Colorado Learned To Live With Cell Towers. Data Centers May Take The Same Road.

It took several years to convince Americans that, despite being eyesores, cell phone towers don’t cause cancer. Photo: Chirag Haldar

In the 1990s and early 2000s, I spent much of my decade as Sprint's spokesperson defending cell phones - and the towers that connect them.

Those structures weren't pretty, and convincing people the ones near their kids' schools wouldn't cause cancer took real work - a new zoning fight, petition or anxious town hall every week. Science backed us: cell towers emit low levels of non-ionizing radiation, weaker than the TV and radio towers Americans lived beside. Disguising them as pine trees and public education helped.

But mostly, demand won - people wanted their phones to work badly enough to tolerate the tower down the street. I remember telling a reporter that people were starting to feel naked without their cell phones. It got a laugh then; I'm not sure I've said anything more prescient since.

Coloradans don't have to look far to see a similar fight today, this time over AI data centers. In north Denver's Globeville-Elyria-Swansea neighborhood, residents have organized for more than a year against CoreSite's DE3 data center campus, a majority-Latino community already living beside the Suncor refinery, Interstate 70 and a legacy Superfund site. One resident put it simply: developers "do this kind of stuff in the poorer neighborhoods."

That opposition helped push the Denver City Council to vote unanimously in May for a one-year data center moratorium. Jefferson County, Boulder County and Longmont followed within weeks; Larimer County extended its own pause into late August. Colorado Springs approved a 50-megawatt AI data center at a former Intel fab - proof this fight plays out unevenly within one state.

The numbers back this up. A March 2026 Gallup poll found 70% of Americans would oppose a data center in their community - worse than nuclear power's roughest stretch in decades of polling. An Annenberg Public Policy Center survey this summer put local opposition at 61%, up sharply in four months. Nationwide, resistance has blocked or delayed roughly $130 billion in projects in Q1 2026 alone.

Is it apples and oranges, comparing this to my cell tower fights? Partly.

Tower fears centered on one testable question: does the radiation hurt me? Science answered it. Data center opposition draws on a broader set of worries - power grids, electric bills, water use, noise, jobs. None of that gets resolved with a coat of paint.

Colorado has felt this directly: after Xcel Energy asked regulators for a special data center rate tariff, the Public Utilities Commission warned residential rates could climb by as much as 55% by 2029 without changes.

Both fights are proxies. Cell tower opponents weren't really fighting radiation - they were working through anxiety about a technology reshaping daily life faster than they could adjust. Towers won because the benefit felt personal. Data centers deliver their benefit to someone else's chatbot, somewhere else.

I think education eventually turns the tide, as it did with cell phones. Once communities understand what data centers actually cost and deliver - and once that value feels personal - the same shift in acceptance is likely to play out here too.

But education alone may not be enough. A consistent federal framework governed cell towers: the Telecommunications Act of 1996 set uniform rules and took health objections off the table. Data centers have no such backstop. Colorado's legislature tried and failed to fill that gap this year - two competing bills died in the 2026 session - leaving cities and counties to write their own rules project by project. That's why Denver, Jefferson County and Colorado Springs are each fighting a slightly different version of this battle.

Federal standards on grid impact, water use and siting disclosure - paired with the public education that won over cell tower skeptics - would give developers and communities a fairer, more predictable set of rules to build trust around.