Residents of north Denver neighborhoods bowed their heads in prayer on a recent Friday as construction workers behind them continued piecing together their newest neighbor: a multistory data center.

Dozens gathered to rally against the data center and demand that representatives of CoreSite, the company building it, meet with them to discuss community concerns that grew as the large concrete building continued to rise last year.

Residents worry about potential impacts to their electricity bills, increased blackouts, emissions from the center’s emergency generators and the facility’s water use. Neighborhood groups representing people who live in Globeville, Elyria and Swansea are demanding that CoreSite work with them to protect residents from these possible impacts, and crafted a list of terms they want the company to abide by.

“If CoreSite wants to be a good neighbor, here’s a proposal that’s going to allow them to be a good neighbor,” Alfonso Espino, lead organizer with the GES Coalition, told the crowd.

Nearly all of the houses in the three neighborhoods are within 1.5 miles of the future data center at East 49th Avenue and Race Street, Espino said. The center sits across the street from a park, a new affordable housing apartment building and a community health clinic.

“This isn’t being built in the middle of nowhere,” Espino said in an interview this week. “It’s being built right next to our park. Elyria is pretty small… It’s being built next door to most of our residents.”

The new data center campus, once completed, will offer more than 590,000 square feet of space for computer servers. It will be CoreDite’s third and largest data center in Denver, where the company is headquartered.

The three-building facility will use a maximum of 65 megawatts to 75 megawatts of power at a time — the same amount of power as up to 82,500 homes. The buildings will also require up to 805,000 gallons of water a day to cool its computer systems — the same as 16,100 Denverites’ average daily indoor water use.

Company officials previously said it is extremely rare to use the maximum amounts of power and water. CoreSite data centers typically use less than 50% of their capacity, they previously said.

But full buildout of the campus won’t happen until the 2030s, if there is enough customer demand to warrant it, said Megan Ruszkowski, CoreSite’s vice president of marketing and sales development.

Construction on the first floor of the first building is expected to finish in June, she said. The company will then add more floors of capacity to the first building — which will use a maximum of 18 megawatts of power — as customers sign on.

CoreSite operates colocation data centers, where multiple companies rent space for their servers and computing needs. The new facility will not be used to train artificial intelligence models or facilitate machine learning, Ruszkowski said.

The company sells spaces to a wide variety of industries, including health care, government and banking. Data centers make possible cloud services, online banking and smartphone apps.

“All of us are everyday data center users,” she said.

Company leaders on Friday submitted a request to the city for mediation services to help create a “good neighbor” agreement between CoreSite and neighborhood groups, Ruszkowski said.

“Our relationship with the surrounding community is a really big priority to us,” she said, noting the company is headquartered in Denver and many of its employees live here.

The company last year donated $25,000 to the Swansea Recreation Center and another $25,000 to the local Boys and Girls Club clubhouse, she said.

The data center is being built on the site of a closed cement factory. CoreSite plans to plant trees and other greenery as well as build a communal green space on the campus.

“We’re really excited about the aesthetic we’ll bring to the community,” Ruszkowski said.

GES Coalition and other community organizations recently delivered to CoreSite a proposed agreement. The neighborhoods closest to the data center are already some of the most polluted in Denver, the organizers noted. Already, the residents live with pollution from Interstate 70, a Superfund site, the Suncor Energy oil refinery and other industrial operations.

“That is why ‘good neighbor’ cannot mean PR, voluntary promises or private conversations,” the coalition’s proposal states. “In a frontline community like ours, being a good neighbor must be enforceable, measurable, publicly verifiable commitments, with real monitoring, public reporting and real consequences.”