is never evidence that space can be contracted.

What has been filed but not built

Aurora's development case layer is the earlier signal. A site plan or a conditional use case is filed months to years before a building permit, and it carries the acreage and the square footage the developer is asking for. These are live or recent cases, with the city's own case numbers.

The Unified Development Ordinance row is the one buyers should not skip. Until Ordinance 2022-75 passed, Aurora had no land use called "data center" at all, which is why the older projects here were approved as warehouses, as industrial buildings or under project code names. It is also why the city is now able to write standards specifically for the use, and why the 35 day directive from the August 2026 council meeting can land quickly.

Who is already operating here, from the air permits

Every data center of any size needs backup generation, and generators above minor thresholds require a state air permit. That makes the federal air register an independent check on who is actually running a facility, filed with a different regulator than the one that issued the building permit.

QTS DEN1 is the only Major Emissions data center in the Denver metro, which is the air register's way of saying it is the largest generator fleet here by a distance. The other two are single tenant. Amazon's DEN-22 does not appear in the building permit table above because Amazon's Aurora permits are filed under its fulfilment estate, and JPMorgan's Sycamore campus appears in both records under two different names. That is normal, and it is the reason to read more than one register.

From the US Environmental Protection Agency's ECHO air facility register, filtered to the data processing industry code and read across all 32,452 Colorado air facilities on 14 August 2026. An air permit proves a permitted generator fleet. It says nothing about occupancy, about available capacity, or about price.

Who is actually plugged in across Aurora

A building existing and a building being connected are different facts, and only one of them decides whether your traffic can get where it needs to go cheaply. These figures come from PeeringDB, which the network operators themselves maintain, so every row below links to the building's own public entry.

The most connected buildings here

From PeeringDB, which is maintained by the network operators present in these buildings rather than by the landlords, which is what makes it worth more than a directory. Two limits. Entries are voluntary, so a building showing no networks may be single tenant or may simply never have registered. And a network being present says nothing about whether the building has space, power or a price for you: that is still a call.

What has been announced in Aurora

Announcements are not filings. Nobody has to build what they announce, the figure is the one the developer chose to publish, and the date moves. They are here because megawatts are what a requirement is measured in, and because the size of what is coming changes who will take your call. Every figure below was read on the page it links to.

Announced capacity is collected by hand from trade reporting and company statements, and each figure links to the report it came from. It is kept apart from the permit record above and never added to it: one is a document a jurisdiction issued, the other is a plan a company published. Neither is availability.

Water is the rule that actually binds in Aurora

Colorado has no statewide data center water rule, so the constraint is municipal, and Aurora's is the strictest in the metro. New facilities that would rely on evaporative cooling are not permitted here under standards the city already had in place before the 2026 debate. The resolution council passed on 10 August 2026 directs staff to formalise that prohibition in the ordinance, and to add buffers and setbacks from residential areas along with permit requirements for where data centers may be located at all.

The practical effect is a two order of magnitude split inside one metro. QTS runs closed loop in Aurora at roughly 2,400 gallons a day. CoreSite's new building in Denver plans evaporative cooling at an average of 115,000 gallons a day, rising to 230,000 at peak. Denver Water declared Stage 1 drought in 2026 and imposed mandatory restrictions on 1.5 million customers for the first time since 2013.

Power, and the tariff that is still unwritten

Aurora is Xcel Energy territory, like most of the metro. The rules governing what Xcel charges a large load are being written right now and are not finished. The Colorado Public Utilities Commission adopted guiding principles in Decision C25-0747 in November 2025, and Xcel filed its large load tariff on 2 April 2026 in Proceeding 26AL-0137E. Its Schedule TL would apply to new load of 50 MW or more, with loads between 20 and 50 MW potentially caught as well. The terms are heavy: minimum 15 year contracts, a payment floor of 80 percent of contracted power, roughly $600,000 in deposits and study costs before construction starts, and an exit fee equal to the remaining minimum monthly bills. As of August 2026 the commission had not ruled.

What the Aurora record adds to that picture is the substation. The DEN1 Substation case at Aurora Crossroads is a conditional use application for a new electrical substation built specifically to serve the campus next to it. At this scale in this market, the power is not something you find in a building. It is something the campus builds, on its own 4.56 acres, on its own schedule, and that schedule is the delivery date whatever the leasing sheet says.

The queue behind the tariff is softer than the headline totals suggest. In one six month period across 2024 and 2025, seven potential data center customers representing 4,000 MW withdrew their service requests from Xcel, while more than a dozen new prospects with 3,500 MW filed. Load in a utility queue is an option, not a commitment. Apply that churn to any capacity a broker describes as coming.

Where the land is, corridor by corridor

When Aurora is the right answer, and when it is not

Aurora earns the search when the requirement is scale, land or a date that depends on an approval actually being granted. It has the only operating campus in the state above 100 MW, the only large forward pipeline, and the only Front Range council that has not paused. If you need multiple megawatts in Colorado, this is effectively where the conversation happens, and the alternative is not another Denver submarket. It is another state.

It is the wrong market if what you need is reach. Interconnection in this metro is concentrated in downtown Denver, where a single building holds close to half of the metro's network presences and the carrier hotel layer sits in a handful of old buildings on and around 15th Street. Aurora is a build market, not a network market. If your requirement is a few cabinets that need many carriers and a cloud on ramp, read the Denver metro guide instead, and expect to backhaul if you land out here.

It is also the wrong market if the business case leans on incentives. Colorado has no data center sales and use tax exemption. HB 26-1030 would have created one for up to 20 years and it failed in the 2026 session, alongside SB 26-102 with its renewable matching and water reporting requirements. Both died. Neighbouring states that do abate sales tax will beat Colorado on total cost for an equipment heavy deployment, and no pressure on a colocation provider closes a gap that sits in the tax code.

And be honest about competition. Aurora has one merchant campus of real size and a pipeline that is mostly unbuilt. That is a seller's position. Your leverage in this market comes from a documented, priced alternative somewhere else, not from a second bid across town.